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.