This week’s What We’re Reading, is really a “What We Will Be Reading” over the long holiday weekend. Hazel and I will be lounging on a dock up at our family’s lake cabin complete with so-tacky-they’re-cute plastic cups with fishing lures on them, a fire pit, and, of course, a pile of books. I couldn’t be more excited. Here’s what I will be reading this Fourth of July weekend. What books will you be slinging along in your beach tote?

My meaty book will be The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, published by Coffee House Press. Yang tells her family’s immigration journey from a refugee camp in Thailand to St. Paul, MN. This book has been getting great press lately and has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for a few months now.

For a taste of poetry, I recently found a little volume of poems by Eugenio Montale at Half Price Books called Motetti: Poems of Love. Translated and introduced by Dana Gioia, and published by local Graywolf Press, the book alternates pages of Italian and English, which excites this rusty almost-Italian minor.

For the obligatory beach-side magazine, I’ll be catching up on the June issue of The Believer which I haven’t cracked yet (whoops!). The perfect magazine for a well-rounded literary sort.

And what about that “trashy” summer novel? Mine isn’t trashy, but it’s a light, fun read. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is playful novel I’ve read countless times over the years about a community on a made-up island who take their letters very seriously. With an overzealous government outlawing the use certain letters, our heroine Ella Minnow Pea leads this alphabet-crazed, tongue-tied adventure.

Enjoy you Fourth of July weekend, and tell me what you’re reading!