Hot Summer Reads

Let's face it, summer reading has become a fashion statement, a vacationer's fetish, a marketer's dream. Sun lotion and Tuscan sun. Whole families, assiduously armed with hot paperbacks. Please, Oprah, please put my book on the beach!

And yet, when the marketing din has gone by, and the afternoons are long, and there's a beach, or a breeze, or a porch swing, how many of us long to get lost in the middle of a great book — or a potboiler — and feel the summertime slow to the soft turn of pages.

This hour On Point: great readers on great summer reads 2007.

Guests:

Oscar Villalon, book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle

Vivien Jenkins, owner of Rainy Day Books in Kansas

Liesl Schillinger, regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.