To continue our summer reading memories, we'll start with the coolest answer so far, from Christopher Priest, Shelf Awareness marketing manager: "The Dharma Bums while hitchhiking around the U.S. the summer I turned 19, or The Mandarins during a summer in Paris." That's hard to top, but Dave Wheeler, our publishing assistant, offers up Diary by Chuck Palahniuk: "It came out late the summer of 2003. I was working at my hometown's public library and picked it up right away because I'd just finished Lullaby. The weather was mercilessly hot that year, so I remember really commiserating with the people of Waytansea and their awful, stuffy summer of tourists. Like everything by Palahniuk, it's twisted and visceral and nauseating and violent and gripping, which is all I wanted as a 16-year-old reader. So, obviously, when I was a bookseller I gave terrible (read: awesome!) advice to parents who asked what was appropriate for their teenager to read."
Heather Young, Shelf's associate editor, will never forget July 2007: "I got gussied up in my best wizardly dudes, visited Diagon Alley (the street behind [publisher] Scholastic's office, which had been converted into a magical thoroughfare) on a hot New York night, and picked up my preordered copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from McNally Robinson (now McNally Jackson) at midnight. By the time I got home in the wee hours, I was so tired I could only manage 38 pages before I fell asleep, but I finished it the next day."
Our publisher, Jenn Risko, recalls her eighth summer, where she "discovered the Little House Books, and read them all. They couldn't have been any farther from my New Jersey childhood, and that's exactly what I wanted." John Kieltyka, our product manager, read James Baldwin's Another Country, summer of 1989, New York City: "Brutal, hot, profound, sad and electric. Made want to stay right where I was and run screaming, simultaneously." --Marilyn Dahl, editor, Shelf Awareness for Readers