Now that the hottest of all seasons is approaching, the healthier minded will finally have the time to knock out a novel or twelve (if you are like me and have aspirations of conquering a book per week). I guess you could read Harry Potter again, or perhaps that new Janet Evanovich mystery, but let’s face it, you’re probably tired of reading the same mindless genre-driven door-stoppers by now. If you are on the search for a unique voice in literature, the following novels might pique your intellectual interest.

For fans of author JD Salinger and filmmaker Wes Anderson, The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen, will surely tickle your intellectual fancy. Larsen weaves a tale of the 12-year-old mapmaking prodigy TS Spivet and his musings on the world around him.

The next book finally brings my two favorite genres together: romantic comedy and zombie horror. Pride and Prejudice…And Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance-Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem by Seth Grahame-Smith (with some help by Jane Austen) brings together the romantic sensibilities of Austen and smashes it in the face with the unadulterated gore of George A. Romero. Many have already made the comparison to Shaun of the Dead, so I won’t even mention Shaun of the Dead in this article.

For the more nihilistic among us, I offer up Chuck Palahniuk’s 10th novel, Pygmy. Palahniuk’s newest novel tells the tale of a totalitarian state that trains adolescents to be undercover spies to infiltrate America as foreign exchange students.

Since the summer is coming up quickly, it may finally be time to read that classic novel we all wish we had the time (and the stamina) to conquer. For my money, I’ll bet very few of us have actually read Victor Hugo’s Les Miserable. This 1400+ page classic French epic set during the early 1800s tells the story of unjustly imprisoned Jean Veljian and the police detective, Javert, who haunts his every step.

And for those looking for a true-life tale, the biography, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin, might just hit the spot. This masterful biography is a seventeen years in the making epic rags to riches life story of one of literatures greatest minds.