All summer long

>>Bigfoot, werewolves, cricket clubs and fruit hunters, just a sample of the characters about to invade the lazy days of reading

Here’s my summer reading list composed mostly of new and upcoming releases, with a few books published earlier in the year that I haven’t quite gotten around to…

If summer is the season of sequels, none is more eagerly awaited in my house than Graham Roumieu’s delightfully demented BigFoot: I Not Dead. Roumieu’s first two installments of the b-list monster’s life, loves and bloodlust, In Me Own Words and Me Write Book, aren’t as well known as Indiana Jones or Narnia, but they should be.

This is not, however, anything approaching PG-rated. In the wise cautionary words of this twice exceptional creature (pathological and grammatically challenged) “there things happen in woods you probably not want know.”

Because I never tire of books about monsters ripping through L.A., I may also take a stab at Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. This is an epic thriller about an ancient race of werewolves, told in free verse, and compared to Ovid if he’d been “raised on a steady diet of Marvel Comics, Roger Corman, and MTV.”

Before I get to that, however, I’m probably going to be reading Black Flies by Shannon Burke. Set in mid-’90s New York, this novel draws from Burke’s own experiences as a paramedic in Harlem. Burke’s first novel, Safelight, was such a hit with critics that his minimalist, small press follow-up made the cover of the New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago.

That will be my little NYC novel. My big NYC summer novel will undoubtedly be Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, a Gatsbyesque tour de force through the world of a Manhattan cricket club. After that, I’ll probably head back to L.A. for All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown. This novel, about three sisters negotiating the ill side effects of Silicon Valley wealth, sounds like it’s just what I want from a summer read, addictive and smart.

CROSS-COUNTRY QUEST

On my quest to discover new Canadian writers, I’m looking at Nathan Whitlock’s A Week of This, which has a glowing blurb from Heather O’Neill comparing him to Tom Perrotta.

I’m also looking at Chandra Mayor’s All the Pretty Girls, a short story collection set in a neighbourhood of very young, very poor single mothers. Mayor’s award-winning first novel, Cherry, was set in the Winnipeg skinhead scene of the ’90s. St. John’s Pasha Malla has been compared to George Saunders and Lorrie Moore, so there’s a good bet I’ll be taking a look at his collection of short stories, The Withdrawal Method.

Closer to home, we’re seeing the products of a good crop of travel writing. In The Fruit Hunters, Adam Leith Gollner delves into the simultaneously juicy and wormy world of fruit eating, producing and distributing. Eventually, I’ll read Taras Grecoe’s Bottomfeeder, and use its insight as inspiration to trim politically incorrect seafood from my diet, but maybe after lobster season.

And by the time I finish Mark Abley’s The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches From the Future of English, I’ll have a whole new take on where our language has been, and where it’s headed.

But what’s a summer without memoirs? Once I’m through Big Foot, I know I’ll end up reading David Sedaris’s When You Are Engulfed in Flames, a new collection that includes his recent New Yorker essay about quitting smoking. I’m not sure if I should treat Augusten Burroughs as non-fiction anymore, but because I can never stop at just one dry-witted memoir, I’ll probably read A Wolf at the Table. Hopefully this will make a better movie than Running With Scissors, and will feature Alec Baldwin in a much longer role.

By the end of the season, I’ll be ready for a refresher course on criticism from the great James Wood in How Fiction Works. This book is composed of blog-type entries on fiction-related subjects like plot and narrative (just in case you don’t know the difference) making this the perfect book for back to school readers, and back to work critics.