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Summer Books

 For the record, my sense is that the book of the summer is Katherine Heiny's "Early Morning Riser." In the past couple of months, I haven't read a better new novel. Heiny's book helped me lose my sense of time passing, for a while, and I still think about it.

It's a book in which things actually happen: someone is jilted at the altar, thefts occur, a random death occurs, adultery is contemplated. The characters--including a carping, damaged retiree, a new version of John Steinbeck's "Lenny," a grifter, an anxious second grader--stay with you. I especially like the music teacher, who brings her mandolin to all social events, and weaves passive-aggressive real-time commentary into the songs she improvises (quietly, on the margins).

But I'm also excited about:

*"Dream Girl" (Laura Lippman)
*"What Happened to Paula" (Dykstra)
*"Billy Summers" (Stephen King)
*"The Turnout" (Megan Abbott)
*"Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story" (Brown)

And you? Recommendations welcome....
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