Lit: Summer Reading

I'm seeing a lot of summer reading posts and articles lately. I'm never quite sure what to make of these lists. What makes a book a summer read? Does the list maker intend that we should read every book on the list? Still, they're always fun to read.

O Magazine has compiled a list of 47 books for their Summer Reading Guide. While they're all fairly recent books, they are not necessarily just coming out and I always appreciate that. I have just added both The Light Between Oceans and Where'd You Go, Bernadette? to the Omaha Bookworms schedule so those two were already on my summer reading "plan."

NPR has a list that their critics are updating with new categories regularly. People, I haven't even heard of most of these books! As if I didn't already have a long enough list of books to read!

Reader's Digest has a surprisingly interesting list they recommend for summer reading, including Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins which shows up on a lot of lists. You don't suppose it has something to do with the cover, do you? Is it wrong that thinking of Reader's Digest reminded me that AARP also has a remarkable good list of books for summer 2013.

Over at the TED blog, they've compiled a list of 200 books on their summer reading list, with contributions from more than a dozen diverse TED speakers or participants including Rainn Wilson (of The Office - his list will definitely surprise you) and Chris Kluwe (punter for the Oakland Raiders). Their lists are heavy on non-fiction if you're looking for books to sink your teeth into over the summer but radio veteran Guy Raz has included Taro Gomi's Everyone Poops on his list. So it's not all high brow stuff!

Last but not least, The Huffington Post has a Teen Summer Reading List actually created by teens. I'm pretty excited to see that these teens are reading, that they are reading young adult books that bloggers I respect rave about, and that they are reading and recommending classics such as The Great Gatsby and "anything by Jane Austen." One of the contributors has recommended Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor & Park, which I've been wanting to pick up (if for no other reason than that she has already sent her fourth book to the publisher - I need to get caught up!).

What about you - do you make a summer reading list? Do you reading habits change in the summer?