Summer Day Reads: 10 Books To Read This Summer

By Alexis Wolfer & Jessie Leventhal

Looking for a good summer read? Amazon recently released their list of The Best of 2010… So Far and we’re taking note. Whether you’re ideal summer weekend is spent house-bound in the cool air conditioned comfort of your home or sweating in the summer sun beach-side, we’re sure there is a book on this list to pique your fancy! Happy reading!

The Best of 2010… So Far

The Passage, $ 15.42, amazon.com

Amazon.com Review: You don’t have to be a fan of vampire fiction to be enthralled by The Passage, Justin Cronin’s blazing new novel. Cronin is a remarkable storyteller (just ask adoring fans of his award-winning Mary and O’Neil), whose gorgeous writing brings depth and vitality to this ambitious epic about a virus that nearly destroys the world, and a six-year-old girl who holds the key to bringing it back… –Daphne Durham Click here to buy.

Healthy foods for when you’re on the go!

The Irresistible Henry House, $16.50, amazon.com

Amazon.com Review: To the ranks of iconic mid-century modern men Gump and Garp, add The Irresistible Henry House. As imagined by Lisa Grunwald, inspired by the peculiar beginnings of a real baby, Henry’s life unspools with more realism and intention than Gump’s, with less a sense of dread than Garp’s. But Henry and his story have the same almost-magic magnetism. Henry arrives in the world as a “practice baby,” passed between a dozen young women at the Practice House of Wilton College’s Home Economics program in a decidedly pre-Spock era that discouraged mothers from holding babies “too much.” From the beginning, Henry inspires in women the desire for his exclusive attention–but none want them more than Martha Gaines, the program director, who has spent her career overseeing the proper raising of a string of “house” orphans who were eventually adopted out… –Mariv Click here to buy.

Book: Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, $18.47, amazon.com

Amazon.com Review: There is, as everyone knows, no place in the world changing as fast, and at such scale, as China. Accounts of the upheaval can be breathless and even alarming, but Peter Hessler is the calmest and most companionable of correspondents. In his reporting for the New Yorker and in his books River Town, Oracle Bones, and now the superb Country Driving, he’s observed the past 15 years of change with the patience and perspective–and necessary good humor–of an outsider who expects to be there for a while. In Country Driving, Hessler takes to the roads, as so many Chinese are doing now for the first time, driving on dirt tracks to the desert edges of the ancient empire and on brand-new highways to the mushrooming factory towns of the globalized boom. He’s modest but intrepid–having taken to heart the national philosophy that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission–and an utterly enjoyable guide, with a humane and empathetic eye for the ambitions, the failures, and the comedy of a country in which everybody, it seems, is on the move, and no one is quite sure of the rules. –Tom Nissley Click here to buy.

A healthy potato salad recipe!

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, $11.92, amazon.com

Amazon.com Review: As the finale to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is not content to merely match the adrenaline-charged pace that made international bestsellers out of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. Instead, it roars with an explosive storyline that blows the doors off the series and announces that the very best has been saved for last. A familiar evil lies in wait for Lisbeth Salander, but this time, she must do more than confront the miscreants of her past; she must destroy them. Much to her chagrin, survival requires her to place a great deal of faith in journalist Mikael Blomkvist and trust his judgment when the stakes are highest. To reveal more of the plot would be criminal, as Larsson’s mastery of the unexpected is why millions have fallen hard for his work. But rest assured that the odds are again stacked, the challenges personal, and the action fraught with neck-snapping revelations in this snarling conclusion to a thrilling triad… –Dave Callanan Click here to buy.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, $15.35, amazon.com

Bookmarks Magazine Review: Michael Lewis has written from the perspective of a financial insider for more than 20 years. His first book, Liar’s Poker, was a warts-and-all account of Wall Street culture in the 1980s, when Lewis worked at the investment bank Salomon Brothers. Everything Lewis has touched since has turned to gold, and The Big Short seems to be another of those books, combining an incendiary, timely topic with the author’s solid, insightful, and witty investigative reporting… Click here to buy.

A sophisticated twist on watermelon!

Book: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, $4.65, amazon.com

Amazon.com Review: Matterhorn is a marvel–a living, breathing book with Lieutenant Waino Mellas and the men of Bravo Company at its raw and battered heart. Karl Marlantes doesn’t introduce you to Vietnam in his brilliant war epic–he unceremoniously drops you into the jungle, disoriented and dripping with leeches, with only the newbie lieutenant as your guide. Mellas is a bundle of anxiety and ambition, a college kid who never imagined being part of a “war that none of his friends thought was worth fighting,” who realized too late that “because of his desire to look good coming home from a war, he might never come home at all.” A highly decorated Vietnam veteran himself, Marlantes brings the horrors and heroism of war to life with the finesse of a seasoned writer, exposing not just the things they carry, but the fears they bury, the friends they lose, and the men they follow. Matterhorn is as much about the development of Mellas from boy to man, from the kind of man you fight beside to the man you fight for, as it is about the war itself. Through his untrained eyes, readers gain a new perspective on the ravages of war, the politics and bureaucracy of the military, and the peculiar beauty of brotherhood. –Daphne Durham Click here to buy.

The Imperfectionists, $15.47, amazon.com

Amazon.com Review: Printing presses whirr, ashtrays smolder, and the endearing complexity of humanity plays out in Tom Rachman’s debut novel, The Imperfectionists. Set against the backdrop of a fictional English-language newspaper based in Rome, it begins as a celebration of the beloved and endangered role of newspapers and the original 24/7 news cycle. Yet Rachman pushes beyond nostalgia by crafting an apologue that better resembles a modern-day Dubliners than a Mad Men exploration of the halcyon past. The chaos of the newsroom becomes a stage for characters unified by a common thread of circumstance, with each chapter presenting an affecting look into the life of a different player… –Dave Callanan Click here to buy.

Book: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, $14.87, amazon.com

Amazon.com Review: From a single, abbreviated life grew a seemingly immortal line of cells that made some of the most crucial innovations in modern science possible. And from that same life, and those cells, Rebecca Skloot has fashioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks a fascinating and moving story of medicine and family, of how life is sustained in laboratories and in memory. Henrietta Lacks was a mother of five in Baltimore, a poor African American migrant from the tobacco farms of Virginia, who died from a cruelly aggressive cancer at the age of 30 in 1951. A sample of her cancerous tissue, taken without her knowledge or consent, as was the custom then, turned out to provide one of the holy grails of mid-century biology: human cells that could survive–even thrive–in the lab. Known as HeLa cells, their stunning potency gave scientists a building block for countless breakthroughs, beginning with the cure for polio. Meanwhile, Henrietta’s family continued to live in poverty and frequently poor health, and their discovery decades later of her unknowing contribution–and her cells’ strange survival–left them full of pride, anger, and suspicion… –Tom Nissley Click here to buy.

Just Kids, $17.82, amazon.com

Amazon.com Review: Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe weren’t always famous, but they always thought they would be. They found each other, adrift but determined, on the streets of New York City in the late ’60s and made a pact to keep each other afloat until they found their voices–or the world was ready to hear them. Lovers first and then friends as Mapplethorpe discovered he was gay, they divided their dimes between art supplies and Coney Island hot dogs. Mapplethorpe was quicker to find his metier, with a Polaroid and then a Hasselblad, but Smith was the first to fame, transformed, to her friend’s delight, from a poet into a rock star. (Mapplethorpe soon became famous too–and notorious–before his death from AIDS in 1989.) Smith’s memoir of their friendship, Just Kids, is tender and artful, open-eyed but surprisingly decorous, with the oracular style familiar from her anthems like “Because the Night,” “Gloria,” and “Dancing Barefoot” balanced by her powers of observation and memory for everyday details like the price of automat sandwiches and the shabby, welcoming fellow bohemians of the Chelsea Hotel, among whose ranks these baby Rimbauds found their way. –Tom Nissley Click here to buy.

The Lonely Polygamist, $17.79, amazon.com

Amazon Review: When times get tense–and they often do–for Golden Richards, the title patriarch of Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist, he turns to a soothing chant of the names, in order, of his 28 children. (It’s also practical, when he needs to sort out just which toddler is showing him a scab, and which teen is asking if he can come to her 4-H demo.) While Big Love seeks the inherent soap opera in a man with many wives, Udall finds the slapstick: Golden’s houses are the sort of places where the dog is often wearing underwear and a child or two likely isn’t. But Udall doesn’t settle just for jokes (though the jokes are excellent)… –Tom Nissley Click here to buy.

To see all the top 10 books on amazon.com, click here!

The perfect summer playlist too! Click here!