Lazy 3-day weekend poll ~ summer reading list, edition 15 :: Now Smell This

Welcome to our annual summer reading poll! Please recommend a great book to add to our summer reading lists, and tell us what fragrance we should wear while reading it.

(Or, do what I do and record here everything you have read since the last quarterly reading poll. And if you want more recommendations, scrolling through the literature tag will bring up all the older reading polls.)

Or, as always, just talk about something else, and of course, do report your fragrance of the day if you like.

My recent reading:

On the fiction front, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time time travel romance was great fun and I enjoyed it despite my own fundamental inability to follow sci-fi timeshifts and alternate timelines (I just relax and enjoy it, what’s the difference). I also enjoyed the second book I read by Christian Kracht, Imperium, and that is the one I will scent…easy peasy since coconuts are a plot feature, so you can wear anything almost beachy but I’m going with the classic Estee Lauder Bronze Goddess (and that adds to the book’s satiric value because I am sure Kracht would roll his eyes at the very idea). I finished the slightly depressing but very good Baumgartner by Paul Auster. I read Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, and am still a little puzzled that I’d never read her before. It’s wonderful and I may re-read it at some point. 

On the mystery front, I read the second in the Rowland Sinclair series by Sulari Gentill, A Decline in Prophets, then the first two by Margaret Frazer in the Dame Frevisse series (The Novice’s Tale and The Servant’s Tale), followed by Chris Chibnall’s Death at the White Hart. All of these were fine but not enthralling. I will probably go on with the Dame Frevisse books, but I really need to find a new mystery series. 

Possibly the most engrossing book I read all quarter was Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, which was recommended to me by Kevin. Like many published authors these days, Frank could use a better editor, but his discussion of modern literature is excellent, and he made me want to read the works I had not read already (hence Memoirs of Hadrian above).

Also on the non-fiction front, I read Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, recommended by DeniseH in our last reading poll, and like Denise I did find parts of it absolutely riveting, although I freely admit to doing some strategic skimming in other parts. I read Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, recommended by Kanuka, and it was as good as she promised, not crazy long, and made a nice thematic match with Christian Kracht’s Imperium. Last but not least, I really liked Xiaolu Guo’s Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China, do comment if you’ve read anything else by her. 

Note: top image is Contemplate [cropped] by McCall Newland at flickr; some rights reserved.