I’m off tomorrow to visit my parents in Atlanta for the holiday weekend. It promises to be both sweaty and relaxing. Not sure what books I’m brining with me yet. I’ve got a lot of good looking galleys sitting next to me. And of course, I’m already getting lots of stuff for the Winter—I haven’t even finished reading the Fall stuff yet. Maybe I’ll bring Denis Johnson’s new book Tree of Smoke. It’s got a rave front page review in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Or I could bring Benjamin Percy’s short story collection Refresh, Refresh and The Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story by David Treuer. Both look like excellent books from Graywolf. The possibilities seem endless.

Also, I wanted to mention how much I loved Diane Ackerman’s new book The Zookeeper’s Wife. You’re probably thinking, great, another World War II biography. People behaving heroically and all that. This is much better than that. It’s the story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw zoo, and his wife Antonina, who used the zoo as a refuge for Jews during the occupation. It reads like a novel and paints a harrowing portrait of what Warsaw must have been like during the war. I really enjoyed it and am looking foward to the her reading at my store on September 19th.

I should mention that we’ve announced our September events. It’s a stellar season. I’m most excited about Junot Diaz on September 12th and David Leavitt on September 24th. I know Mark really likes his new book Indian Summer. Perhaps I’ll bring that with me on the plane. October will bring even more great authors here to Cambridge, including Orhan Pamuk, Jim Shepard, Paul Krugman, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. It’s an amazing Fall for books.