Trent Hamm

What can I say? I’m a junkie for recommended reading lists. I love to see what others point to for good reads, and I’m especially intrigued when I see a book pop up over and over again. That means either (a) it actually is a good book or (b) it’s intriguing enough that the publishing house behind it is promoting it like mad because they see HUGE CROSSOVER POTENTIAL and NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and POSSIBLE MOVIE TIE-IN and various other dreams of book marketers.

So, I snagged Rebecca Blood’s incredibly impressive collection of links to summer reading lists and visited them all.

What I discovered was disheartening. The lists were dominated by “chick-lit” summer reading lists that recycled a handful of the same titles over and over again. I quickly grew tired of hearing about how perfect for summer reading Jennifer Weiner’s Best Friends Forever and Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls were – trust me, by the end, I was sick of seeing those two titles and a handful of others.

Clearly, marketing departments are at work here.

Many other lists were loaded down with whatever the authors had recently been sent by publishing houses. It’s easy to imagine a burnt-out arts editor at a dying newspaper in a small down sitting there thinking to himself, “Shit, I need to come up with a ’summer reading list’ article. Well, let me see what’s in my inbox.” and just listing them. Such lists reek of cheap whiskey, Pall Malls, flop sweat, and slightly-burnt newspaper ink.

Yet, after drifting through dozens and dozens of such lists, a few reading gems did drift to the top. I found myself noting an interesting book here and there, buried under the weight of a thousand Jennifer Weiner press releases.

(I have no problem with Jennifer Weiner. She’s a fine writer, according to my wife, though I’ve never read a book by her. I’m mostly just venting after seeing her name come up time and time again like “cook’s choice” in a grade school cafeteria.)

So, I constructed my own summer reading list – a list of books I’m actually excited to read over the next few months (probably into fall and maybe even into winter, to tell the truth). Each entry on the list (save one) was published in English for the first time in the last twelve months, and there’s very little overlap between genres, both by design and by my own personal tastes.

I’m smart enough to realize that you couldn’t possibly care less about what I’m reading and are here to find something for you to read. My sincere hope is that this list works like any other truly good list of suggestions – you’ll read through it, yawn at a few entries, scratch your head at a few others, and maybe find one or two that you haven’t heard of before that you decide to pick up and read.

Satchel – Larry Tye
Ignoring my utter fascination for old-time baseball (which runs deep and wide, which you’ll figure out if you read this site for long), Satchel Paige is simply an interesting character to examine from a purely social perspective. It’s the story of a quirky individual struggling to fit into a team environment – and succeeding. It’s a story of the Jim Crow south. It’s a story of how the great ones hang on to glory and are never quite sure when to let go. But mostly, it’s Satchel Paige, one of the true mythological figures of baseball.

Unfashionable – Tullian Tchividjian
Christianity struggles with an image problem on two fronts: the judgmental behavior of Christians on the ground, and Christians in the seat of power passing laws in opposition to social progress. When combined with an ongoing desire for mainstream acceptance, it’s unsurprising that there’s a wide swath of backlash against Christians. Tchividjian argues a universal truth: when you’re already seen as unfashionable, it’s a waste of time to go around begging for acceptance. Instead, he suggests a completely different approach: ignore the mainstream, stop pushing what you believe on others, and instead live what you believe – and backs it up theologically.

How the Mighty Fall – Jim Collins
Collins is consistently able to write business books that have a tremendous amount of overlap with daily life. Often, this is because the business behaviors he isolates have direct parallels with how individual people act. How the Mighty Fall seems to hit that sweet spot once again, addressing how businesses that were once leaders fall behind the pack and often fail – a behavior often witnessed with leaders in all aspects of life. Although there is often a bit of the “Malcolm Gladwell effect” going on here – drawing conclusions sometimes not wholly supported by the data – I’m really eager to dig into Collins’ conclusions on the nature of collapsing businesses.

Fordlandia – Greg Grandin
“Fordlandia” was Henry Ford’s disastrous attempt at creating a rubber plantation in South America in the 1920s and 1930s, attempting to apply the policies of his assembly line and American work standards to farming in rural Brazil. Today, Fordlandia stands in depressing ruins as the jungle reclaims what was once rightfully its own. Written by Greg Grandin, who wrote the fantastic Empire’s Workshop a few years back (on a similar subject), Fordlandia looks to be a great piece of analysis of a fascinating failed experiment.

Hungry Monkey – Matthew Amster-Burton
How do you convince a three year old to be adventurous with their food when they’re content with hot dogs and macaroni and cheese? This is the exact adventure we often have in our own dining room, where arugula brings boos and Oscar Mayer brings cheers, where Kraft Macaroni and Cheese comes out on top against almost all comers, leaving carefully-prepared foods in their wake. Amster-Burton tackles this very problem in his own life and digs into the reality of raising a child with a desire to eat outside the box.

Digital Barbarism – Mark Helprin
I’ve been looking for a well-reasoned response to the “freer copyright” perspective of Lawrence Lessig’s excellent Remix. Such a response is on dangerous ground, as we rather obviously live in an era where the nature of copyright is under deep discussion and the push is in the direction of less copyright. One only needs to glance at the Amazon discussions about Digital Barbarism to see the smoke in the air, but where there’s smoke, there’s often the fire of a challenging discussion.

Julian Comstock – Robert Charles Wilson
I thoroughly enjoyed World Made By Hand by James Howard Kunstler, which fictionalized ordinary life in America after a global energy collapse. However, the book’s snapshot took place in the midst of the decline, not exploring at all what comes next. The steady hand of Robert Charles Wilson takes over that scenario in Julian Comstock, looking at 22nd century America, centuries later, when society has undergone tumultuous changes after the abrupt loss of energy more than a century before.

Shop Class as Soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford
In some ways a follow-up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Shop Class as Soulcraft investigates the nature of work and the disconnect that many people feel between the work they do and the world around them. This is certainly a disconnect I felt for a long time – a career in computer programming dealing with abstract data does not lend itself well towards sensing the real world in what you do. Crawford’s original essay is unquestionably brilliant and I look forward to reading how it expands into a full book.

The Scavengers’ Manifesto – Anneli Rufus and Kristan Lawson
I find the whole “urban scavenging” philosophy fascinating. It’s basically an alternate value choice, maximizing the value of things (since nothing should be wasted) but minimizing the value of time (as it’s seemingly appropriate to invest a lot of time into scavenging). There’s also what I like to call “scavenging-lite” – meaning things like shopping at yard sales and using Freecycle – that seem completely normal to me yet seem revolutionary to some. Rather than seeing this book as suggestions on how to live (which it is), I look at it as something of a cultural artifact.

Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
The one book on this list that’s not a recent release, Infinite Jest is the 800 pound gorilla on my summer reading list as I strive to keep up with Infinite Summer. If you’ve never read it, now’s the time.