What's in your reading wallet?

This is a confession.

Right now, I'd rather read than write, rather bury my nose than let my fingers do the walking over the keyboard. It's summer and to me, that's always meant books. Books, the smell of coconut suntan lotion (yes, I'm so old I used lotion to get a tan), and the ice-cold inside of a Dairy Queen are the very essences of summer to me. Mountains of books and mountains of hours in which to read. So lazy, so decadent, so perfectly right.

I didn't even realize what was tugging at my metaphorical apron until I read a blog post by my aspiring novelist friend, Eman, and she talked about getting distracted from her work by a book of short stories. Then I realized it was the wish to lie about somewhere, anywhere comfortable and cool and lose myself in a ripping good read for hours and hours on end.

It's June, after all, and I'd like nothing better than to trade the to-do list for the new mystery by Elizabeth George. I don't want anything too heavy or hard to read in June, July, or August when even the beverage glasses sweat. I don't necessarily want to be a better person, or know more facts, or understand literature of any sort better when the summer is over.

Although, I fall crazy in love with anyone who can both write a good story and make me better for it at the end. Marilynne Robinson, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Phillip Roth, Wallace Stegner, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, J.D. Salinger, Tim O'Brien, Susan Minot, J.R.R. Tolkien, Raymond Carver, and Jane Smiley are just a few writers who have done that for me. They are the ones whose books I go back to over and over, sometimes just to look at, sometimes to read a bit, sometimes to re-read.

What I want my summer reading to do is transport me, take me away to some other place, where I can inhabit another world, get lost in it, meet and get to know people I might never meet in my real life. To get to the last page and sigh, "Ah, that was SO good!" These books are also on my summer list:

Little Bee
Netherland
Let the Great World Spin
The Private Patient (by P.D. James who always writes a perfect mystery and has been doing so for years.)
Anything and everything by George Pelecanos
Mysteries by Laura Lippman because we both live in Baltimore and that's where she sets her books.

What's in your reading wallet? I would so love to know!