Alan Cheuse's Annual Summer Reading List
Reviewer Picks 'Big Fat Novels,' Short Story Collections

Listen to Alan Cheuse's picks for summer reading.

Photo courtesy Alfred A. Knopf

Photo courtesy Scribner

Photo courtesy Doubleday

June 17, 2002 -- A long hot summer and a big fat novel -- the two things just go together, says All Things Considered book reviewer Alan Cheuse. Every year about this time, Cheuse offers his recommendations for the summer reading season. And this year, says Cheuse, "I'm going to recommend some big books that make entire worlds come to life -- books that make time, as it goes by, stand still."

• The Sweetest Dream, by Doris Lessing (HarperCollins, February 2002).
Cheuse says Lessing's latest is a "no-frills portrait of a London group house, run by a generous, long-suffering woman with a deep emotional life."

• The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter (Alfred A. Knopf, June 2002).
Cheuse says Carter's first novel, a family thriller set in New England and Washington D.C., takes the reader into the world of the "darker nation," as Talcot Garland, the lawyer narrator, calls the African-American middle class.

• Unless, by Carol Shields (Fourth Estate, April 2002).
Carol Shields' new slender novel is "a tug of hearts between mother and wayward daughter," Cheuse says. The novel is set in Canada.

• The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Books, March 2002).
Cheuse recommends Robinson's latest book to fans of history and science fiction. "Imagine…the Bubonic plague wipes out most of Europe's population, leaving America to be discovered and developed by the Arabs on one shore and the Chinese on another."

• Blues Lessons, by Robert Hellenga (Scribner, December 2001).
Cheuse describes Hellenga's novel as "a story about a young Michigan white boy growing up into a world of racial confusion, guided in his heart by the blues music he loves so well."

• A Multitude of Sins: Stories, by Richard Ford (Alfred A. Knopf, February 2002).
"If you're looking for a good short story collection to carry with you," Cheuse recommends this volume by Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford.

• At the Jim Bridger, by Ron Carlson (Picador USA, May 2002).
Cheuse calls Bridger's collection of stories a "sweet and adventurous new collection." Included in this collection is the short story, "Single Woman for Long Walks on the Beach."

• Disappearing Ingenue: The Misadventures of Eleanor Stoddard, By Melissa Pritchard (Doubleday, May 2002).
Cheuse calls Pritchard's collection of linked short stories "dreamy and delightful."

• Batavia's Graveyard, by Mike Dash (Crown Publishers, February 2002).
For readers wanting non-fiction, Cheuse says this book set in the 17th century and written by British journalist Dash has it all: "Mutineers and a shipwreck and Dutch religious heretics turned murderers."

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