Ahhhhh, summer.

Time for splashing in swimming holes, long rides down country roads with the radio blasting, and — perhaps most importantly — digging into a good book.

Summer reading lists are a popular American phenomenon. And we happen to live in a rather well-read community (give yourself a pat on the back, Mankato.)

So in the interest of sharing our best with you, I combed my beat for book recommendations, and have gathered a rather impressive list that I shall now pass along.

Ellen Mrja, faculty, Minnesota State University

The best book I’ve read this summer is Pulitzer Prize winner “Olive Kitteridge,” by Elizabeth Strout. This is a collection of short stories about the lives of people in a small town in Maine. The only thing they have in common is that at some point in their stories the retired schoolteacher named Olive Kitteridge is going to appear — sometimes to do something large, sometimes to barely brush their lives.

At times, then, we see Olive as compassionate, bigoted, cruel, heartbreakingly lonely, a busybody. But she’s always human. I teared up as I read her story. We schoolteachers ... so misunderstood.

Nicole Helget, local author and faculty at MSU

I actually read this a month ago or so, but I loved “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” by Junot Diaz, which won the Pulitzer, I think. Diaz is testing new literary approaches, and the tales of Trujillo’s dastardly reign in the Dominican Republic are insightful. I’m always a sucker for the fictional/political genre (is that a genre?), and this one’s as good as “In the Time of Butterflies,” another good novel about Trujillo lusting after everyone’s daughters and killing everyone around him.

Karen Wright of MSU’s KMSU 89.7 FM

I just finished reading a great medical thriller guaranteed to make you buy bottles of antiseptic hand cleaner, cover your cough and practice meticulous hand washing procedures!

It’s called “Pandemic,” by Daniel Kalla, a Vancouver Emergency Room physician who began writing novels after his experience in dealing with the SARS outbreak. Written several years ago, it was just re-released. Pandemic describes a “fictitious” H1N1 virus outbreak that cuts too close to home now as health officials recently debated whether to declare a pandemic with the latest global flu outbreak. However, the outbreak in the book was purposely spread by terrorists.