I love this time of the year. Aside from the fact that the extra daylight makes me feel as though I may actually get through my To Do list before nightfall, I start hoarding books for my summer vacation beach reading binge. Plus, the TV networks have actually created year-round programming to keep me glued to the boob tube (this is good and bad).

Here are just a few things I’m totally digging this summer (I know—it’s not really summer yet, but since it’s been over 90 degrees every day, I think that’s just a technicality.

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I’ve been on a memoir binge lately. From The Bloggess’s book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Jeneration X by Jen Lancaster and even finally On Writing by Stephen King (which is part autobiography, part writing lessons).

I just started the third chapter of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, but I love this book. Here’s the publisher’s description:

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

Cheryl is brutally honest about her strengths and weaknesses to the point where I’m still not sure if I’m sympathetic towards her or somewhat turned off by her choices. But I like that.

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I love the original “Mob Wives.” Sorry. I can’t help it, but there’s something weirdly endearing about those women. I like bad-ass bitches who fight for their family. And truth be told, they’re more “real” than the “Real Housewives of Insert City Here” because they’re not rolling through town in a Rolls Royce, pretending they’re making more money than they are, wearing big jewels with their clay faces. They support their families while their husbands are in jail (and unlike a certain NY “Housewife,” they say “jail” instead of “going away”).

So I’m hoping the newest installment, “Mob Wives Chicago,” is just as good. Check out this extended trailer:

From the mind of Aaron Sorkin, creator of “The West Wing (the best TV show EVER in my opinion)” and screenwriter of The Social Network and Moneyball,  comes “The Newsroom,” a behind-the-scenes look at the people who make a nightly cable-news program. Focusing on a network anchor (played by Jeff Daniels), his new executive producer (Emily Mortimer), the newsroom staff (John Gallagher, Jr., Alison Pill, Thomas Sadoski, Olivia Munn, Dev Patel) and their boss (Sam Waterston), the series tracks their quixotic mission to do the news well in the face of corporate and commercial obstacles-not to mention their own personal entanglements.