Quick reads for a hot summer!
Books under 250 pages that pack a wallop.

Margaret Atwood
Penelopiad
Retelling of Odysseus and Penelope's mythic story.

Ron Hansen
Isn't It Romantic
Beautiful, self-possessed Parisian Natalie Clairvaux, a lover of all things American, decides to assuage her hurt feelings over her fiance's latest infidelity by taking a trip to the U.S. Appalled at Natalie's destination choice, the local travel agent grudgingly books her on a Greyhound See America tour, whose highlights include the world's largest buffet.

Alan Lightman
Einstein's Dreams
The book takes flight when Einstein takes to his bed and we share his dreams, 30 little fables about places where time behaves quite differently.

William Maxwell
So long, see you tomorrow
On an Illinois farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment the tenous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end.

Julie Otsuka
When the Emperor was Divine
This heartbreaking, bracingly unsentimental debut describes in poetic detail the travails of a Japanese family living in an internment camp during World War II, raising the specter of wartime injustice in bone-chilling fashion.

James Sallis
Drive
A stunt driver for movies, Driver finds more excitement as a wheelman during robberies, but when a heist goes sour, a contract is put on his head and his survival skills burn up the pavement.

Calvin Trillin
Tepper Isn't Going Out
It's a quintessentially New York comedy revolving around Murray Tepper, a quiet, good-humored man whose one oddity is his passion for parking on Manhattan streets. His knowledge of arcane New York parking rules is encyclopedic, and he likes nothing better than to park legally and sit in his car reading the paper.

Have a fabulous Fourth!!
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