This past week, I've been asking TPM staffers to write up their summer reading picks. Below, some of our superb interns weigh in.

Lakshmi: I read Carl Sferrazza Anthony's wonderful biography of Florence Harding last summer and I plan to continue going down the First Lady route by checking out Sylvia Morris's Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady. Also on my list is the young adult novel Child of Dandelions by Shenaaz Nanji, the story of an Asian Indian girl who fled Uganda with her family after Idi Amin issued his 1972 order expelling all Asians from the country.

Matt: For summer reading this year I am mostly just catching up on some Cafe books, Nixonland and Standard Operating Procedure in particular. As a nice beach book, I've also tossed Gravity's Rainbow in there, with some David Sedaris to boot.

Dave: My friends and I formed a Thomas Pynchon Book Club, with our first (only?) selection being Gravity's Rainbow, without a doubt the most frustrating and rewarding book I have ever picked up. I'm not even going to try and describe its madness and perfection. For lighter reading, I'm going with essay books- Will Leitch's God Save The Fan (Crashing the Gates for sports is the best analogy), Keith Johnstone's Improv (techniques on improv comedy, but also great life advice) and Eudora Welty's On Writing (sharp).

Al: I have to admit, I'm still halfway through Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. I'm also reading Freud's last (and controversial) book Moses and Monotheism. And there's always the sisyphean task of catching up on unread RSS feeds.

Ezra: I've been reading books from the TPM Office Big Old Pile O' Books, which I've enjoyed so far.

First was Gaming The Vote: Why Elections Aren't Fair and What We Can Do About It. It goes through the problems with various voting mechanisms such as plurality voting, runoff voting, and approval voting. It's a lot of thought provoking political theory, but the author gives many real world examples - especially a particularly wacky Louisiana Governors race - to make the theory relevant.

Yesterday I finished Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business, which chronicled the powerful policial consulting firm Sawyer Miller. In addition to helping candidates around the US, they also spread American campaign tactics around the world. The irony was that they gradually grew to support liberal and progressive causes in America while helping large corporations at home and often brutal governments abroad.

And so far I like Get Out The Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout, all six pages that I've read.