We couldn't help but get a little excited when we read that Reading is Fundamental is visiting more than 40 D.C. public and charter schools this week to distribute 15,000 new books in an effort to promote good summer reading habits among children. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Summer Learning, the two-month summer break often results in a learning slide among children, especially those from low-income households.

Here at DCist, we are all about promoting reading. You're not looking at our site for just the pretty pictures, right? So the staff decided to compile a summer reading list of our own -- we suppose, in hopes that when a child walks through Dupont Circle where a loyal DCist reader is sitting by the fountain with one of our recommendations, they'll think twice about writing off books as some educational requirement. Reading is cool, kids.

Photo by jsmjr.

DCist's Summer 2007 Reading List

>> The movie adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is due out later this year and should draw some well deserved attention to the great young adult fantasy novel. Get ahead of the crowd and read the first and arguably best entry in Pullman's His Dark Materials saga before the hype kicks in. Pullman's universe is perhaps not as rich in detail as J.R.R. Tolkien's, and his characters lack the same accessibility as J.K. Rowling's, but the series is unique for its fascinating and non-condescending approach to its young audience. Whether it is the credible treatment it gives to romantic love between pre-teens or its eviscerating take on religion, Pullman's perspective is a unique one, and his adventures are worth exploring for anyone who used to love (and still does) A Wrinkle In Time, The Dark Is Rising, etc. Plus, there are cool polar bears.

>> Cormac McCarthy's The Road was in Oprah's Book Club, but don't let that fool you -- it's not Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. It's a story about a father and his son walking through some kind of post-apocalyptic America. It's not particularly happy, but the Pulitzer Prize winner is a fast and engrossing read with lots of vivid imagery. Plus, it might just be the only book about cannibals to ever win something as distinguished as the Pulitzer.

>> We weren't sure what to expect from Andrea Levy's Small Island. The book -- which has won several awards, including the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year -- sounds like a dry character piece about a married Jamaican couple trying to adjust to life in London post-World War II. But Levy creates rich and detailed characters by slowly revealing their back-stories through a series of fascinating flashbacks, which range from humorous to terrifying. It's no surprise that blatant racism plays a big part in America's history (and American soldiers are not portrayed kindly in this novel), but Small Island exposes a different kind of racism that was prevalent in England after the war -- an underlying hatred that smiles at you while it stabs you in the back. Small Island should be required reading for high school students, so future generations don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

>> What's good beach reading without a little war torn nihilism? Though we're about 70 years behind, we look forward to reading Eric Remarque's Three Comrades (Drei Kameraden), which was the inspiration for The Deer Hunter, the disturbing 1978 Christopher Walken film.

>> For those who haven't delved into magical realism yet, there is nothing better on a hot summer day. We highly recommend getting entangled in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, a tale of a fictional Colombian town and its inhabitants over a century. We're also set on reading Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, a postmodern road-trip book, and Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, which is rumored to be his best book since Gravity's Rainbow. In typical Pynchon fashion, the story includes a cast of over 100 characters and is apparently exhausting to get through, which anyone with masochistic reading tendencies will enjoy. While the story takes place during World War I, this is what Pynchon has to say about his novel: "With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred."

>> With an inevitable film adaptation looming on the horizon, one might be inclined to skip reading Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife in favor of waiting for Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams to take the screen as star-crossed lovers carrying out a relationship despite his annoying tendency to go time traveling at inopportune moments. One would be missing out. Niffenegger's novel is richly detailed and consistently heartbreaking. The book casts aside genre conventions, a romance for people who can't stand maudlin love stories, science fiction for those who hate spaceships, a slightly fantastic and deeply moving look at love and destiny.

>> If you prefer your summer reading to be a little less tear inducing, but no less thought provoking, there's Max Brooks' World War Z. The author of the tongue in cheek Zombie Survival Guide has imagined an oral history of the aftermath of a worldwide zombie catastrophe that is, like any good zombie story, a thinly masked social critique, in this case attacking everything from the Bush administration to corporate America. But Brooks never sacrifices storytelling for sermonizing, which is all the more surprising considering how his eyes never waver from his intended targets.

If DCist's reading list isn't enough to quench your literary thirst, Busboys and Poets is holding the Last Chapter Closing Event of D.C.'s Big Read, presented by the Humanities Council of Washington, D.C., and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. The May 19 event, which begins at 8 p.m., celebrates the monthlong city read of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Also check out our Reader, Meet Author column for other recommendations and events in the city. And of course, leave us your own reading list in the comments.

Missy Frederick, Andrew Wiseman, Jeffrey Beam, EK Eckert and Ian Buckwalter contributed to this post.