Ulysses

How obnoxious (and clichéd, with Bloomsday just past) to suggest Ulysses as your summer reading. (Hey, why don't you climb the Matterhorn while you're at it!) Well, I'll confess that I read it, years ago, with only incomplete comprehension, but one chapter has stayed with me (though in most discussion it's overshadowed by Molly's famous finale): the second-to-last, "Ithaca," in which Bloom brings Stephen home after their daylong wanderings and makes him a cup of cocoa, and they pee in the yard. Framed as a catechism's Q&A, it's sweet, poignant, wonderfully comprehensible, thoroughly hilarious, and makes whatever labors it took to get to that point worthwhile, as if you had stumbled into a cozy mountain hut after scaling an Alp.