Summer reading

I read quite a lot the whole year but mostly during summer, when the temporary loss of my internet access and university exams create the perfect conditions for me to sit down and read the books I’ve been piling up on my bedside table through winter.

Peanuts by Charles M. Shulz     http://www.amazon.it/

(little preview: you’ll read a lot about Peanuts on this blog). The book is a collection of recoloured Sunday strips from the sixties, paused by pages where the characters themselves teach you how to draw them. Even if I found the book too expensive for what it is I can’t really say I’m not satisfied: most of the times I tend to read only the strips from the nineties and forget that the oldest ones are an enjoyable reading too.

In a nutshell:

Pro: beautiful stories for who is already familiar with Peanuts, vivid and joyful colours.

Cons: it’s really expensive if you think that it doesn’t take more than twenty minutes to be read.

Vote: 3.5/5

Secret Lives of Great Artists by Elizabeth Lunday     http://www.amazon.com/

Whoever loves both art and gossip can’t really leave this book on the bookstore’s shelf even if, I must sadly admit, on the cover it promises to tell you “what your teachers never wanted to tell you about master painters and sculptors”, but really tells you already known gossip or at least facts that are not as exciting as it lets you imagine. Thirty-two artists are analyzed  together with their most famous work of art and the description draws quite a masterpiece of everyone, giving you the kind of information that, while visiting a museum that shows painting of the artist you’ve read about, you’ll like to tell to your friends or anybody near you. A very enjoyable reading that covers pretty much all the artists you already know something about from Van Eyck to Andy Wharol. This is the kind of book you want to keep on your bookshelf to be seen by someone you want to impress, even if I still cannot understand why it bothers to tell you the sign of the zodiac of every artist.

In a nutshell:

Pro: never bothers you, talks about art with irony.

Cons: sometimes the information are a bit disappointing.

Vote: 4.5/5

A supposedly funny thing I’ll never do again by David Foster Wallace     http://www.amazon.com/

I wanted to read something from David Foster Wallace for a long time but never did it because I was discouraged by the dimensions of Infinite Jest, I never considered his nonfiction books before this one. It’s just a long article that he had to write for Harper’s magazine in which he had to review a luxurious one week long cruise in the Caribbean. On the (Italian) cover you can read “a book that you can’t stop reading even when you’re brushing your teeth” and yep, that’s pretty much true. The author speaks in such a complicated mix of irony and seriousness that you both want to book a cruise and never ever in your life go on a cruise. A special mention goes to the notes (sometimes a page or two pages long), worth every penny I paid for the book.

In a nutshell:

Pro: brilliant, funny, makes you want to book a cruise.

Cons: makes you hate cruises.

Vote: 5/5

Eleven kinds of loneliness by Richard Yates     http://www.amazon.com/

Even if I both love short stories and Richard Yates I have to admit that this one has been quite a suffered reading and by that I mean that it has taken a lot more time to read than I expected: it would have been better to read it while reading a more joyful book at the same time. The eleven stories are mostly sad stories with a bitter undertone, with themes and characters loved by the author such as veterans, illness or broken writers. I would recommend this book to everybody because it’s one of those books that keep the promises made on the cover, and in this case is solitude. While reading you can feel solitude, cut it in half if you want to. When a character cries you want to cry and when is hoping for something to happen you are sad because you know he is too candid to understand it never will.

In a nutshell:

Pro: touching and well written stories.

Cons: if you’re happy this will make you sad and if you already are.. well, don’t read this.

Vote: 4/5

The waterproof bible by Andrew Kaufmann     http://www.amazon.com/

Since I absolutely adored All my friends are superheroes I had quite great expectations about this book, so the disappointment was even bigger. For whom already knows the author the plot of the book won’t be a surprise: Kaufmann is great when it comes to put the extraordinary in the ordinary life, so good that you get used to the extraordinary and the story becomes boring (at least in this case). I think that if he got rid of some pages, especially in the middle of the book, the story would have been much more fluid. Now it just looks like a bumpy road that makes it difficult to go ahead and doesn’t neither let you enjoy of the moments of absolute tenderness and brilliance that the author offers you.

In a nutshell:

Pro: beautiful and well written story.

Con: too many downtimes.

Vote: 3.5/5

These were my summer reading! What have you read during summer? Let me know in the comments!

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