Showcasing a few of my intended summer reads

Summer has three big weekends that provide a beginning, middle and end, with the opening act being Memorial Day weekend, which starts today. This also provides a starting point for many pop culture pursuits, one of the tried and true being summer reading.

There are a lot of new books coming out that we will feel the need to have right away(the new Harper Lee,for one) as well as many bestsellers/classics/escape reads. Overwhelming yet not such an impossible feat to achieve.

With this weekend, I plan to start at least one or two books on my intended summer reading list(yes, I wrote it down) and the following titles showcased here are but a handful of what is awaiting me during the long hot days of summer. They pretty much cover the four flavor groups; classic cool, salty scary goodness, currently crunchy and savory sweetness, a perfect picnic basket of literary fun:

BITTERSWEET: Miranda Beverly-Whittemore's third novel seems to be her breakout book, as this story of a newcomer to high society discovering it's dark side has a lot of crossover potential.

When Mabel Dagmar gets invited to spend the summer in Vermont with her college roommate Ev Winslow, it sounds like a dream come true. For a scholarship student like Mabel, this entrance into a world of old school elegance that provides her with new friends(and even a romance) is light years away from her regular hum-drum existence.

However, as family secrets bubble to the surface, Mabel is made to choose between protecting the inner circle or becoming an outsider again. This sounds a lot like if Patricia Highsmith was writing for the TV series Revenge, a combination that promises to be as tasty as peanut butter and spicy chocolate:

DELANCEY: The subtitle of blogger Molly Wizenberg's memoir is "A Man, A Woman, A Restaurant, A Marriage," which sums up the basic story being served up here. When her husband Brandon first came to her with his plans for a pizza restaurant in Seattle, Molly thought it might go the way of other idle notions he had had before.

 Much to her surprise, the business took off fast and furious and while she stayed supportive of him, Molly's frustrations about balancing his work with hers brought them both to a turning point in their relationship. Fortunately, their mutual passion for food helped to bridge some of the emotional gaps.

I've never read Wizenberg's blog Orangette but if it's as heartwarming and engaging about food and life as the book promises to be, I might check it out:

DANIEL DERONDA: I may get a late start on this section of my Road of Rereading challenge(still have a ways to go with Far From The Madding Crowd) but tackle it, I shall.

What's particularly going to be unusual for me in taking up this George Eliot saga is that I'm also currently reading Middlemarch for the first time.  My Middlemarch read is for different reasons but taking on two works by the same author at the same time ought to be interesting.

Deronda fascinated me with it's depiction of the title character discovering his birth mother's Judaism and learning the ins and outs of that faith. For Victorian England, this was not a regular topic of discussion and since many of few Jewish characters in fiction during that time were severely stereotyped, this book is quite the radical act.

 Contrasting Daniel's emotional journey with that of Gwendolen, an impulsive young woman who makes a bad bargain in marriage, was probably a good method of engaging a mass audience. Both sides of the story do compliment each other and will be a refreshing dip into substantial waters of this humid season:

LOVE IS RED: This debut novel by Sophie Jaff has it's heroine Katherine Emerson in the sights of a mysterious killer called The Sickle Man. He believes that she has some special destiny to fulfill in the future and only he can truly savor her destruction.

To be honest, I wasn't too sure about reading this one but after checking out this review of the book at Smart Bitches, my interest is peaked. This thriller is also part one of a trilogy and I really happen to like those. A series is nice but can get really stretched out too thin after awhile(unless it's rigorously planned out), so a trilogy is such a welcome sight for these sore eyes.

Besides, summer reading is about having fun and a sinister little number like Love is Red sounds like the perfect addition to my literary wardrobe:

I hope you all enjoy this first holiday weekend of summer(I'll be taking a blog break this Monday) and enjoy your time off with some fabulous reads. While I don't have any vacation plans, my ideal one would be a bookstore tour, as there are so many great places out there offering the best and the brightest in every genre. If you get the chance to do some visiting, add a local bookstore to your list of stops, you might be surprised at the treasures you find on the shelves!: