Summer Reading Suggestions

I'm heading into some August vacation time, and am starting to hunt for good summer reading suggestions.  Any ideas?  (Maybe in a bit lighter vein than Greg's summer reading, Inside the Third Reich....)

I've read a couple over the summer that I'd recommend (besides Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows  which I thought was a beautiful ending to an extraordinary gift of the imagination to the world).  One was for my "Church & the Biomedical Revolution" class.  It's Joel Shuman & Brian Volck, Reclaiming the Body:  Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine.  They suggest that "modern medicine" has in some ways taken the place of faith for many people today. (An excerpt:  "Indeed, much of what drives modern medicine is an admittedly noble concern to 'eliminate suffering' and increase the individual's control over his or her life. . . . That these claims sound so benign and noble -- so 'Christian,' in fact -- is, we think, a big part of the problem.  By assuming medicine and Christianity are pursuing the same things -- which, coincidentally, happen to be things we want, such as health, the power to choose, and an able-bodied, painless death -- Christians transfer even more authority from their religious community to medicine, reinforcing one of the least-appreciated phenomena in Christianity since the Reformation -- the growing amnesia that Christinas can and should think, speak, and act differently than the rest of the world.")  They suggest that Christians ought to "reclaim" the body in various ways -- including reclaiming an appreciation for the body as "a gift to accepted with confidence and gratitude, with all its limits and failings", and reclaiming the notion of the Christian community as  a "gathered body" that ought to worship together in service and practice outside the confines of Sunday worship.   They look at various issues of modern medical ethics -- reproductive technology, end-of-life issues, even cosmetic surgery, through this filter, with some very interesting results.

And speaking of living your life as though your faith really mattered, I'd like to put in another plug for a book that's already been mentioned here -- Rob's brother's story of the founding and floundering of Big Ideas, Inc., the company that created Veggie Tales. (Phil Vischer, Me, Myself & Bob.)  I will confess that my interest is piqued by the fact that we have one very ardent Veggie Tales fan in our household.  But I think anyone -- even a person who hasn't spent the last 11 years of her life with the sprightly tunes of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber as the soundtrack of much of her home life -- could learn something from reading about Phil Vischer's struggles to build a Christian alternative to the Disney empire.  How about this lesson for your Contracts classes:  When the growing company needed to move into new quarters as they expanded, and Phil Vischer was tempted to play hardball with the old landlord to get out of his old lease contract, his lawyer asked him whether he really wanted to renege on this commitment.  Turns out, when he thought about it, he decided he didn't -- he just paid the rest of the rent under the contract, as promised.

Finally, at the risk of sounding pretentious, the reading that I was assigned for one of my classes that I was most surprised to enjoy as much as I did (in fact, so much that I read way beyond the assignment & I fully intend to finish the whole book) was Dorothy Sayers' translation  of Dante's Inferno .  As I understand it, it's the only translation that preserves the original rhyming scheme.  Though purists undoubtedly argue that this distorts some meaning, I think it's absolutely delightful.  Our professor told us to read it out loud to ourselves, which was a wonderful suggestion.  And Sayers provides just enough notes and background to help an unclassically-educated, post-Vatican II Catholic like me understand what's going on without breaking the flow of the poetry. 

Anyone else read anything good so far this summer?