Really, this should be titled “ What I Read on My Summer Vacation” ; what I’ m mostly reading these days is student papers. I cram in as much uninterrupted good reading as possible every summer, and here’ s a selection from this past summer.

Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey

Cheever’ s short fiction is glorious, but his life was less than happy. Bailey’ s exhaustive 800-page biography goes into that life in excruciating detail: Cheever’ s drinking, his struggles with his sexuality, and the multiple losses and humiliations brought on by both. Bailey genuinely seems to like and respect his subject, but he doesn’t spare him, and by the end I felt as if I were being beaten. Still, for anyone who wants a complete picture of Cheever’ s life, this is an indispensable work.

The Stories of John Cheever

The big red book contains all of the stories published in five of Cheever’ s six collections of short fiction, plus a handful of uncollected stories. (Cheever hated his first collection, The Way Some People Live, never allowed stories from it to be reprinted, and destroyed any copies he could get his hands on. I’ve read a library copy and the luminous Cheever voice isn’t there yet: it’ s a perfectly competent and forgettable collection.) After reading the Bailey biography I wanted to reread Cheever’ s short stories in the order they were originally published, somewhat different than the way they were arranged in the Collected. Read in its original order, I thought Cheever’ s most consistently strong work to be in the first two collections, The Enormous Radio and The Housebreaker of Shady Hill. Of course, Cheever is also a great read to accompany the AMC television series Mad Men, which covers the same milieu and has paid homage to Cheever’ s writing by setting Don and Betty Draper’ s home in Ossining, where Cheever spent much of his life, and on Bullet Park Road, a fictional street named after a Cheever novel.

Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

I love big-picture theories, and Diamond takes on everything from human migration causing the extinction of large mammals in South America, to the axes of the continents affecting the spread of agriculture, to why the Spanish conquered the Incas and not vice versa. The material on the domestication of plants and animals is fantastic, and the first half of the book in particular is stunning in scope and ambition. Diamond’ s work reminded me of the writing of his fellow Pulitzer Prize winner Jonathan Weiner, whose The Beak of the Finch also makes one see the world as a whole in an entirely new light.

Driftless by David Rhodes

Rhodes published three highly regarded novels in the early 1970s, was paralyzed from the chest down in a motorcycle accident, and disappeared from the literary world until Milkweed editor Ben Barnhart tracked him down in a small town in Wisconsin. Barnhart’s acquisition of Driftless is in itself a great story, but Driftless is an even greater novel: Rhodes’ ambition is no less than to capture a small town in all its variety and nuance. He succeeds admirably, and he writes with a Chekhovian lack of sentimentality toward his characters.

John Reimringer’s first novel, Vestments, is a Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week/Starred Review, and an IndieNext and Midwest Connections pick. Buy it here.