First the credible choice, the suck-you-in-and-steal-your-Saturday choice, a book I ADORED for the first half, and liked for the second half and you should all pick up for your summer reading stack:

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is a book about baseball and college and love, and like all the best books, it’s about a dozen things more. And the idea of having to explain the merit of the books I read makes me not want to post book reviews here, because I know writers. They all have Google alerts on their names, and they read every sentence written about them. As a writer-type myself, that’s a dark hole of stress, writing for people I admire all the time.

So I’ll tell you this: I started The Art of Fielding on Friday afternoon, finished it Saturday afternoon, and it’s 512 pages long. This is Harbach’s first book. He spent nine moneyless years writing. Read more about him here. The NYTimes review is here.

Book number two is from Daniel Handler and artist Maira Kalman, and a volume you don’t read as much as sigh through, and pretend you’re in the 8th grade, heartbroken. (For that, it is almost certainly the perfect summer book.).

Why We Broke Up is a novel — one long breakup letter illustrated by Kalman. You’ll love it. And then you’ll want to tear out all the pretty illustrations and frame them for your wall. (New York Times review is here.)

Buy it here.

Also, it’s technically for teenagers, which made me love it all the more.

What’s on your summer reading list? Seriously — I’d love to know. My stash is looking sparse. I like books that suck you in and won’t let go til you’ve finished. And then the sentences still dance around your head.

My Grandpa had his first kiss at Phoenix’s Union Station. He was a soldier, getting on a train and headed to war. The girl he kissed became my Granna. They were married for 67 years. I was curious about this old train station, which I was surprised to find still standing — and even more surprised and delighted to find a special kind of story within.

From Sunday’s paper, read The Spirit of Union Station here. Photos by Michael McNamara.

Thanks as ever to Michael McNamara for the gorgeous and spooky photos.

And thanks to Fred, for existing — or, not.

(You’ll want to read the story to learn more.)

I have a writer friend with whom I like to close down restaurants. Once, I sat with him in a cafe for three hours and did nothing but drink a glass of water. He teased me, after — but it’s also the slowest I’ve ever seen a person drink a cup of a tea.

I’m celebrating something — a thing only another writer can understand, and this weekend, when we were the second-to-last people to leave another restaurant, he brought me a celebratory gift: a book of Kerouac’s advice for sentences and general human existence.

He has a copy, he explained, and the pages are starting to get wrinkled.

Genius treasure friend.

(Post title from one of my favorite Kerouac lines, which I have framed in giant proportion at home.)

A tough assignment: a year after the Tucson shootings, what is left to say? Some victims talk. Some still can’t, or don’t think they should. The words about Tucson are sputtering, halting, choking. Talk, some hope, can heal them.

I listened to all they had to say, and my story on the Jan. 8 anniversary is here. It’s a story about all the words of this year.

Photo by Pat Shannahan/The Arizona Republic

A favorite story from 2011:

Bucks and Buxom

It is a spectacular 10-point rack – a state-record set of antlers, even – but some of the points are interfering with a green bra and the model within.

“It’s a hard rack to shoot,” Scottsdale photographer Sal Corbo says as he ponders his tableau. The bra and its contents have got to fit between the antlers, and one of these things is larger than the other. “It’s just so narrow, and she’s got so many curves. I don’t want to cover them up.”

“Hold the rack up a little bit,” he calls from behind his camera, and the model scoots the antlers higher on her body.

“It was better to the left,” he says. She shifts the points across her decolletage.