Okay, folks, here's where you get to help me out. I need some decent books to read this summer. I will have the leisure, for the first time in a year, to give a book the time it deserves.

I would like suggestions. I tend to prefer:

- stories that are thought-provoking without being doggedly political

- speculative fiction that doesn't sound like an autistic 15-year-old wrote it

- suspense in the Dan Brown/Lincoln & Childs style

- linguistics, if presented in a social context

- sociology, anthropology

- stories that are difficult but so well-written that I don't mind, like The Poisonwood Bible or White Oleander


Books I hold dear, in case that helps you point me in the direction of new works:

- A Wrinkle In Time series

- The Earthsea Trilogy + Tehanu

- The Chronicles of Narnia

- anything Tolkien

- Ella Minnow Pea

- Thunderhead

- DaVinci Code (so sue me), Angels and Demons

- Life After God and other things by Douglas Coupland

- Citizen of the Galaxy, The City and the Stars, The End of Eternity (go, Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke!)

- crap like The Thorn Birds

Can you help out? I'm also taking movie suggestions. :) Netflix will be my companion in the evenings.