Summer! Reading!

We compiled an extensive reading list last week at NCPR, but if that wasn’t enough, let me direct you to one by Nick Kristoff, New York Times columnist. Action! Romance! Social justice! Kristoff’s headline proclaims. As a fairly pedestrian reader, I’d have to agree. And I’m really pleased that Zola’s Germinal tops Kristoff’s list. I was assigned the book as a senior in high school, for an AP Modern European History class, and remember it fondly as one of the best required reading books ever. Light summer fare it is not (violent stories of class revolt rarely are). And to Kristoff’s list of exclamatory descriptors I would add Revolution! Rebirth!

Pale Fire, too, is pretty genius. If we are going the Nabokov route, let me plug Speak, Memory…and let me add those nouns to my exclamatory summer reading invocation:

Speak! Memory!  In short—

Read!

Is there Revelation! in store for readers? Perhaps.