Kit10

NO better place... — Source: Krug6 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kruggg6/)

Browsing to create a summer reading list can be as fun as reading itself–perhaps that’s why the media is so eager to help. It’s barely June and already over twenty-five notable lists are out for children and adults (in addition to all those issued by local libraries and schools). The LA Times list is by far the winner based not on content, but on the visually stunning and seamless browsing experience achieved by its format. In a culture where the media produces dozens of book lists vying for attention, presentation matters.

Enjoy browsing the readings lists using the direct links below. I’ll try to add new lists as they are issued. Feel free to make suggestions of your own in the comments.

Newspapers/Magazines

Institutions

People

Misc

Half full, half empty. Despite the consistency of Jeannette Walls’s candid storytelling, her two most popular works, The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses, give starkly opposing impressions. Both are the stories of individual women whose lives are filled with adversity. Each book’s close relationship with a variety of uniquely American communities and events makes them worthwhile contributors of a chapter in the larger literary biography of our nation.

However, whereas the narrator in Horses scorns pity, even when warranted, Castle assumes an empathetic audience in order to climb a moral pedestal and boast of loving flawed parents–without offering sufficient grounds for such affection. Perhaps these divergent attitudes are a natural result of the distance between Walls and her subjects, Castle being Walls’s memoir while Horses is fiction based on the life of Walls’s grandmother. Nonetheless, Castle is one of many books in the growing Traumatic Childhood genre, which includes Andre Dubus III’s Townie, Wolff’s This Boys Life, Burroughs’s Running With Scissors and many others. Horses, on the other hand, has a much more humbly triumphant—and therefore rare—perspective. It’s a case of choosing the half full glass of gin over the half empty box of tissues. If you can read only one, I’d read this, not that.

THIS THAT