Join us every Wednesday in July and August and learn about the Decoda staff’s summer reading picks. Today Margaret Sutherland, Decoda’s Executive Director, is sharing her summer reading challenges and hopes.

I have been at a bit of a loss with my reading. World events have been so disheartening that I haven’t been able to handle anything too serious, but I don’t want my reading to be like eating a diet of cotton candy. As a librarian in Castlegar once said to me, I need something “light, but not frothy.”

Lately, I have been visiting Ireland in my reading. I have read right through Benjamin Black’s Quirke series and really enjoyed them. The noir series is set in 1950s Dublin and does a great job of taking you to another time and place. Benjamin Black is a pseudonym for John Banville, the Booker Prize winning writer. His new novel, Snow, was also very good. Right now, I am reading Tana French’s new novel The Searcher. I have read all of French’s books and enjoyed them as well.

Next, I think I will go for comic writing. I have looked at the winners and the shortlists for the past few years of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. I’m going to see what I can find. In the past, I found Nina Stibbe’s trilogy there and thought they were hilarious.

Maybe I can combine the two – Ireland and funny books – I see a Roddy Doyle novel on the list I haven’t read, Charlie Savage. I think I’ll start with that.