My Summer Reading: Matthew Lawrence

This week, GoLocalProv's Summer Reading's scouts caught up with Matthew Lawrence, whose devotion to the word comes through in everything he touches... from blogging on various literary sites near and far to founding Not About the Buildings, a forward-thinking non-profit that supports community libraries, to the wildly popular (and fun) Micro-Memoir speed-writing events and last month's Spelling Bee held at the Providence Athenaeum. What's in this man's summer bookbag? Take a look.

Right now I'm in the middle of The Longest Journey,

the novel EM Forster wrote right before A Room With A View and Howard's End. I found it in a used bookstore and bought it because I liked the cover, but what really got me excited was the completely unenthusiastic description on the back cover:  "...the book is not a perfect whole, but we feel that it does not so much fall apart as fly apart..."  I'm wondering what modernist catastophes to expect at the end.

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But not everything I read is a century old.

Liz Phair just released a crazy album on the Internet the other day, and that reminded me that I still need to read Whip-Smart, a memoir that's named after Phair's second album.

It's written by Melissa Febos, a former New School student who spent four years working as a dominatrix in midtown Manhattan. It's been highly recommended to me from friends, and I'm a sucker for a well-written sex work memoir, so that's next on my list.

Summer's also my favorite time to read what famous people have to say for themselves,

so it's pretty convenient that Pat Benatar's got a new memoir out, called Between A Heart And A

Rock Place. I'm not a huge fan of hers--except for "We Live For Love," which is fabulous song and incidentally about a thousand times better than "Love Is A Battlefield" - but I admire her sense of style and I like the novel idea of a rock star memoir that's pretty much free of sex and drugs.

I'm also very excited for the new Aimee Bender novel...

(although Ann Hood already mentioned that). Actually all of Aimee Bender's books are worth reading more than once. The Girl In The Flammable Skirt changed my life in high school, and An Invisible Sign Of My Own, her sad and beautiful turn-of-the-millennium novel, is even better.

Finally, I'm a sucker for suspense and I like quick reads,

so I plan to spend some time with Patricia Highsmith this summer. I read The Cry Of The Owl over the winter and it was so wonderful I probably wouldn't have put it down if my house had been on fire. I've never read any of the novels with the Tom Ripley character, though (despite the fact that I've seen at least three different movie versions of the story) so I'm hoping for some time to read those as well.

429 Too Many Requests

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