The Hot Ethan & Other Hot Stuff

Day 104 (in the shade) of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Paulette only has 100 more pages to go in the Edith Wharton biography by Hermione Lee. (I am still only 133 pages into it...but maybe I will take it to the beach.) This is when I always recommend Summer, which Wharton liked to call "the hot Ethan." And we don't mean Ethan Hawke. We mean Ethan Frome.

But Paulette's hot summer reading will include romances.

Donna's summer reading will include some Mary Kay Andrews books recommended by her daughter: The Fixer Upper and Savannah Blues. The former looks like a fun read, and the latter like a cozy mystery with romance, and both are probably some kind of chick lit! (Everybody loves chick lit!) Donna just finished Blue Dahlia, but I don't know if it's the romance by Nora Roberts or the screenplay by Raymond Chandler. Probably the romance. She also loves, and often re-reads, The Shell Seekers, by Rosamunde Pilcher. Which Susan also loves!

Susan is reading Patterns of Childhood by "the wonderful, poetic Christa Wolf," also known as A Model Childhood, a novel about growing up in Nazi Germany, and just finished Cousin Bette, by Balzac, who was so hot he scandalized Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn in The Music Man, by Meredith Willson.

An actress in New York, Susan is also reading a lot of plays. And coming up on her summer reading list: the last two Steig Larsson novels.

Kevin, an actor in New York, thinks he may ignore the "three TOMES sitting beside my bed that probably total over three thousand pages to be read" and instead buy "the latest 'the girl that...' book by the dead Swedish author."

Wait! An actress in New York who likes Stieg Larsson and an actor in New York who likes Stieg Larsson. Should I try to set them up?

Because, back at Facebook, Dawn reports:

I'm currently devouring an utterly delectable coming-of-age novel called THE HIGHEST TIDE by Jim Lynch, and slowly savoring TWENTY POEMS TO NOURISH YOUR SOUL by Judith Valente and Charles Reynard (which I understand to be one of the fruits of your successful, if inadvertent, matchmaking effort--nicely done)!

Yes, yes, I accidentally rubbed some poets together, and they caught fire. Hello, Dolly!