The sky is sooty and although the day is young, it has a quiet feel with a single bird song interrupting at regular intervals. I’ve been trying to remember what we did on Memorial Day when I was a girl. I remember elderly veterans standing outside grocery stores selling red poppies. Thinking back, these men must have veterans of the World War I, and when I recall the day, it’s linked with crepey skin and shaking hands. No one in my family ever died in the service although one of my uncles served as did my brother and cousin.

Yesterday I drove past a nearby pioneer cemetery and noticed that it was being spruced up for visitors and it was dotted with fresh bouquets. I talked with my cousin yesterday who stills lives in the small town where I grew up and some family members are going to the cemetery to visit my grandmother’s grave.

And now on NPR they’re running a brief story about Les Fleurs de la Memoire, or Flowers of Memory. This is a group of French citizens who have adopted the graves of American soldiers killed during the D Day operation. The cemetery contains the remains of 10,000 soldiers and every time I’ve seen photographs of this place, the crosses and Stars of David that mark each grave seem to stretch forever.

Living far from most of my family, I have no graves to visit, but I’ve been thinking about all the young lives that ended in battle. Thinking about how all these men and women had plans and dreams and a destiny that were erased. And I wonder what constituted the first war, the first battle in the history of humankind. Was it a skirmish over a hunting ground or a kidnapping?

When I think back it seems that Memorial Day was often the first picnic of the summer and that it marked the end of spring and the emergence of summer. Back then school was usually over around Memorial Day so it always represented the freedom of summer days stretching ahead, full of promise.

These days besides remembering the dead from war, this weekend also signifies summer reading. At the NPR website you can find a list of books recommended by independent bookseller and you can also read excerpts from the books. The link is: http://www.npr.orghttp://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90478802

And the books are: City of Thieves, by David Benioff, Now You See Him, by Eli Gottlieb, The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry, Trauma, by Patrick McGrath, Wrack & Ruin, by Don Lee, America America, by Ethan Canin, What Happened to Anna K., by Irina Reyn, The Prince of Frogtown, by Rick Bragg, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenide, Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, Today: 101 Ghazals, by Suzanne Gardinier, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, by Vendela Vida, The Story of a Marriage, by Andrew Sean Greer

At salon.com you can also find their Summer Reads article with suggestions for thrillers: Hold Tight by Harlan Coben, The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber, Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, Obedience by Will Lavender, Losing You by Nicci French

Blue is appearing between puffy cumulus clouds and warmer weather is promised after a dreary, drizzly Sunday.

Summer is the second busiest season in the book publishing biz because it is when publishers bring out titles that they’ll hope you’ll pack in your beach bag and suitcase. I’m still compiling a pile of novels for my annual vacation at the Oregon Coast not to mention a stack for evenings spent on my patio, awaiting a cooling breeze. My main qualification for a summer read is that it’s utterly engrossing and allows me to surrender to the torpor of a sun-drenched world. Since I won’t be traveling to Paris or Provence, I need books to whisk me to other worlds, other lives.

In the past summer reads were supposed to be as substantial as cotton candy, but in recent years that trend has changed and literary novels and books by new authors woven around weighty concepts and themes are also making an appearance in book stores. So books by Annie Dillard, Ian McQuen, Amy Bloom Michael Ondaatje, and Ian McEwan are going to nestle in the stores along with the new titles by Janet Evanovich and Dan Brown, not to mention the final Harry Potter book. Summer is also a time to release memoirs and biography and this season includes Peeling the Onion by Günter Grass and Circling My Mother by Mary Gordon. Summer releases also include scholarly tomes such as Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005 by J.M. Coetzee, and Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolin.

This weekend after finishing up another chapter in my Bad Guys book and hosting a baby shower for a friend, I’m reading the third book in Nancy Martin’s Blackbird Sisters series, Some Like it Lethal. Part chick lit, part romp, the story takes place amid Philadelphia high society and settles me among people I’ll never meet in real life. Martin is one of those writers who make her stories look easy, but if you look closer at her scenes, you’ll notice just the right dose of details to make you believe in the story world and the gaggle of characters and murder suspects.

In case you’ve missed it, for the past month the staff at salon.com has made suggestions for summer reads that won’t leave your feeling cheap and empty. In the fourth part of the series they’ve focused on mysteries, a crowded genre and offer up reviews of these books: Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, Mr. Dixon Disappears by Ian Sansom, Up in Honey's Room by Elmore Leonard, Body of Lies by David Ignatius, Body of Lies by David Ignatius, and The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper. You can find these reviews at http://salon.com/books/feature/2007/0607/Summer_reads

Happy reading and writing to all.

The sky is mostly blue this morning as if making an effort to push away the clouds. I’m pouring my second cup of Earl Gray tea and making my daily to-do list and thinking about the chapter I’m working on and the issues that need addressing in a client’s manuscript.

One thing I love about this time of year is how all the experts and book pundits weigh in in on books to read during the sweet days of summer. This morning on NPR’s Morning Edition show they featured a segment on reads chosen by independent booksellers. For the complete story go to npr.org, but in the meantime, here is the list: Soon I Will be Invincible by Austin Grossman, Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje, Bangkok Haunts, by John Burdett, In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin, The Accidental Touris by, Ann Tyler, Five Skies by Ron Carlson, The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy, Anagrams, by Lorrie Moore, The Children's Hospital, by Chris Adrian, At Large and At Small, by Anne Fadiman, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, Devotion, by Howard Norman, Finn, by Jon Clinch, Knots, by Nuruddin Farah, On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan. Doesn’t this sound like a delicious line up?

The NPR site includes excerpts from the books and short reviews. Also, at salon.com each Monday in June, beginning with June 4, there is a list of summer reads. I realize that summer is equated with reading because when vacations mean time to lie on a beach with a fat novel. I like reading in any season, but in summer I sit on my small patio, sipping wine or iced tea, listening to the birds go about their business in birddom, looking up from time to time with the satisfied gaze of a gardener at my various pots of blooms…..ah summer. Let’s all read more.