Further to my call for summer reading lists, here’s what Cheryl Braganza, Carol Katz and Susan Lempriere have planned. We’ll check back in September to see how far they got…
Cheryl Braganza
- The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys: set in pre-war London, a small, light paperback, easy to carry, Canadian writer.
- Because I have Loved and Hidden It by Elise Moser. Bought the paperback at the Blue Met this year and then met the author. Her lyrical prose makes me stop and savour the words, so I will read it slowly. It’s set in Montreal which makes it extra special.
- The Violin Lover by Susan Glickman – Another Canadian author. I was looking for a music and art story and this seems to encompass them both. Piano and violin teachers interspersed with secret love affairs, Mozart sessions AND it begins with a body floating down the Thames.
- Saris on Scooters by Sheila Arnopoulos. I bought this at her book launch at Paragraphe recently as I am interested in women’s issues in India myself. No love story, it is an enlightening trek through some of the poorest of villages and how women are coping.
- Scenes from My Life by Judith Dench: full of great childhood photos and family stories of Dame Judy Dench told in her own words. I have seen all her films and seen her live on stage at the Haymarket and have great admiration for this actor.
- A Love of Reading by Robert Adams. He reviews 14 books in this one book which means I will get a lot of ground covered quickly! I enjoy the historical background at each curtain opening.
- Open by Andre Agassi: an easy read and am on my second round. Hard to believe that he hated the game while we all enjoyed watching him over the years. He is blunt and blurts out what he was thinking when we thought he was thinking something else !
Carol Katz
- Journey to Vaja by Elaine Kalman Naves.
- Healing and the Mind by Bill Moyers.
- The Writing Life by Ellen Gilchrist.
- How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb.
- Writers and Company by Eleanor Wachtel.
- The Notebook: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers. Edited by Berry and Natalee Caple.
- A History of Marriage by Elizabeth Abbott.
- Body Music: Essays and Poems by Denis Lee.
- The Heart Specialist by Claire Holden Rothman.
- The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer.
- Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler.
- Mordecai and Me by Joel Yanofsky.
- Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis by Lisa Sanders.
- A History of God by Karen Armstrong.
Susan Lempriere
I love novels set in a dystopian future. I have just finished one called The Unit, by Swedish writer Ninni Holmqvist.
So now I am inspired to go back and read the novels that started this whole passion for me when I was a teen - John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes and The Midwich Cuckoos.
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Here's a more kick-ass reading list. We'll see how far I get:
- Under the Dome, by Stephen King. Weighing in at over 1000 pages, the horror master is back at it with the story of a small town in Maine that gets suddenly enveloped in an invisible dome that lets air and light pass through, but not solid objects. The key here is what happens to the residents inside the dome and how they face this new and incredible reality with all the personal baggage from their previous, pre-dome lives;
- American Tabloid, by James Ellroy. Book one of his so-called 'Underworld USA' trilogy, where all that is hidden by the thin veneer of civilization is exposed under the harsh light of day, where ordinary people chase extraordinary amounts of money by doing incredibly sleazy things, Ellroy is a master of the short sentence, the choppy dialogue that rumbles with meaning and menace;
- Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. After watching The Hours again, I realized I hadn't explored the source text that Michael Cunningham uses as the basis of his excellent book about the tortured life of Virginia Woolf. A critical oversight in my overall reading;
- The Bourne Deception, by Eric Van Lustbader. Continuing on where Robert Ludlum left off, Lustbader has been granted the mantle of eeking out yet more stories about the amnesiac American agent gone rogue trying to stop the evil bad guys while trying to figure out who he is and what we wants to do with all the skills given him.
A short list, but it's all the time I've got and I may not get through these. I have a couple others I purchased in New York – one about the race to the South Pole, a modern-day account of a re-created mission to duplicate the Scott expedition to the South Pole and another book on the life of Darwin. We'll see if we get those.