Tommy’s Summer Reads

My summer reading is usually done whenever I have a spare moment away from our literary camps where I work. My absolute favorite, though, is a nice two or three hour reading session in the hammock in my backyard.

1. Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch by Ben Thompson

History has never been so much fun, or quite so bloody. Thompson walks us through some of history’s greatest battles, duels, shootouts, and wars, from Cyrus the Great who forged the Persian Empire on a camel charge, to Bishnu Shrestha, an off duty ghurka who took on forty gun toting train robbers armed with only his knife. Absolute, bloody, fun.

2. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

Iain Banks died June 9th and somehow I’ve never gotten around to picking up one of his Culture novels. Innovative, imaginative, and full of wonder, Consider Phlebas transports its readers to the stars and I cannot wait.

3. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

I’ve basically been waiting for this book for the last eight years. I devour anything Gaiman puts out and it’s nice to see he finally has another adult novel. Shrouded in pre-publication secrecy, we haven’t known anything more than to expect a tale of modern terror seen from the eyes of a seven year old.

4. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

I love swashbuckling adventure and Dumas is one of the two men who entrenched swashbuckling in popular culture. (The other being Errol Flynn.) I love to re-read Dumas every once in a while. There’s nothing better than the tale of four men who become brothers as they conspire against a cardinal to save their king and country.

5. Six Months in 1945 by Michael Dobbs

This is the story of how American and Soviet relations, in the space of just a few months, went from the conference at Yalta planning to take down Hitler to the Cold War arms race that lasted for more than fifty years. Hiroshima and Nagasaki play a larger role than you might expect, but then atomic weapons tend to do that.