The Books, Movies, and Music of Summer

Vic’s Summertime Picks

Movie – The Great Gatsby

My favorite summer movie so far has been The Great Gatsby, another favorite book of mine. I thought the adaptation was tasteful, and I enjoyed Baz Luhrmann’s ability to put together a film that was both visually striking and faithful to the book.

I also look forward to seeing Anchorman 2: The Legend continues. I have to make sure my funny bone isn’t broken. Its usefulness, the funny bone that is, is too often overlooked.

Music – Camper von Beethoven

My musical tastes are a smorgasbord of genre bending indecision. I’m going to invent Punk Rock-Disco-Jazz-Indie-Folk as a genre someday. I’ve been listening to a lot of Sublime, Guster, Camper Van Beethoven—they’re back together by the way, and I’ve been discovering Jazz tunes all over the place.

The Great Gatsby and Invisible Man have had an influence on my desire to learn more about Jazz, even though I’m such a novice when it comes to this genre.

Book – The Invisible Man

Even though I’ve been chided for coveting a book that so frequently appears on high school reading lists, I take great pleasure in coming to the book’s defense. J.D. Salinger’s, The Catcher in the Rye has been and will be forever my favorite book. The reason is simple. It was the first book to make me fall in love with reading. I owe a great debt to Salinger for that book.

After a long love affair with books, I’ve tread many pages, walking in the shoes of character upon character of several authors’ creation. Thankfully, this summer has been full of happy reading.

So far, I’ve read The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck; Doubled Shadows, by Ouyang Jianghe; Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut; Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke, and I’m currently rereading Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. I have found them all tremendous in their own right.