by Olivia Scott // Georgetown University

If you can’t remember the last time you laughed while reading something other than The Onion, Kurt Vonnegut’s “A Man Without a Country” is the cure. Published just two years before the author’s death, the 140-page almost-memoir delivers the irreverent and insightful revelations of a man who had long since stopped caring about public opinion. Complete with original drawings and instructions on how to live, it almost seems as if the ecentric Vonnegut is talking directly to the college-aged youth of the nation.   
For the intellectual showoffs out there (hint: you yell out all the answers to “Jeopardy!” even if no one's in the room), take a look at what happens when A.J. Jacobs endeavors to read the whole encyclopedia. Formatted as mock entries from A-Z, “The Know-it-All” chronicles Jacobs’ year spent reading all 32 volumes of the 2002 Encyclopaedia Britannica (that's 33,000 pages) and his attempts to make good on his new knowledge in social and competitive settings.” A quick spoiler: turns out being academically arrogant has its pitfalls. Jacobs did a similar stunt a few years later when he wrote "The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.”

And if summer to you means baseball, check out Will Leitch’s “God Save the Fan.” After several years as a sports writer, Leitch became disillusioned with the current state of sports media (he compares ESPN to the Imperial Forces from “Star Wars”). In 2005 he created Deadspin.com, a blog run by Gawker media that’s designed to give true sports fans the news they want, without the corporate media angle. The same witty voice that has made Deadspin so popular also lights up this book, which is all new material and took Leitch only five months to write.