So are any television junkies out there reading anything interesting this summer? My high school English teacher would be so proud - I have been on a Victorian literature kick the last several weeks, having just re-read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published by the youngest and perhaps least known of the three Brontė sisters, Anne, one year before her untimely death from influenza. Great novel, and of the three literary sisters, second only to her sister Emily's equally dark and controversial Wuthering Heights in my opinion. I just checked out Charlotte Brontė's Shirley from the library, and plan to read that next. Right now, per my sister's recommendation, I'm halfway through Thackeray's Vanity Fair (which I bought in Germany ten years ago and never read). I've heard college kids forced to read it as part of their syllabus decry it as "stupid," not understanding its sarcastic and satirical tone, but I find it hilarious. With its richly comical insights on society, it just goes to show that people - and human nature - do not change, and are the same today as they were 150 years ago in Victorian England. (The difference is, back then they had the grace to hide it better!)
Normally I read a lot more non-fiction and usually am in the middle of something somewhat educational or spiritually invigorating at the same time as I'm reading a piece of fiction. A friend gave me a stack of political hardbounds from a variety of pundits, but I've had no appetite for that lately. Last week I finished The Other Side of Death by Scottish Theologian J. Sidlow Baxter. The youth pastor I work with gave me Francis Chan's Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God which I'm about to delve into next. Chan is a youth pastor in Simi Valley, California, and I enjoyed hearing him speak at a national conference for youth leaders in Pittsburgh last year. (The guy's a bestselling author and all, and I recently discovered he chooses to live in a humble apartment with his family despite his means...which always leaves me with a faint feeling of self-reproach over my own desire for nice digs! [sigh])
For the beach I'm checking out one of Irish authoress Maeve Binchy's novels, best known perhaps for her made-into-feature-film Circle of Friends. That's as close to "light reading" as I'll probably get, nerd that I am 
Anybody else?