DISCOSALT SUMMER READING: PART 1

Not exactly beach weather out there…so you can either start gathering animals in pairs or park your bikini body on the couch and catch up on some good reads until the sun deems you worthy again. Discosalt writer Aylin Sankur squares in with her summer reading picks for this summer.

Fall On Your Knees

By Anne-Marie MacDonald

Simon & Schuster

Joyce Carol Oates but less self-aware, less willfully inscrutable. A lyrical, beautiful, melancholic, absolutely haunting epic. A book that will makes you miss your Muni stop. (Ignore the fact that it’s an Oprah’s Book Club pick…this …never… happened)

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The Story of a Marriage

By Andrew Sean Greer

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Set in the San Francisco’s Outer Sunset near the Pacific in the years after World War II, Greer uses the area’s fog, ghosts, longing, and isolation from the rest of the city to tell the story of two people coexisting—not living—in a marriage. A marriage where issues of race, class, sexuality, and love lay, roiling, under the fine dust of sand, the beach dunes come to reclaim the land.

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Play It As It Lays

By Joan Didion

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Disillusionment. Disconnectedness. Mind fuck. 200 pages. Read it.

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The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

By Michael Pollan

Penguin Press

Put down the Tostinos Pizza Rolls, and start thinking, however reluctantly, about what you put into your body. What I liked about this examination of where our food comes from—and trust me, it ain’t always pretty—is that Pollan is funny, articulate, admits he likes McDonalds, and realizes there are limitations on how environmentally and socially conscious we can be about our food. Most importantly, he’s never, ever preachy.

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Check out more Discosalt Book Reviews in the “MISC” section HERE