Summer Reading

Well, we are well into summer and my reading list is shaping up. People ask me how I can read when I live at a nudist resort and I've always thought that was like asking me how I could eat or breathe because I live here.

Reading and writing and thinking about things are so much a part of who I am that I think I would go nuts(er) if I had to stop. Now, that doesn't mean that I have more than one eye on the book (I have my right one trained for that), or that it doesn't take me a couple of extra days to finish a book -- but I am still drawn to good books like a moth to a flame. Good conversation has that affect on me, too.

We have people from all cross-sections of life here. Literally. Doctors and lawyers, auto mechanics, policemen and firemen, teachers, bookkeepers, telephone operators, nurses, retired military, and truck drivers. Just to mention a few. And I have different kinds of conversations with every one of them; ranging from professional and technical to humorous to political and religious to highly personal.

One of the sub-groupings of these people are my literary friends. I know. Again, you are thinking, "You live at a nudist resort and spend your days reading and talking about books?" This is the point where you want to slap me up side of the head and say, "Focus!"

Trust me, after a while, it's all about the people and not their skin. I mean, how many times can I marvel at the juxtaposition of naked twenty-somethings and sixty-somethings freely socializing? (They'd probably never even talk to each other outside of here.) Or if my ass is going to sag like that in a few years? Or what an interesting place for a tattoo. Eventually, it's about people and personalities and friendships.

So, yes, it is perfectly normal to be able to live at a nudist resort and have literary friends and discussions. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Oh, I almost forgot. Check out some of these books this summer:

• The Hard Way by Lee Child
• The Cold Moon by Jeffery Deaver
• The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
• Death Watch by John Sandford
• anything by Cormac McCarthy
• anything by James Carlos Blake
• Thunder of Time by James F. David
• Lemons Never Lie by Richard Stark
• Pegasus Descending by James Lee Burke
• White Sister by Stephen J. Cannell
• The Afghan Campaign by Steven Pressfield
• The Burning by Bentley Little
• anything by William Faulkner
• anything by Joe Lansdale
• anything by Jim Thompson