Summer reading was, for the most part, indulgently pedestrian: I checked out those durned Girl books by Stieg Larsson; I read the Hunger Games trilogy (by Suzanne Collins); I sped through Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett; as an aside, check out the author phot on his Web site: classic!). I also worked in A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan) and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender) and Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness (Robert Whitaker -- highly, highly recommended, if you're of the nonfiction bent).
It's feeling more fall-like (pumpkin spice lattes: they're back!), and I feel a transition to heavier books coming on. I've been doing a bit of exploring of the Booker short-list; I just finished Room (Emma Donoghue), and I'm a few chapters into C (Tom McCarthy). 2666 (Bolano) and Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel) are waiting for me to crack them open. At the gym today, gasping and red-faced and sweaty, the woman on the machine next to me looked over quizzically.
"How do you read like that?!"
"So many books, so little time." (Also: a bit of mania!)