Summer's here and that means it's time for a few things: Working on your hillbilly tan, revising your popsicle-run map on your favorite GPS-enabled touch device, and brushing up on those sassy page-turners — books!

To help turn the heat up on the year's hottest reading season, we asked our good friend Joanna Angel, the woman responsible for revolutionizing the porn industry by creating alt-porn and a lady whose book selections have never steered us wrong, to curate a reading list. Angel, who also has a guest appearance in an upcoming episode of Childrens Hospital (new episodes every Thursday night at midnight, E/P), was kind enough to offer some suggestions for all you latchkey kids out there who are home all summer with nothing to read!

Lush Life

By Richard Price
480 pages; Picador
Available at: Amazon.com

It takes place in the Lower East Side in New York City, and I always like reading books about New York City. [Laughs.] It's a novel. I didn't even expect the book to go where it did, but it just starts off with a bartender and a friend out drinking. It starts as a book that you think is gonna be about hanging out, drinking, one of those books about New York. But on their way home from the bar they get murdered, and it's a murder that mimics the murder of an actual actress. I didn't even know she was real, which I was embarrassed by. I thought it was all fiction. There's an actual actress, her name is Nicole duFresne. She was murdered in that same exact spot and she was murdered in the same way.

“She was murdered in that same exact spot and she was murdered in the same way.”

It's sort of a detective story: They think they found who did it, then it turns out it's the wrong guy. It's really good. It's kinda weird, but not your typical detective story.

Why do you like reading books about New York so much?

I don't know. I lived there for a while, I still kinda consider myself a New Yorker even though I don't live there full time. I go back from time to time. I spend a lot of time there and I lived there full-time a couple years ago, and I grew up in New Jersey, so I went there all the time. I actually was really upset when I first had to move to LA because literally all I ever wanted to do since I was 10 years-old was live in New York. [Laughs.] I remember going with my dad to work when I was younger and he would take me to the West Village or the East Village and I'd walk around while he was at work. Afterward, he'd take me back in the summertime and stuff. I remember thinking when I was younger, "I don't care what I do when I grow up. I just want it to be something in New York." [Laughs.]

“I remember thinking when I was younger, ‘I don't care what I do when I grow up. I just want it to be something in New York.’”

LES Tour with Richard Price

When I was in high school I used to take the bus that was near my house and go into the city to go shopping and go see bands play. I always really loved it. I finally moved to New York City and had to move to LA two years later. I was really upset at first. I go back and forth now, it's okay, and I've gotten a little more comfortable in LA.

But books about New York talk about certain places, and I can envision them so well. New York has a very fast-paced way of life, and I feel like every time I read a book about New York it's fast-paced as well. It's a really good book. That's the thing. I'm really busy and it's really hard to read a book that's hard to get into, so I picked it up, I read it, and I kept reading it. It's a quick read. It's well-written and the language is good but it's not really heavy or anything. I liked it.

The Art Of Racing In The Rain

By Garth Stein
336 pages; Harper Paperbacks
Available at: Amazon.com

I would recommend it to everyone. This book was really interesting. It's really funny and really sad at the same time, and I learned a lot about car racing, which I actually knew nothing about before. It's a book about a race car driver and his life, but it's all told through the eyes of his dog. It's super cool. Yeah, it's really, really good. It's really well done. After I read the book I'd be walking around and whenever I'd see a dog I'd be like, "I wonder if it's thinking all the things..." You know?

The dog got to learn about race car driving and there's like a certain point in the book where he got accused of molesting this younger girl. It's pretty unfortunate. The dog was in the room, so he saw what was going on and when he saw the cops come to get him, he was trying to bark to explain, "No! That's not what really happened! I was there!" He couldn't do anything, so the dog got really frustrated. It felt really clever. It really made you think that dogs really feel that way. It was really sad but really happy at the same time.

Is there ever a point where it seems sorta weird that the dog would be around to witness stuff?

No, it totally makes sense. That's the thing. Then there's a lot of parts where the dog is not in the room because he either peed in the room or did something bad and got sent outside. He'd get really upset because he saw certain things that were going on. I tried to research if people think this is actually true: There's a part where the guy's wife has brain cancer and the dog kept smelling the wife's head. It was almost like the dog knew she had cancer before anyone else in the book did.

“It was almost like the dog knew she had cancer before anyone else in the book did.”

That is true. They did a study on it a few years ago.

Not that it actually proves it, though. You can't talk to a dog and ask, "Does this smell weird?" But it was sad in the book because he couldn't really express himself aside from rolling around and barking. [Laughs.] There were parts of the book where the dog was complaining about the toys he had, "Why would anyone think anybody would want to eat this? This is stupid. It doesn't taste good." [Laughs.]

Is it pretty much how you imagined dogs would think? Or did you not really think about it before?

I never even thought about it before, but now I fully believe that dogs have fully functioning brains. It was a really good book. I was laughing out loud as I was reading it, I was crying as I was reading it.

Skinema

By Chris Nieratko
288 pages; Vice Books
Available at: Amazon.com

I'm gonna drop my friend's book, just because it's really good. It came out a couple years ago. He's also from New Jersey. He's infamous for doing these reviews of porn movies in Vice, he's done a bunch of mine. He doesn't actually review them at all. If a movie is called Secretary Sluts, he'll tell some random story about a secretary he once had and how they got along and why he hated her. He takes something about the movie and tells a story about his life.

It's really funny. And based on that, he gives it a review. They're like porn reviews that aren't porn reviews. He actually does record reviews for my site in the same way and it's really funny because everytime he posts one up people will complain they didn't actually learn anything about the album. Once in a while he'll throw you a curve ball and actually review the record. People get really confused.

In any case, he did have a whole book of these porn reviews but they're all connected to tell a story of his life. He uses porn movies to frame a story about his life. His life was really interesting. He was a sponsored skateboarder. He worked for Hustler. He worked on a lot of skate videos. I don't know. He's a really interesting, funny guy and his book is awesome and hilarious. There's really funny pictures in there. A few of my movies are in there. I don't even remember.

There's one movie we did, *** On My Tattoo. [Laughs.] Most of our movies have one or two anal scenes in them, but this particular movie didn't have one of them. This was used in the book as a reference point as he assumed that all girls with tattoos took it in the ass all the time. He tells a particular story about a girl he had taken home one night from somewhere and she was covered in tattoos and he was really upset when she did not want to have anal sex with him. This was framed by my movie, because it's a movie with all tattooed girls and there's no anal scenes in it. So that's how he related. [Laughs.] It was really funny.

“He tells a particular story about a girl he had taken home one night from somewhere and she was covered in tattoos and he was really upset when she did not want to have anal sex with him.”

The Walking Dead

By Robert Kirkman
Ongoing series; Image Comics
Available at: Amazon.com

It's a smaller comic series. It's about zombies. [Laughs.] About a year ago my friend recommended it to me and I don't know, I think it's really good. I don't usually like zombie-comic stuff. There's so many of them a lot of them are the same. I feel like the story is actually really well-developed and the characters are really good. You really get hooked on the characters, particularly the main one. He changes a lot as the state of the zombie apocalypse changes. He changes his views and the way he reacts towards things.

A lot of times in comic books, zombies are like those neo-zombies on meth kinda. Really fast, dangerous, crazy zombies. These are slow, Night Of The Living Dead zombies and I like that. It sets the pace of the book. The main character is a sheriff and there's zombies everywhere, so he's gotta deal with it. [Laughs.]

It's just always one thing after another, isn't it?

[Laughs.] Yeah. He's got this good friend who's like his partner, and he finds out his friend made moves on his wife, so he has to deal with that. It's basically one thing after another, and you meet a lot of characters. Some die, some change. But it's a good zombie comic. I would recommend it for the summer. You can't really go wrong with that.

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