I’m participating in 20-something Bloggers’ Blog Swap. My swap partners are Cate and Maureen from What We Covet. Please read my guest post on So You Think You Can Dance over there! Here are Cate and Maureen’s thoughts on summer reading.



As our summer vacations come to an end, we begin to realize what we’re about to lose for the next nine or ten months: warm breezes, Sno Cones, trips to the beach, and free time. Mostly free time, because when you live in North Carolina, those other three things actually come around with some frequency. However, with the loss of our free time, we find ourselves unable to enjoy them.

Above all these, we mourn the departure of our pleasure reading. Below we share our picks for summer reading while we all have just a little more time to indulge our literary fancies.

MAUREEN

Summer is the time for to tackle books that are just too big to fit in between Very Literary Literature, Volume I and Very Literary Literature, Volume II. Right now I’ve been working through George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, a sprawling epic that contains more characters I want to strangle than characters I do not. I have to read as much of it as possible at once because of the innumerable characters and complicated everythings.

I am also a fan of some forms of literature that many people disapprove of–like comics! A season where no elite scholarly types look down their noses at me is the best season, and one in which I may finally catch up on, say, Fullmetal Alchemist. However, it is important to remember to read only one type of comic at a time, because accidentally reading Gunnerkrigg Court from right to left will make it too much trouble for a lazy summer day.

CATE

My first preference is for something that I wouldn’t be forced to read during the school year or that I wouldn’t read in public (I’m looking in your direction, Sweet Valley High). Beyond that, I have only one requirement: that the subject is so engrossing I can’t put the book down. For some people, that’s Dan Brown’s latest code-cracking, scandal-mongering page turner. For me, it’s often one of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter series or a biography by Lady Antonia Fraser. Not only did she pen the lovely Marie Antoinette: The Journey (upon which Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette was based), but she has also covered the lives of Mary, Queen of Scots; all six of Henry VIII’s wives; Oliver Cromwell; and others. If you care anything about compelling, well-researched biographies, she’s your girl. When I’m feeling less historically inclined but still want to read non-fiction, I turn to memoirs of current pop-culture fixtures, such as my imaginary husband Scott Weiland’s Not Dead and Not for Sale: The Earthling Papers: A Memoir or James Lipton’s memoir-slash-Hollywood guide book Inside Inside. And on the rare occasions when those books won’t keep me occupied? I always fall back on my trusty trashy romance novels–particularly the ones written by Sabrina Jeffries, of course!

Bio

Maureen and Cate each hold a BFA in Creative Writing from an institution that shall remain nameless in order to protect the innocent who tried to teach them. Their aversion to actual work knows very few bounds, as evidenced by their joint blogging project, What We Covet.