Yes, August is quickly slipping by and soon the summer will be over. But don't fret as there's still time to sneak away to the cottage or the beach with a good book for some R and R and R (rest, relaxation and reading).
Here are some suggestions ...
MYSTERY
Honky Tonk Samurai - Joe R. Lansdale
The story starts simply enough when Hap, a former 60s activist and self-proclaimed white trash rebel, and Leonard, a tough black, gay Vietnam vet and Republican with an addiction to Dr. Pepper, are working a freelance surveillance job in East Texas. But the pair is soon blackmailed into covering a missing person case, which leads to a lot more (including murder!).
Jenni Laidman reviewed the book for the Chicago Tribune, saying:
Listening to a Joe R. Lansdale's East Texas detective yarn in the Hap Collins-and-Leonard Pine series is like hanging out with a skilled barroom raconteur. Lansdale's language dances with colorful and regular profanity as he performs a shotgun wedding between wild and ridiculous, tying it together with enough cartoonish violence and abundant wit to send you reaching for your wallet to buy the next round. . . . Altogether it's wild, funny, utterly improbable and thoroughly satisfying entertainment.
HUMOR
Theft By Finding - David Sedaris
"The diary begins in 1977 with 21-year-old Sedaris hitchhiking around the United States and sleeping variously in a dried-out riverbed, on a golf course and under a bridge. He smokes pot and takes acid and, to earn money, picks and packs fruit and washes dishes. In Knoxville, Ohio, a drunk pickup driver tries to assault him, prompting him to jump out of the truck while it’s still moving. Afterwards he flags down a car whose occupants offer to take him to Cincinnati. Throughout the journey they throw cans out of the window and say that all black people should be slaves. 'Oh boy. What a day,' Sedaris sighs."
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Now some four years removed from Grace’s official coming out as a woman, Tranny leaves her in a much better place, even as she admits that her transition is still a work in progress. Still, the hardest part of Grace’s journey feels like it’s been completed by the memoir’s end. In a time where the world is becoming increasingly more aware of transgender issues, Grace’s memoir offers something more than just a quality read. It’s a poignant and timely look at a still-emerging cultural issue worthy of serious discussion.
As with his gargantuan history of London, Ackroyd here revels in origins, particularly of words, and part of the joy of Queer City is the abundance of recherché terms for all types of sexual being and erotic act, and their bizarre derivations. The word “faggot," he informs us early on, meant a bundle of sticks of wood, on top of which accused sodomites were burned to death. And language, at least from the 11th century onwards, has been used as a form of control, he says, with “sodomy” “a catch-all term that could mean anything or everything."... Ackroyd here offers another utterly unique reading experience, with something to tickle the nose, or shelve for a dinner party, on every page.
Giovanni's Room explores feelings of self-loathing, social isolation and confusion. Sadly, gay and bisexual men often feel like outsiders in the communities that they should feel the most accepted. If you grew up as the only queer person in a small, rural town or you grew up in a religious, anti-LGBT household, surely you know the feelings of isolation and confusion. ... Giovanni's Room explores these emotions and evokes them in all of his readers.
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