Ocean breezes, cold beer, suntans, romances and great books — ahhh, the many wonderful things about summer. But what makes a good summer book? It can’t be too serious; it can’t require much thinking and it can’t be too important because Lord knows when you have a book in one hand and a beer in the other, you may not remember the whole thing. Like all things in summer, your reading list should be fun.
“”Namedropper,”” by Emma Forrest, is definitely a great summer book. One of the most underrated books of the last five years, “”Namedropper”” will have you laughing out loud. The novel’s heroine, Viva Cohen, is a precocious London teenager who lives with her gay uncle and is best friends with, as Simon and Schuster puts it, “”a drugged-out beauty queen and an aging rock star.”” The book follows Viva from London to Los Angeles, where she rubs elbows with celebrities, gets tattooed and loses her virginity.
You may think this sounds like a bit of a “”chick book,”” but Forrest writes so well that Viva’s antics will make even the most macho of guys laugh harder than they have ever laughed while reading. Forrest’s “”Namedropper”” is a great feminine counterpart to Nick Hornby’s “”High Fidelity.””
Speaking of Hornby, his follow up to “”High Fidelity”” has recently been made into a movie. “”About a Boy,”” which stars Hugh Grant and Toni Collett on the big screen, shows how Will Freeman’s bachelor lifestyle is changed after befriending a boy. While the movie is excellent, the book is a lot better. Hornby has a brilliant way of weaving rock ‘n’ roll into plot lines.
“”High Fidelity”” was a bible for vinyl-loving bachelors everywhere, and “”About a Boy”” uses music in much the same way. While Nirvana plays a key role in the book, the movie changed the grunge rock theme to hip-hop. This was an obvious move to appeal to a more modern and diverse audience (since when did liking Nirvana make you dated?). Nirvana was one of those important literary devices that meant so much to the book; the title itself is a play on the Nirvana song “”About a Girl.”” If you haven’t seen the movie yet, go see it, but read the book also — you’ll thank me later.
If witty British novels aren’t your thing, perhaps you should round up your best buds and head out in search of new adventures — or just read Jack Kerouac’s classic, “”On the Road.”” Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx, Mary Lou and Old Bull Lee are just some of the friends you’ll meet in this ode to the freedom of the open road. Hopefully, this book that came to define the Beat generation was not ruined by your high school literature class; it is one of those great novels that reaffirms the importance of finding.
The moral of “”On the Road”” is that in life, what is important is not the destination, but the journey and the friends and experiences you pick up along the way. Read it in June, then hitchhike across the country in July. Just make sure you send a postcard to your mom so she doesn’t worry.
All that is left is the important and always entertaining trash novel genre. Any supermarket romance novel will do, but if you’re going to read trash, read the best trash that money can buy. Of course I mean Jacqueline Susanne’s “”Valley of the Dolls,”” the mother of all trash literature (and I mean that as a huge compliment).
In “”Valley of the Dolls,”” you will enter the world of Neely, Jennifer and Anne. The things that unite these three women are dolls — red dolls, pink dolls and yellow dolls. These dolls are pills: Nembutals, Valium, Dexedrine and any other 1960s upper or downer. Sex scenes, plot twists, overdoses and cheating husbands are what make “”Valley of the Dolls”” a living, breathing, shouting, screaming text that was one of the most scandalous book to hit bookstores in the 1960s.
So there you have it: four books that never won the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, but have enough sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll to be thoroughly entertaining.