Help! Reader’s Block!

Seriously. Ayuda me!
m.snowe is in a serious rut. She’s looking for some good summer reading. She’ll be starting this in a few days, but it’s been a few months since she picked up a book at random or by suggestion, and fell in love. And m.snowe craves that serious, eat-off-the-same-utensil, rub-their-dirty-feet, throw-yourself-onto-the-subway-tracks-just-to-prove-your-ardor infatuation.
Lately, most of the books m.snowe courted have been total teases, with such promise, yet so disappointingly unsatisfying. They looked nice when you sat with them on the train, or in restaurants, or with a glass of wine on the couch. Like good on paper guys, except…they were no good on paper. So lately, she’s been going back to the old stand-bys…like this, and this, and this. Her need for satiety has driven her to almost reconsider picking up the phone and getting back with this for the third, tumultuous time.
As a rather rough-and-tumble reader/writer, m.snowe makes no show of being all pretentious-y (see how unpretentious it is, to make up fake words?), and she has no trouble admitting that she needs new books to read, that perhaps are written by authors slightly less dead, though a pulse is not necessarily a requirement for her new ventures into good reading.
So basically: Help! FYI, there is no genre or style that m.snowe won’t at least give the ol’ grad-school try. m.snowe’s favorites are varied. She just needs a story to actually care about enough to read through to the end, one that has a decided lack of narrative mediocrity. Is that so hard to find?
Oh girrrrl, you need to have torrid affair with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trust me on this one.
I enjoyed Then We Came to the End, but didn’t love it. Best book I’ve read this year (though it is a few years old) is The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
Just went on an Amazon binge and ordered all three. This is a promising start. More suggestions are welcome. Thanks!
I’m a bit slow to the summer reading list (and to your blog), but considering your amusements, your frustrations, and your reading loves, I would suggest The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. (it has nothing to do with that horrid tom cruise movie AT ALL, even if the titles are the same)
[…] m.snowe came to this book knowing absolutely nothing about it, other than it was recommended, by this dude , and the cover is quite pleasing to the […]