I abandon New York for the West Coast every summer, and I like to pull at least some of my summer reading from west of the Mississippi, too. There’s a lot of really wonderful Western and so-called regional writing out there, much of it undersung—like my best find from last summer, James Galvin’s “The Meadow,” a lovely little hundred-year history-in-novel-form of a little patch of land in southern Wyoming. This summer I’m planning to revisit John Muir, for some writing I'm thinking of doing about Yosemite, and also looking forward to “Gold Fame Citrus,” the forthcoming novel from Claire Vaye Watkins, whose 2012 short-story collection, “Battleborn,” I admired. And on a not-Western note (except in the Western-canon sense), I hope to finally read a book I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while: Frank Kermode’s “The Genesis of Secrecy,” an inquiry into the act of interpretation.
I also plan to do some listening this summer. Aside from one cross-country drive in my early twenties, I’d never gotten into audio books, but lately I’ve turned to them to solve a very specific problem: what to do about all those books I read too young and would love to encounter again as an adult? Virtually all of my reading hours are spoken for, but recently I realized that there are always little patches of potential reading time around the edges of any given day—so long as I don’t need my hands or eyes, that is. Hence audio books, and the new-to-me experience of scare-quote reading. Having read whatever I’ve read of Russian literature way too young, I recently made my way through “Anna Karenina” and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” this way, and while I’m not sure how I would have felt about that if I hadn’t already read those books in print, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and by what an interestingly different experience it is than reading on the page. Meanwhile, it also reminded me of why I always liked Dostoyevsky a lot better than Tolstoy, so he’s up next.
—Kathryn Schulz
Summer is the season of far-flung immediacy—learning the rhythms of conversation in a distant city, feeling hot stones on bare legs in strange terrain, or nodding off outdoors, salt-brined, some weekend evening—so it struck me as the perfect time to pick up “Alexandrian Summer,” by the Egyptian-Israeli novelist Yitzhak Gormezano Goren, originally published in 1978, in Hebrew, and only now translated into English. The book, based on Goren’s memories of being ten in the summer of 1951, just before his family left for Israel, helps show why postwar Alexandria inspires nostalgia and avidity in seemingly everyone who knew it. By focussing on a couple of families’ intertwined lives, Goren traces out the city’s cosmopolitan tangle of faiths and cultures without losing sight of the comical domestic inflections that they nurtured. The result is what summer reading should be: fast, carefree, visceral, and incipiently lubricious. I enjoyed Yardenne Greenspan’s lush translation, and this first English edition is done up with a dreamy introduction by André Aciman, the reigning king of Alexandrian longing. It turns out that he grew up on the same street as Goren, in a slightly different but no less enchanted age.
—Nathan Heller
On July 28, 1915, President Woodrow Wilson sent U.S. Marines to Haiti, to protect American corporate interests against European takeover, launching an occupation of Haiti that would last nineteen years. During that time, the U.S. government remapped Haiti, rewrote its constitution, took charge of the country’s financial institutions, and established forced labor. But you wouldn’t know any of this reading such books as “The White King of La Gonave: The True Story of the Sergeant of Marines Who Was Crowned King on a Voodoo Island,” by Faustin E. Wirkus; or “The Magic Island,” by William Seabrook, who counts among his other works “Jungle Ways: Seabrook’s Book Out of Africa”; or “Cannibal Cousins,” by John Houston Craige. Some of these books, with their sensationalized misappropriation of Haitian Vodou, inspired the first zombie movies: “White Zombie,” “Revolt of the Zombies,” and “I Walked with a Zombie.” I am not just rerereading these books this summer because I am a glutton for punishment but because my grandfather was a Caco, or a resistance fighter, against this occupation, and I want, a hundred years later, to get a sense of the minds of some of the men he was fighting against. As a palate cleanser, I’m adding Mary A. Renda’s “Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940,” and a Haitian novel set during that period, Jacques Stephen Alexis’s “In the Flicker of an Eyelid.”
—Edwidge Danticat
What I am going to do pretty soon is go back to Elena Ferrante’s novels. I was tipped off by James Wood’s review, and I read “My Brilliant Friend,” which was an utter thrill. Then I got interrupted and went off and read some other things. Now I’m going to get back on the train. Amazing how many books there are that are better than what you’ve been reading lately.
—Joan Acocella
You have to check out Jacinda Townsend’s “Saint Monkey.” This stunner of a novel—set in Kentucky just before Civil Rights blows Jim Crow to pieces—tracks the lives of two young black women, both outsiders, both searching, and the thorny friendship that holds them together.
And Alejandro Zambra’s “My Documents.” This dynamite collection of stories has it all—Chile and Belgium, exile and homecomings, Pinochet and Simon and Garfunkel—but what I love most about the tales is their strangeness, their intelligence, and their splendid honesty.
—Junot Díaz
I’m looking forward to reading the fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s home epic, “My Struggle,” but although I’m thrilled that the success of the books has been such a coup for Knausgaard’s American publisher, Archipelago, I’m waiting until I go to the U.K. later this summer to buy the British edition. Archipelago’s editions, which have a wider and squatter format than most books, truly are beautiful to look at. But when it comes to actually reading, the resulting longer line of text distracts me from sinking into the book, which is all I want to do with Knausgaard. Sorry, Archipelago. Maybe when you do the boxed set of six volumes—you are doing a boxed set, I hope?—I’ll get them just for beauty’s sake.
—Rebecca Mead
My mind is on Transcendentalists this summer. I’m reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Prose” and “Poems,” in new editions from Harvard University Press; two studies of New England Writers whose deficiencies can be imagined from their titles but whose glories are everywhere in their sentences: “The Flowering of New England” and “New England Indian Summer,” by Van Wyck Brooks; “Emerson Among the Eccentrics,” a great group portrait by Carlos Baker; plus Thoreau’s “Walden,” for its usefulness as a guide to the forest floor—and because I’ve read it every few years since I was fourteen—along with a book I view as its near rival, Stanley Cavell’s “The Senses of Walden.” Way leads on to way, so who knows where these various paths will lead.
—Dan Chiasson
I hope to finish reading a couple of books that I started more than a year ago and failed to finish. The first is Edward St. Aubyn’s “Mother’s Milk,” the fourth in his series of Patrick Melrose novels. I consumed the first three books in days, by turns enthralled and appalled by the self-lacerating, cynical Patrick’s Waspish point of view. “Mother’s Milk,” however, begins in the P.O.V. of Patrick’s young son, an improbably self-aware elementary-schooler whose memories extend back to the womb. I found the kid a little tiresome and didn’t get much past page twenty. But I recently flipped ahead and saw that in chapter six we return to Patrick’s savage perspective, as he struggles with prescription sleep meds, adultery, and mother-hatred. Perfect for summer!
Last winter, I got to page seven hundred and fifty of “War and Peace,” then petered out. For six months, my yellowing bookmark has stood, like a quiet rebuke, midway through the monolithic tome. I had actually been enjoying it, so I might try to work my way back in—or I could just reread “Anna Karenina” again, I suppose.
Not long ago, I read Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” which I liked even better than “The Corrections”: it seemed a more mature and fully realized work, and I’m going to come right out and admit, in public, that its final pages moved me to tears. All of which is to say that I’m looking forward to taking a run at Franzen’s new novel, “Purity.”
—John Colapinto
This summer I’ve read Emmanuel Carrère’s “Limonov” and Aage Borchgrevink’s “A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya.” While Carrère treats Limonov—a professional mythomaniac and part-time fascist-cum-Bolshevik—as a spectacular literary character reflecting Russia’s (somewhat less spectacular) recent history, Borchgrevink’s Breivik works out the details of his manias in a metaphorical/literal lonely room, out of which he emerges as a killer. Though the consequences of their hateful mythologies are different, both Limonov and Breivik’s stories prove that fascism begins with gratuitous self-involvement.
—Alesksandar Hemon
After teaching a class on cities and the American imagination a couple of years back, I realized that I didn’t know enough about the history of the suburbs where I grew up. So this summer I’m working my way through Kevin Starr’s epic, seven-volume “Americans and the California Dream.” Vaguely related: I’m excited to finally read Ray Raphael’s “Cash Crop: An American Dream,” a 1985 book sold to me as the definitive account of Northern California’s reticent, highly organized communities of freelance marijuana farmers. (Every summer, I feel especially homesick for California, where we don’t take summer all that seriously, it being nice out all year long.)
When I’m teaching, I don’t have much time to read books that I’m not going to underline, so I’m also using the break to catch up on a few fun things: Benjamin Meadows-Ingram and Brad “Scarface” Jordan’s “Diary of a Madman,” about the Houston rap legend’s youthful exploits and evolving imagination; Felix Denk and Sven von Thülen’s “Der Klang der Familie,” a wondrous oral history of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Berlin techno culture; and Andrea Pirlo’s “I Think Therefore I Play,” the Italian football legend’s appropriately classy autobiography. (I may not finish every one of these books but, over the next couple of months, I will most certainly carry them, as a pile, from room to room.) I don’t read much fiction during the summertime, but I do plan on getting to John Williams’s “Stoner,” a novel about the steadying and transformative powers of literature. It’s also a tragic tale of how the love of literature won’t save you in the real world of campus politics, personal relationships, everyday life. A way to remind myself, I suppose, to start thinking about next year’s courses.
—Hua Hsu
This summer, I’m reading two accounts of far-flung, tempestuous twentieth-century lives. Vincent Giroud’s “Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music” chronicles a surreal career that Nabokov’s cousin, the novelist Vladimir, would have been hard-pressed to invent: a cosmopolitan composer flees the collapse of tsarist Russia and winds up as a Cold War cultural warrior, organizing ambitious festivals that were secretly subsidized by the C.I.A. In what amounts to a full-throated defense of a controversial figure, Giroud argues that Nabokov exploited Cold War hysteria more than it exploited him. Oliver Hilmes’s “Malevolent Muse: The Life of Alma Mahler” is a stylishly dispiriting biography of the woman who had early ambitions to become a composer but who won fame for a remarkable series of marriages and affairs—to and with, variously, Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel. Hilmes, who earlier wrote a fine life of Cosima Wagner, emphasizes the extent of Mahler-Werfel’s anti-Semitism, which remained disturbingly strong even during the Second World War: in exile in Los Angeles, she told Werfel that the Nazis had done “a great many praiseworthy things.” I’m also delving into two pop-music books: Jessica Hopper’s “The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic,” which lives up to its brazen title; and Eric Weisbard’s “Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music,” which studies how pop-music radio mirrors and advances social change. Finally, for pleasure and edification in equal measure, I’m reading Mary Norris’s “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,” an already celebrated memoir that grew from a series of New Yorker blog posts.
—Alex Ross
Reading Judy Blume’s new book, “In the Unlikely Event,” was thoroughly enjoyable; it also explored, in triplicate, one of my greatest fears: being in a plane crash. It made me even more curious to read Mark Vanhoenacker’s “Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot,” about the joys of being an airplane pilot. At parties, Vanhoenacker writes, he is often asked questions that “suggest that even now, when many of us so regularly leave one place on the earth and cross the high blue to another, we are not nearly as accustomed to flying as we think”: questions that reassure him that “a deeper part of our imagination lingers” in the realm of ancient thoughts about flight. He seems to have the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet—I’m curious to read his assured perspective on the whole operation, which may liberate me from my reptilian one.
I just finished reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels—the fourth and final book, “The Story of the Lost Child,” is out in September, and, spoiler alert, it’s fantastic. (I hereby unveil myself as her proofreader—no easy role when you’re hyperventilating.) Having run out of Ferrante, I’ve dipped a toe into Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” which, unlike everybody else, I haven’t read yet, and hope to plunge into fully this summer. So far, it’s true: it’s very good. (But I’m still reading like a proofreader, distracted by an iffy “discrete” on p. 4.)
—Sarah Larson
The great promise of summer reading is the pleasure of total absorption: time to climb into the hammock (or splay yourself across some godforsaken patch of airport carpet during an endless layover) with all of “In Search of Lost Time” or whatever. Making your way through a big fat novel offers one kind of intensity of reading experience, but if it’s full immersion you’re after, there’s a case to be made for the short story as the natural genre of summer. You can read one in a single sitting, which is why Edgar Allan Poe thought the story was the king of all forms, the only one that could offer “the immense force derivable from totality.” Read a bunch of stories by the same writer, and you come away with a portrait of a mind in mosaic—if she’s not much good, the cracks will soon show; if she is, you’re privy to something exquisite. The latter is the case with “The Love Object,” a new selection of Edna O’Brien’s short stories spanning the whole of her career, which I plan to keep dipping in and out of over the next few weeks. O’Brien’s mastery reveals itself in any number of ways; one is the slippery ease of her stories’ openings, which catch you up before you quite realize what you’ve gotten yourself into. The water gets very deep, very fast. Take the opening of the story “Storm”:
You can’t ask for a more honest summer sentiment than that. Poe loved short stories for the power they gave their authors: “During the hour of perusal, the soul of the reader is at the writer’s control.” I happily cede mine to O’Brien, and also to Mavis Gallant, one of the most brilliant story writers in the language, who deserves to be read as widely as her fellow Canadian Alice Munro. No one writes about brutish people like Gallant; she transforms the meanest human specimens into subjects of high fascination and sympathy, which makes her excellent reading for overheated estival subway commutes.
—Alexandra Schwartz
I’m reading Knausgaard Vol. 4! The magic continues!
—Elif Batuman
