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12 top picks for summer travel reading (and drinking)

Summer means travel and relaxation. And few things are as relaxing – and enriching – as a good stack of books for the beach, the Riviera, the countryside, or the Rose Hotel lobby.

We’ve decided to give you a hand by compiling a partial list of the top summer reading list selections from USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Before we get into those literary picks, allow us suggest an accompaniment to your reading, should find yourself at The Rose Hotel this summer. We recommend a cool glass of Hanna Sauvignon Blanc Russian River Valley. We serve it at the Lobby Bar, where it is very popular and a good value. In addition, we have a full bar open from 3-11 p.m. daily featuring upscale Silver Oak 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon Alexander Valley by the glass.

As long as we’re talking about reading to go along with that fine vintage, keep in mind The Rose has a complimentary copy of USA Today delivered to each guest room weekdays, as well as daily editions of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and San Francisco Chronicle available in the lobby.

There’s also a small library of cocktail-table-size books in the lobby to give you additional variety.

As for your summer reading, here are 12 top picks.

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a genre-defying work that lies somewhere between a novel and collected short stories. One chapter is written as a PowerPoint presentation; another takes the form of a magazine celebrity profile. A single cast of characters unites the book, among them a punk rocker turned music producer, his kleptomaniac assistant and a washed-up guitarist who proposes a “suicide tour” to revive his career by ending his life.

Beautiful Maria of My Soul by Oscar Hijuelos
In a sequel of sorts to The Mambo King Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos examines the life of the muse of that novel as she moves from childhood to the fast lane in mid-20th century Cuba. María enchants whether she’s dancing in clubs, appearing in advertisements, or walking the sweltering streets of Havana. Her story is one of fierce love, luscious sex, and otherworldly beauty, but also of heartbreak and hardness, as she carries painful memories of the death of her sister and her dear mother. The two main men in her life are Ignacio, a nefarious, strong-willed businessman who provides poor María with extravagant clothes and an apartment, and Nestor, a poor musician whom she loves passionately. Less prominent but still present is María’s daughter, Teresa, and her growing up in America. Hijuelos’s Havana is as much a full-fleshed character as María as it endures the rise of Castro and the mass exodus of Cubans to Miami in the 1960s. An intelligent and playful ending caps off a vivid story that should delight readers of The Mambo Kings and enthrall those new to Hijuelos’s imaginative and florid voice.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  by Aimee Bender
At age 8, Rose Edelstein discovers she can taste feelings in food — lonely pie, adulterous roast beef, resentment soup — whatever angst or elation the cook might have experienced while preparing the meal. Weird for any kid, yes. But when a family like the Edelsteins is serving up its own wacky stew of alienation and contradiction — from the taciturn father, who “always seemed a little like a guest,” to the misanthropic brother, a physics prodigy with KEEP OUT posted (in 17 languages) on his bedroom door — having the ability to sense the dissonance between emotion and behavior can be especially painful.

Words That Matter
This is a little book of life lessons.“What you risk reveals what you value,” declares the novelist Jeanette Winterson. “A woman cannot directly choose her circumstances, but she can choose her thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape her circumstance. ... As a woman thinketh in her heart, so is she,” said author Dorothy Hulst. “Can one be spiritual without religious faith? One can. All one needs is to be open to someone else’s concerns, fears, and hopes, and to make him or her feel less alone,” suggests Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel. These are just a few of the wise thoughts in Words That Matter, a book of quotations full of everyday truths and surprising insights.

Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross
The three antiheroes of this first novel contemplate murdering their wives, or perhaps they have already murdered them — until the end you’re not sure. One of the husbands is the infamous Cleveland doctor, Sam Sheppard, who was tried twice for the murder of his wife (once convicted, once acquitted). Each of the three stories is part romance, part mystery and part police procedural. The author has said that he idolizes Alfred Hitchcock; Mr. Hitchcock once said that in his movies, “I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.” “Or a woman,” Mr. Ross might add.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
David Mitchell’s densely plotted novels veer between sci-fi and historical fiction and unfold across multiple continents and several centuries. His latest novel is more constrained, but no less ambitious. It takes place in 18th-century, isolationist Japan, on an artificial island off of Nagasaki. The Dutch merchants living there are forbidden from learning Japanese or setting foot on the mainland without permission, but Jacob de Zoet, an ambitious young clerk, manages to charm his hosts. He falls in love with a Japanese midwife who is sent to a nunnery and navigates the ranks of both his trading company and the Japanese political hierarchy. The novel, Mr. Mitchell’s fifth, is being published in 10 countries and made its debut at No. 1 on the London Sunday Times’ best-seller list.

Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
Some things are given when you pick up a Carl Hiaasen novel. Greedy developers and political cronies will go down, justice will be delivered by a swamp-dwelling, vigilante environmental activist with a creative streak (a spiny sea urchin to the groin tops most modern torture techniques) and the madcap plot might seem a touch familiar at this point, but you’ll be too entertained to care. In his 13th novel, Star Island, Mr. Hiaasen lampoons today’s celebrity culture and the sub-industries it feeds — from paparazzi, managers and publicity firms to ruthless stage parents. An out-of-control pop star vacationing in South Beach nearly derails her upcoming album tour when she O.D.‘s in a hotel room. Things get worse when a grudge-bearing paparazzo kidnaps her body double.

Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens
Mr. Hitchens once described Margaret Thatcher as sexy in a dispatch for the New Statesman. When they later met, she spanked him with a rolled up parliamentary order and called him a “naughty boy.” “I had and have eyewitnesses to this,” Mr. Hitchens writes in his new memoir. Mr. Hitchens focuses on important figures in his life (including novelists Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie) and ideas that transformed him (his early infatuation with leftist revolutionary movements, his decision to become an American after 9/11, his eventual break with the political left over the Iraq war). He rarely touches on his private life, and only makes passing references to his wife and daughters. Still, the secrets he spills reveal another side of the essayist and critic.

Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth by James Tabor
There are at least 52 ways to die in a cave, according to James Tabor. Among them: flash floods, asphyxiation from carbon dioxide, getting attacked by rabid bats, getting struck by lightning while crossing a stream, getting struck by lightning while talking through a cable telephone and falling to your death after animals chew through your rope. Mr. Tabor, author of Forever on the Mountain, delves into such subterranean terrors through the story of two explorers’ race to reach the bottom of the earth. An American spelunker leads a risky and ultimately deadly expedition to a cave in southern Mexico, while a Ukrainian caver braves a freezing super cave in the Republic of Georgia.

When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead by Jerry Weintraub with Rich Cohen
Hollywood power player Weintraub, now 72, is always in control and goes to great lengths to prove it: besides having managed musical legends like Presley, Sinatra and John Denver (“I cooked him from scratch”), Weintraub once closed a deal by faking a heart attack, and won the respect of one of Chicago’s most powerful men, Arthur Wirtz, when he cursed Wirtz out for making him wait. (Wirtz would go on to become one of Weintraub’s mentors.) Weintraub has also produced plays, TV shows, movies (from Nashville to the Ocean’s 11 franchise), and more, summing up his talent simply: “When I believe in something, it’s going to get done.” Edgy and honest but refreshingly spare in his criticism of stars, colleagues and family, Weintraub can be forgiven for glossing over speed bumps in his career (one failed business lost $30 million before it closed in the mid-‘80s) and occasionally showing his age with wandering rumination. As Weintraub repeatedly states, he is not a star, which perhaps that explains the disappointing omission of photos. Still, with a bold voice, a storied career, and a cast of superstars, his memoir makes a rousing insider tour of some five decades in the entertainment industry.

The Only Game in Town: Sports Writing from The New Yorker edited by David Remnick
For more than 80 years, The New Yorker has been home to some of the toughest, wisest, funniest, and most moving sportswriting around. Featuring brilliant reportage and analysis, profound profiles of pros, and tributes to the amateur in all of us, The Only Game in Town is a classic collection from a magazine with a deep bench. Including such authors as Roger Angell and John Updike, both of them synonymous with New Yorker sportswriting, The Only Game in Town also features greats like John McPhee and Don DeLillo. Hall of Famer Ring Lardner is here, bemoaning the lowering of standards for baseball achievement—in 1930. A. J. Liebling inimitably portrays the 1955 Rocky Marciano vs. Archie Moore bout as “Ahab and Nemesis … man against history,” and John Cheever pens a story about a boy’s troubled relationship with his father and “The National Pastime.” From Tiger Woods to bullfighter Sidney Franklin, from the Chinese Olympics to the U.S. Open, the greatest plays and players, past and present, are all covered in The Only Game in Town. At The New Yorker, it’s not whether you win or lose — it’s how you write about the game.

How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley
Nine thoughtful, unfussy essays by the author of the collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake navigate around illusions of youth in the hope that by young adulthood they’ll all add up to happiness. The account of Crosley’s footloose adventure to Lisbon on the eve of her 30th birthday starts things off in rollicking fashion in Show Me on the Doll: without proficient language skills, getting hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of Bairro Alto, and panicking in front of the myriad QVC channels offered by her hotel, Crosley recognizes that Lisbon was a place with a painfully disproportionate self-reflection-to-experience ratio. There is the requisite essay about moving to New York and replacing her anorexic-kleptomaniac roommate with a more acceptable living arrangement: in Crosley’s case, delineated in Take a Stab at It, she is interviewed by the creepily disembodied current occupier of a famous former brothel on the Bowery, McGurk’s Suicide Hall. As well, Crosley delivers witty, syncopated takes on visiting Alaska and Paris, and finding much consolation from a two-timing heartbreak in New York by buying stolen items from her upholstery guy, Daryl, who found them fallen Off the Back of a Truck, as the delightful last selection is titled. These essays are fresh, funny, and eager to be loved.

We hope you like our recommendation, and that you have a fabulous and adventurous summer that includes a visit to The Rose Hotel. Just click on the Home link at the top of this page to make your plans.

We’re looking forward pouring you a few glasses of our finest wine selections.

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