There was a time when summer reading lists were not such a chore, back when my town library still had funding and used it to decorate the children’s section with construction paper dragons and cardboard Harry Potters. It was a time before literary guilt set in, before I worried about tackling lists or canons, and devoured everything in my sight.

Still, even though free time gets quickly filled up these days with so many things—cold Coronas, Top Chef reruns, and, unfortunately, jobs both paid and unpaid—this summer I longed for the satisfaction of crossing completed entries off of my self-created literary curriculum. This summer was going to be different; I was going to finish my list.

It began as the summer of the short story. Back in the spring, even before finals ended, I started to stock my shelves in preparation: Wells Tower, Junot Diaz, Victoria Patterson—masters of the sinfully small, minutely detailed, and often desperately concluded genre piled up crookedly along my wall.

Admittedly, this was not the stuff of the canon. But these were shameless books, singularly real and, generally, still new. There was a courage to these writers, their words not yet tainted by the bitterness of complacency and self-importance.

Indeed, it’s been an exciting summer for reading, and it’s not yet over until September 22. Read these books quickly, before schoolwork really begins, and you may still have the makings for a list of well-measured proportions.

Wells Tower—Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (Farrar, Straus, Giroux): These are brutally funny, intensely human stories filled with accented dialogue. If you can only get through a few, try Executors of Important Energies, the story of a strange and implicit trust, and Wild America, which tackles the disappointment of family.

Victoria Patterson—Drift (Mariner): These stories are the antithesis of The O.C., though the setting is the same. Patterson gives us the scraps of Newport Beach in new, lively form: the waitresses, maids, and single mothers who add texture to an otherwise polished beach community. Hers is a compassionate yet measured prose with enough beachy sex scenes to brighten your cool autumn days.

Junot Diaz—Drown (Penguin): For me, his second writing endeavor, the novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was even better, but there’s no denying the honesty of Diaz’s prose. From the Dominican Republic to the suburban communities of New Jersey, Diaz’s settings serve as backdrops for the cycles of anger, inherited violence, and poverty that his male characters must face.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez—One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harper Perrenial): Okay, so this one may have been canonized by now, but it still reads like a disobedient masterpiece, squirming out of the confines of establishment. Read it for the first time, or read it again. Marquez’s gorgeous dissection of a town and its people is one of the most brilliant stories available. It’s a novel of female power, with a number of strong women who anchor the story and provide a sense of continuity during years of cyclical rebirth.

Lionel Shriver—The Post-Birthday World (HarperCollins): If for nothing else, love this book for its shameless British inflections, and for its pointed portrayal of the expats many of us long to be. A glimpse into the fateful decisions of a relationship, this novel is told in alternating chapters, allowing us to see two diametrically opposed paths for the same character. It is a giving book, a generous book, enveloping any occasional flaws along the way with welcoming charm.

Preeta Samarasan—Evening is the Whole Day (Houghton Mifflin): Samarasan’s first novel borrows from many of the great postcolonial writers before her—mostly Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie—but manages to maintain a uniquely haunting tone. Her characters, a wealthy Indian family living in Malaysia, confront family myth and cover-ups, searching for identity in a stripped-away core.