Last night Eunice asked me to come up with a list of books I think she should read, with brief synopses. I was instantly excited–this is exactly the kind of project I need to keep me busy this summer, as my job starts to wind down and I get ready to go back to school. And it is the perfect thing to include here on this site. You may see bits and pieces in this spot, but the whole list will exist as a separate page, ever expanding and updating. There are hundreds of books I can (and do) recommend, and as Eunice pointed out last night, almost every day of my life I tell at least one person about one book I think they should read.
And I’ll start right now:
Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent is a great piece of summer reading. The man is one of the funniest comedic writers I’ve come across–laugh out loud on the subway funny. The first of his books I read was The Lost Continent, which I picked up because it’s about the place where I was born: the great vast middle of the country. Bryson drives all over small town America, lamenting the loss of small town uniqueness as we move into the twenty-first century, and making hilarious observations about diner food, roadside attractions, seedy hotels, and the joys of driving a non-air conditioned old car down narrow, deserted country roads. This book made me fall in love, both with this country and with this writer, and set me on the path of reading everything he’s ever written. If you haven’t yet been introduced to this brilliant humorist you are sorely missing out, and I’d like to thank my aunt Karen for introducing me to him four and a half years ago. My life has been made better for it.