This year's summer reading list

Every summer I spend a lot of time reading outside, with the heat and the flowers and the birds and bugs. The kind of books I save for summer are those set in warm climates, rich with sensory details - the best kind of escapism, for me. I figure this year I'll need more of that than ever. So, here's my tentative list of "sun books" for 2009:

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf by John Muir (reread - I'm inspired by that TV series, Appalachia: A History, which kept quoting from it)

The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay (reread)

Maybe Sindh Revisited by Christopher Ondaatje, his tribute to Sir Richard Burton's travels in Pakistan and India (reread)

Ancient Rome on 5 Denarii a Day

Maybe Travelers in Disguise, which consists of the travel narratives of two Renaissance-era Italians who visited India

And then I've got a yearning for ancient Greek novels, which I hope are as trashy as I'm imagining them to be. So far I've got Callirhoe, and if that's fun, there will be others.

I might also read something by Shashi Tharoor, one of India's leading public intellectuals and incidentally, a very good-looking man.

These are just guidelines, to inspire me when I'm plugging away at work, and subject to change at a whim. Last year's list was mostly disregarded in favor of the No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels, and the year before that I ended up immersed in India travelogues.