"Must-Read" Summer Releases

I love Saturday mornings.  I typically sit at the computer with my cup (or two) of coffee and leisurely read blog posts of my online "friends"  I enjoy catching up on their personal as well as literary lives.  One of my favorite Saturday routines is to read Cathy's Weekly Week Round Up.  I save that post for last because I know I will spend several minutes following all her links to various sites.  This week is no exception.  One of the links led me to Entertainment Weekly's list of 18 top summer picks, and while all the new releases sound enticing, there are three books that I know I will have to read ASAP.

Slow Love:  How I Lost my Job, Put on my Pajamas, and Found Happiness by Dominique Brown (scheduled to be released on May 9).


Description from Goodreads:  From the beloved author Dominique Browning, a humorous and moving book about losing a job and winning a life. In November 2007, former editor in chief of House & Garden magazine Dominique Browning experienced what thousands have since experienced. She lost her job. Overnight, her driven, purpose-filled days vanished. With her children leaving home and a long relationship ending, the structure of her days disappeared. She fell into a panic of loss but found humor despite everything, discovering a deeper joy than any she had ever known. It was a life she had not sought, but one that offered pleasures and surprises she didn’t know she lacked.

Slow Love is about wearing your pajamas to the farmers’ market, packing up a beloved home and moving to a more rural setting, making time to play the piano and go kayaking, reinventing yourself, and not cutting corners when it comes to love, muffins, or gardening. This elegant, graceful—and yet funny—book inspires us to dance in the kitchen and seize new directions. 

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender 

(scheduled to be released on June 1)

Description from Goodreads:  On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.

The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad, and confirms Aimee Bender’s place as “a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language” (San Francisco Chronicle).

The Cookbook Collector (by Allegra Goodman)

(scheduled to be released July 6)

Description from Goodreads:  Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.

Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collectoris a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

So, Thank you, Cathy, for providing me with more books to add to my every growing pile.  It is because of kind, generous bloggers like you that I do not have to worry about boredom in my retirement years!

So how about you?  Are there any new summer releases that you are anxious to read?