Summer reading, is there anything better?

I’m up early this morning to head to Carolina Beach State Park where researchers are banding painted buntings to track them. It’s all research for the novel, baby!

We’re leaving tomorrow to head to the mountains for nine days of real family vacation (not the kind of vacation where I get invited to speak or teach a workshop and I drag my family along for a free hotel experience). As I always do when we travel, I’m a little panicked about what to take with me to read, so I’ve spent the last few days gathering things from my TBR pile. I’ll probably take ten books. I might only finish two during the trip, but I need the peace of knowing the others are there just in case. This semester I’m teaching a course in North Carolina literature at UNCA, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading for that class. I’ll post the reading list and syllabus here soon.

In the meantime, enjoy this New York Times photo essay of folks doing what I hope to be doing for the next week: “Reading Outside.”