As many of you know, my favorite place to read is on a dock at Lac Pythonga. I am recently returned from that paradise, with a slight tan and a bunch of bug bites. The weather was cool, dry, sunny. I was sorry to leave, back to Chicago’s heat and humidity.
This is what I read and loved:
Amy Bloom’s Love Invents Us 
was published in 1997. How did I miss this gem? This slender novel (203 pages) packs a punch. When we first meet Elizabeth she’s a middle schooler in her undershirt and panties, modeling a sable coat for the store’s owner, Mr. Klein, who gives her a ride to and from her elementary school. “Maybe I’d never have to go home. He could drive me to Mexico, night after night through the Great Plains, I wouldn’t mind.” Quite the beginning. It devolves from there, in a luridly entertaining way. Remember Tom Perrotta’s Election? In the same way, a high school English teacher destroys his life for Elizabeth. There’s more, and it’s all dark and weird and wonderful.
My sister-in-law Georgia brought me my next read, I Regret Almost Everything, a memoir by New York restaurant entrepreneur Keith McNally. It’s another book that starts with a bang — a suicide attempt. (Thank you, Georgia.) McNally s
uffered a life-changing stroke in 2016. His body never fully recovers and his voice is limited. He’s also facing a $1 million loss if he doesn’t open Pastis, a planned restaurant in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. His adult children show up for him, which bothers his second wife, with whom he has young children in London. Woven into the treatments of today are stories of his past, told with verve and humor. Yes, he drops names — but that’s his life at the Manhattan hot spots he created or updated, including The Odeon, Cafe Luxembourg, Balthazar, Minetta Tavern. This is a model memoir. Study it for its form.
Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain is among my all-time favorite reads, so I pre-ordered his latest, John of John. The elder John is a sheep farmer, a weaver, a lay preacher, a closeted gay man who lives with his mother-in-law. The younger John is an art school graduate without a job, who comes home to the father and grandmother who raised him, in the Isles of Harris in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. There’s a boatload of hurt in one house, and it plays out over 400 pages of beauty and insight. This is a vibrant, heartbreaking read.
Do you need a smart beach read? Paul Collins’ The Murder of the Century is a work of non-fiction about the beginning of tabloid journalism in New York, during the Gilded Age. A man’s headless torso washes up in the East River. Who was he? Who killed and dismembered him? There’s a trial, an execution, and a woman who gets away with murder. This is at a time that news was carried by pigeons and medical examiners were suspect of the new use of fingerprints as a means of identification. A gripping read.
Another beach read: The Shampoo Effect by Jenny Jackson. I picked this up in the airport on my way home. It’s about a young writer 
who wins a retreat at a beach community and involves herself in a group of friends who’ve known each other since high school. She writes a tell-all about them, which shakes things up in the best way. The author Catherine Newman blurbed; “Unforgettable… laugh out loud funny.” It’s neither of those things but it kept me engaged.
I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey last week. Run, don’t walk. It’s everything a movie should be.