We open the phone lines for our annual summer books show. What are your picks for a good summer read this year?
Below is a list of the books mentioned on the show:
- The Giver — Lois Lowry
- Fidel Castro: My Life: A Spoken Autobiography — Ignacio Ramonet
- Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and then Lost It to the Revolution — TJ English
- How to Listen to Great Music: A Guide to Its History, Culture, and Heart — Robert Greenberg
- Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock — Sammy Hagar
- Too Much Happiness — Alice Munro
- Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism — Belva Davis
- Shooting Kabul — N.H. Senzai
- Devil Red — Joe R. Lansdale
- Turn of Mind — Alice LaPlante
- Floating Worlds — Cecilia Holland
- The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean — Susan Casey
- Unfamiliar Fishes — Sarah Vowell
- Vive la Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution — Mark Steele
- The Cloud Collector’s Handbook — Gavin Pretor Pinney
- A Confederacy of Dunces — John Kennedy Toole
- Capitola the Mad Cap — Emma Dorothy Eliza N. Southworth
- The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spenser
- The Mammoth Book of Adventure & Endurance — Various Authors
- The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific — Paul Theroux
- Gaia?s Garden: A Guide to Homescale Permaculture — Toby Hemmingway
- True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel — Peter Carey
- The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL — Eric Greitens
- 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America — Albert Brooks
- War — Sebastian Junger
- Skin of the Earth: Stories of Nevada’s Back Country — Art Gibney
- The Glass Room — Simon Mawer
- Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre — Kieth Johnstone
- The Elegance of the Hedgehog — Muriel Barbery
- Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors — Nicholas Wade
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel — David Mitchell
- Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstasy — Mark Christensen
- Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK — Lamar Waldron & Thomm Hartmann
- Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America — Russ Baker
- The Geometry of God — Uzma Aslam Khan
- The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer — Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Interpreter of Maladies — Jhumpa Lahiri
- Bluets — Maggie Nelson
- The Devil’s Highway: A True Story — Luis Alberto Urrea
- Home Boy: A Novel — H.M. Naqvi
- How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer — Sarah Bakewell
- Away: A Novel — Amy Bloom
- Freezer Burn — Richard Smith
- Mutiny on the Bounty: A Novel — Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
- Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Sea Wolf — Jack London
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — Jules Verne
- Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World — Nicholas Schou
- The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America — Don Lattin
- Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith — Jon Krakauer
- The Memory Palace — Mira Bartok
- Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster — Jon Krakauer
- Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains — Jon Krakauer
- Mister Pip — Lloyd Jones
- On Whitman — CK Williams
- Crafting the Considerate House — David Gerstel
- The Doper Next Door: My Strange and Scandalous Year on Performance-Enhancing Drugs — Andrew Tillin
- Songs of the Dying Earth — George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
- At Home: A Short History of Private Life — Bill Bryson
- A Short History of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson
- Samba Dreamers — Kathleen de Azevedo
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder
- In the Eye of the Sun — Ahdaf Soueif
- Losing Julia — Jonathan Hull
- The Next 100 Years for the 21st Century — George Friedman
- Zazen — Vanessa Vaselka
- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea — Barbara Demick
- Driftless — David Rhodes
- To Have Not — Frances Lefkowitz
- The Rings of Saturn — W.G. Sebald & Michael Hulse
- Pitcarin’s Island: A Novel — Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall
- Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void — Mary Roach
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close — Jonathan Safran Foer
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration — Isabel Wilkerson
- The City & The City — China Mieville
- Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality — Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jetha
If you are interested in buying one of these books, you can support KQED by clicking on the title, which will take you to that book on Amazon.com. A portion of the profit will go to KQED.
These titles are also available from your local independent bookseller. You can find the one nearest you at BookSense.com.