The summer of 2008 is all about the perfect balance between hustling at a summer job to make some cash and lazing around the house to wind down from nine months of brain-squeezing academics. However, you don’t want to become a drone from a summer devoid of any intellectual stimulation, so the Emerald has compiled a list of three great summer reads that will help keep your mind occupied.
The first two books are fast, fun novels that are purely entertainment, while the last book sincerely is an important insight into today’s world.
Jessica Anya Blau’s newest book,”The Summer of Naked Swim Parties,” is the perfect read for a hot day lounging in the grass. With a plot line that’s equal parts funny, raunchy and soberingly honest, this sordid novel about a summer teenage romance truly is a coming-of-age tale.
The year is 1976 and 14-year-old Jamie is just delving into the world of sex, drugs and the popular crowd where she loses her virginity and her child-like innocence all at the same time.
Paired with the blush-worthy antics of her parents’ marijuana-smoking nakedness, young Jamie is barely able to navigate her home life along with her two best friends and newly acquired boyfriend.
While this isn’t the most intelligent read of all time, it still provides a candid mirror of adolescent behavior that will cause you to reflect back on your own carefree high school summers with your own loves, losses, joys and mistakes.
Duane Swierczynski’s newest work, “Severance Package” brings to life any of your covert secret agent fantasies with a bloody tryst between an employer and his employees.
Murphy Knox & Associates is a financial company that turns out to be a front for a rogue combination of U.S. intelligence companies the CIA and the MI-6. The result is the “inexistent” CI-6 whose actual mission is a big question mark.
Now being shut down, an order from above causes the company’s boss, David Murphy, to gather together seven of his most trusted employees for the most dangerous type of Saturday morning meeting: the kind that kills.
With no way out and nobody to trust, each employee must either fend for themselves or band together to escape death from the booby trap-rigged 36th floor.
As fast-paced as a speeding bullet, this action-filled novel will engage all of your senses and bring the thrill of the chase (or the hunt) right to your living room recliner. It will provide a spectacular break from your monotonous life of flipping burgers or making espresso for annoyed customers at your summer job.
“Standard Operating Procedure” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris is a real-life account of the atrocities allowed by the U.S. Government in the infamous Iraqi prison facility Abu Ghraib.
Written in a journalist’s style, this surreal tale of torture, imprisonment and interrogation all in the name of democracy will take your breath away and cause you to think long and hard about the world we live in today.
One may think that this is left-wing propaganda, but that belief will be quashed when they discover that all of the book’s contents are factual accounts from military prison guards and military interrogators who were there to see and participate in the dehumanization of Iraqi individuals among the stink of death, fear and unsanitary living conditions.
Commentary straight from the mouths of the military personnel who took the infamous photos of prisoners being detained naked with bags over their heads while handcuffed in obviously uncomfortable positions is made all throughout the book.
The novel is based on a documentary by Errol Morris that shares the “Standard Operating Procedure” title. It is being screened at the Bijou Art Cinema at 5 p.m. and 9:40 p.m. nightly through at least Thursday June 12.
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