Dethtron's Summer Reading List

Summer is basically here for me, since I wasn't able to get into the database management class I was hoping to take for Summer Session 2.
To celebrate I baked a cake (not lying, and it was delicious considering I suck at baking). Then I went to my favorite local used bookstore and loaded up for the summer. $30 bucks later and I've got a stack of summer fun to wade through. I know that Kennedy already has the market cornered on book reviews, but I just wanted to share my hyper-eclectic list with everyone.

So in no particular order here is the list:

• Philip K. Dick "Radio Free Albemuth"
• Philip K. Dick "The Zap Gun" - Those two will be somewhere towards the end of the summer as I'm currently about 100 pages away from finishing the entire PKD American Library set (15 of his best novels) and am needing to take a slight break from the Dick.
• Jonathan Ames "What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer" Non-fiction collection of essays and diary entries from a great modern satirist. If PG Wodehouse had a coke problem this is how he would have written
• Chuck Palahniuk "Fight Club" At almost 30 years old I'm ashamed to admit that I still haven't read this in spite of having read most of his other novels. Oops
• Franz Kafka "Das Urteil"- a collection of short stories and novellas. I've read a lot of them in here that I'll be skipping (I swear to god if I ever have to read "Die Verwandlung" again...), but it had one short story in particular that I've been looking for (thanks to JM Coetze citing it non-stop in one of his recent novels) "Ein Bericht fuer eine Akademie." My understanding is that it's about a talking monkey giving a university lecture. Can you smell the satire? It's also got "In der Strafkolonie" in it, which I only had as a Xeroxed handout that got ruined in a basement flood. I've been wanting to re-read that for a while now- getting original language texts in the US without paying through the nose is hard yo.
• Herman Melville "Pierre or the Ambiguities" Yeah the Moby Dick guy. One of my least favorite authors ever ("Billy Budd" is a pretty good read, though. Especially if you're a law student). In fact he's up there on my author's I'd like to go back in time to kill list at about the same rank as Hemmingway (Fuck Hemmingway- fucking one trick pony piece of shit...I would go drink Pernod in Spain and then kill him the the rain). But anyway a good friend who will soon be a Dr. of English Literature (is operating on books that difficult?) told me that if I hate Melville I will love this. It's apparently completely insane and is full of incest and other depravities. Good times, I hope his assessment is correct, because this novel is long.
• Friedrich Duerrenmatt "Das Versprechen" A fairly well known German mystery novel. I don't know much about it, but here is what attracted me to it- it looks like a light/easy read which I need as my German is a tad bit rusty, it's pretty short, and it only cost me $2 in a mint condition hardcover. Why not?
• David Ferring "Konrad" Old school black library WFB novel from the late 80s. We'll see. After the heaviness of the rest of my list I needed some crap fantasy or sci-fi to decompress with.

What are you crazy cats reading this summer?