NEWS: Suicide Bookshelf: Summer Reading Was Always Our Song

CULTURE: Suicide Bookshelf: Summer Reading Was Always Our Song

People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

Yes, Memorial Day weekend has once again come and gone, and the time is now officially upon us for the beach and snappy white sneakers and summer reading. The best time of the year ever, if you ask me. Last week, Professor PointBlank assigned you all his summer reading list; this week, I shall hand out mine.

Now it's more or less summer and all where it counts, but even in Southern California (where everyone likes to pretend it's summer year-round) we're not quite out of the metaphorical woods of overcast coastal gloom. Still, it's nice to pretend until the climate catches up, and one of the best ways is with a book taking place as far away from Thomas Hardy's dismal gray puddles and shires as possible. One of my personal favorites for this purpose is Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary. (I'm kind of a big fan of his; not sure if you could tell.) The protagonist here is familiar: Jack Kemp is a skulking alcoholic journalist for a paper on the brink of disaster, into his early thirties and a wrinkled suit, putting up with strange people in some stranger-still warm weather place for the sake of adventure. The book itself, however, is Thompson's first, the better part of a decade before he really grew into his character. This one is fiction, you see, taking place in the far-off heat and political turmoil of 1950s Puerto Rico. Still, somehow—perhaps because he was younger when he wrote it—the characters are real, much less caricature at this point. Even then, however, it's unmistakably Thompson from start to finish, and that's never, ever a bad thing.

One other thing unique to a Thompson novel here is that the fiction angle allows him to really work up a story arc, less stream-of-consciousness and more build-up; it's a side of Thompson rarely seen, and for a first novel it's remarkably well done. The book was rejected everywhere on his first attempt at publication (written in 1959, it didn't see printing for forty years), and it boggles my mind to this day. It's got knock-out fights and political tension, a comical dead-end job with idiot coworkers, gorgeously run-down tropical landscapes, an endless supply of iced rum and cheeseburgers, and (for the ladies) some romance in the form of a desperately sad love triangle and a smash-it-up holiday weekend yacht party that has little hope of ending well. It's also fairly short and a quick read, so you'll have time for some rum and cheeseburgers yourself.

Speaking of something being fairly short, I'm also a pretty big fan of short stories over the summer. This is mostly because I like to bring books to the beach, and the last time I got caught up in a regular novel, I forgot to move for a good couple hours and ended up with a back not altogether unlike a boiled lobster. You don't necessarily want something heavy, however—I leafed through a Raymond Carver collection the other day and almost got depressed on contact—so, in my opinion, you can either go the irreverent pop-culture route or the fun campy retro route.

If you take the first route, you'll probably want to take Chuck Klosterman IV along with you. It's his latest, and it combines a pretty great cross-section of what the man can do. The first section, "Things That Are True," should appeal to you celebrity worship types, with uncut versions of profiles and trend stories he's done for magazines like Esquire, Spin, and The New York Times. From Britney Spears to Billy Joel, no one is safe from his criticizing bespectacled hipster eye. The second section, called "Things That Might Be True," poses rhetorical questions and answers them by editorializing the low-culture staples of Klosterman's daily diet. Here, alone with his own thoughts, he's at times subject to wild tangents that on occasion never make it home, but when he's on, he's really on, dryly hilarious as he explores everything from pirates and robots and 24-hour VH1 to X-Men in real life and a list of the top ten most-accurately-rated artists in rock history:

The third section of the book is called "Something That Isn't True At All," and it's a work of fiction (which seems to be going around with journalists lately in this article). I'll admit: I haven't read that section yet. But it's on my list for the summer, that's for sure. The only real problem with Chuck IV is that it's still only out in hardcover, which can be kind of a bummer for lugging to the beach and such; if you still want to check out Klosterman but don't want the added weight, get Sex, Drugs, and Cocoapuffs: A Low-Culture Manifesto. It's pretty much an entire book full of "Things That Might Be True," put together in mix-tape form, and I have a hard time deciding which book I like better.

Now, if you want to bypass the irreverent pop-culture and go straight to Route Two, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to go all traditional 9th grade reading list on you and assign the interconnected short stories of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, a classic allegory about the sadness of colonization and war in the context of super awesome and adventurous space travel. Of course, by "afraid" I mean "totally thrilled," because it's one of the best books I was ever assigned, and, if certain college courses were any indication, people are probably going to yell at me now that Ray Bradbury isn't real science fiction because there are no dragons and sexy cyborgs or something, but then I would just have to argue that if Bradbury's doing it wrong, then I don't want to be right. It's a fun book to read again now that we're a good deal past the grand future of 1999 and beyond, just because it's interesting to see what he got wrong and what he got right. Bradbury also intersects futuristic science with homey summer scenes complete with hot dog stands and lemonade, enough to almost forgive even the themes of impending apocalypse (a possible downer and source of heaviness in the midst of summer fun).

Wait, almost forgive? What am I talking about? The language alone forgives all. If somehow you weren't assigned this book for school ages ago, this needs to be first on your list. Get on it.

From science fiction, it's really only a short jump to comic books, one of the best summer mediums ever. They read through like lightning, the pictures give your imagination some rest, and they are almost always tons of fun. The most immediate one I have to get behind right now is Jaime Hernandez's Maggie the Mechanic, the first of three Locas-centric Love and Rockets compilations due out over the present to near future. It starts at the very, very beginning of the series, which is lucky for you, because at what better point to jump in than at the beginning? Especially with a storyline like Love and Rockets, which gets complicated pretty fast. The characters are endless, and thankfully there's a legend in the back.

Nowadays the comic is slightly more straightforward slice-of-life, but back in the day it got pretty crazy, mixing goofy-gorgeous Mexican punk-rock girls up with space rocket mechanics, aliens, dinosaurs, and lucha libre. That's the Love and Rockets you get in this compilation: for our not-always-so-fearless heroine Maggie Chascarillo, flying a hover-scooter to fix a spaceship, fighting a dinosaur, contracting a voodoo jungle illness, getting kidnapped by a mysterious secret agent lover man, and dancing drunk on a table, are all in a day's work. What a woman!



No but seriously, it's all a mash-up of short unbelievable stories that veer into wild fun fantasy (and just a little bit of cheesecake, for the... ladies?) while still centering around some of the coolest and most real kids you'll ever meet in a book, comic or otherwise. Enid Coleslaw only wishes she could hang with Maggie and Hopey.

Love and Rockets does cater to a certain kind of pop culture, but if the Klosterman type was more your speed, then the fun summer comic for you is Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim series. The basic story can be summed up thusly: what if life was like an old Nintendo game? This is what Scott Pilgrim, our intrepid Canadian slacker bass-player hero, is faced with when he falls for the love of his dreams, feisty American Ramona Flowers. At first it's all awkward romance and vegan cooking, but the action doesn't stop once the first of Ramona's Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriend Bosses descends upon Scott with his zombie army for an all-out battle. Meanwhile, there's Scott's crazy underaged Chinese ex-girlfriend Knives to deal with, and will his band Sex Bob-Omb ever be more successful than The Clash at Demonhead, the Blood Brothers-esque art trio of the girl who stomped all over his heart like a Koopa Troopa? The odds are stacked against them all, but with a little faith and some extra power-ups, they just might make it.



Suffice it to say, it's a really dorky story, but the sheer amount of scenester parody and video game culture packed into each page keep it pretty hilarious and fun, and the illustrations are adorable. There are three pocket-manga-sized books out so far, and I believe three more on the way. I can't wait.

Wow. Between the two of us, you all are going to be kept busy well into September. Anything sound good? Or, better yet, anything already on your list sound better? I've already read all these ones, after all, and am scrambling for a reading list of my own! At any rate, happy incoming summer, and happy reading! And don't forget to wear sunscreen! Nobody likes a boiled lobster.

Chuck Klosterman!!! Yessss!!!

I haven't read IV yet, but Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is one of my faves. As is his other book Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story.

I highly recommend them both.

Happy summer reading everyone!

For short and zippy, yet cool and much smarter than you think at first glance, I heartily recommend George Saunders. "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil" is one of the better things I have read in the last year or so. CivilWar Land in Bad Decline is also a fairly exciting collection of bizarre but utterly readable stories.

He leaves me giddy.

The Martian Chronicles is one of the best collections of short stories ever written in any genre. good call.

Thank you for this. Really.
The Love and Rockets story goes in my amazon cart immediately.

I just read PointBlank's list. I did not know Lloyd Alexander died.



I'll check some of these out. I have the Palomar stories from Love and Rockets, but nothing else.

Love and Rockets is sheer genius.

I came so, so close to buying Brief and Frightening Reign... about a month ago based on the cover alone. I'll have to get on that now.

I love them both to death, but Gilberto's stories are definitely a different animal from Jaime's. I almost want to say Jaime's is less somber somehow, but it can definitely get dark at times. I think it's mostly just the environment in which each one takes place. They're re-releasing Palomar Stories in a similar three-volume trade format to Locas. I need to get on that, too.

Yay!!! Let me know if you like it.

S.D.&C.P. is definitely one of my favorites, but K.Y.S.t.L. is a tricky one. I think Klosterman's tendency toward tangents kind of gets the best of him in that one, just on account of the length. I think I'm going to have to do an article celebrating (and criticizing, at times) his entire collection.