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Summer Reading

by DAYNA EVANS

I have a rule during the summer: Never leave the house without a bathing suit and a book. You can never really know when you'll find yourself by water, with nothing to do, or both. I have, over time, come to take this rule too seriously and have ended up with a tote bag stuffed with several books that I want to read, all in the name of having options. I'm sure a famous author has once notably said that reading is an activity best performed outside, and to this I will add that it can only be enhanced by adorning oneself in swimwear. Ignore the possibility of chronic back pain and disregard the girlie implications of reading while sunbathing. Just bring War and Peace to the beach and show summer who's boss.

The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher

An entire shelf on the bookcase in my bedroom is dominated by MFK Fisher’s books, all of which I’ve read more than once and with a more terrifying obsession each time. As a gift I was given The Art of Eating, which is a compilation of some of her best books into one giant volume, and if it weren’t for the incredible inconvenience (it’s, like, seven pounds), and the fact that I’ve already read every book in the anthology, I’d read that, too. It is mystifying that she isn’t as essential to your life as she is to mine. I do love food more than most, but her style (evocative, intimate, but with a bluntness that edges on scolding) should be enough to get you to join me in infatuation.

I suggest you start with The Gastronomical Me, an autobiographical account of a woman who spent her life being a badass in places like Dijon, France, and Chexbres, Switzerland, eating and cooking and ordering after-dinner Scotch at her table for one. No one writes quite like her — an evil stepmother coldness layered with passion — and with certainty, no one can eat like her.

Something to Tell You by Hanif Kureishi

When I read my first Hanif Kureishi novel, I saw it as a masculine Zadie Smith story but with more sex and less emotion. I realize now that the emotion is there, but it is hidden under layers of boyish desire and melodrama that make you cluck with admonition, much like Kureishi’s female characters tend to do. In Something to Tell You, he captures London in so many lights and shadows — a place that appears to have a more adult richness than New York.

Kureishi's characterizations of the upper crust and the squatters, mixed with Pakistani and Indian cultures as they present themselves in London, the story is so aching with escapism that it’s the perfect book for your summer. If you’ve been needing a vacation from your vacation, come in from the sunshine and read about the damp dreariness of London from the 1970s onward, in all of its resistance to change.

You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard

There was a short period of time in my life when I thought I knew how to write short stories — they were subpar and imitative, but at least I thought they made a point. Then I read You Think That’s Bad by Jim Shepard, after which all of my delusions were deflated within its first sentence. I have never seen a writer so thorough in not only his scope of subjects but in his delicate scrutiny of lives and landscapes that are outside of our understanding.

He covers everything from the unhappy family life of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special-effects director for Godzilla, to the gore and horror of 15th-century serial killer/molester of children, Gilles de Rais. There is no author I’ve read who utilizes imagination with such expert precision and vastness, as if he were not a fiction writer, but a journalist. The stories can occasionally be dense (so maybe avoid reading while under the influence), but they never fail to remind that the trend of aloof sparseness in writing may just be a copout.

Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steves

You may know Rick Steves as that nerdy dude with a travel show on public access television. He’s been around for longer than Anthony Bourdain and he’s got more to say than the Frugal Traveler, but most of his televised material is dry and dull and makes you feel like you’re traveling with your puritan dad. I beseech you to not be deterred by that, nor the word “political” in this book’s title, because I think this book is a mighty worthy read. The word “travel” when used in regards to Americans can have a sinister edge: in a lot of cases, we interchange “travel” with “party” and “culture” with “beer.” It’s fine — exploring the world can really mean those things.

In this book, Steves makes the valid point that, should we choose, we can actually elaborate on our own perception of adventure by interacting with the cultures and people we visit. Trust me, it's not a downer, and it doesn't make vacationing to Aruba seem low-brow. He gives advice and anecdotes on how we can interact with the world more deeply than by posing in front of relics we know nothing about. If you're planning a summer holiday, I highly recommend giving this a read — Steves, despite his humdrum countenance, is a guy who knows how to travel.

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

Cullen’s younger brother, Gabriel, has gone missing. Simultaneously, a rare, supposedly extinct woodpecker shows its face again in his town. Cullen, grief-stricken and confused, picks fights with his best friend, his non-girlfriend, and his family, all while trying to understand why everyone has gone so wild over the imaginary woodpecker.

Despite its reputation for being melodramatic and pseudo-virginal, teen fiction has the potential to be quite good. After feeling drained from wasting nights misinterpreting allegory in literary fiction, this teen book can feel refreshing, direct, and astoundingly complex. The summer may be a good time to catch up on your list of philosophy books you pretended to have read in college, but Where Things Come Back will prove to be more rewarding, if only because it identifies with emotions you’ve long-since buried or deemed “juvenile.”

The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht

When a particular writer is all you hear about on every media outlet, it is easy to assume that whatever is being said is all hype. Tea Obreht and her debut novel, The Tiger's Wife, were inescapable for months before, during, and after the book release, and still continue to amass attention beyond any author's wildest dreams. Of course, it is never failed to mention that she is twenty-five. I felt compelled to entirely ignore The Tiger's Wife out of blatant envy — who writes an Orange Prize–winning book when they’re twenty-five? Inevitably, curiosity got the better of me and when I picked up Obreht's novel, I carried it around like a newborn child.

Before I had even gotten a third of the way through, I was recommending it to strangers on the street, telling friends I was too busy to hang out (i.e. reading this book), and basically living inside its mythology. This is the classic tale of the doubtful who shouldn't have doubted. Though I suppose reading about it on one more recommended book list is only further putting you off, let me just say that there is a guy who is a bear (sort of) and a man who doesn't die (cool!). Read it and don't be a hater.

How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton

For those who’ve completed the seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, I will quietly congratulate, while vindictively resent, you for your achievement. I have read Swann’s Way, which obviously astounded my delicate Francophilic mind, but I stopped there, thinking that I had other (not better) fish to fry that wouldn’t suck the life out of me. Many have never read a lick of Proust, and I commend you as well for holding out this long despite the certainty of academic disdain. No matter where you are on this spectrum, I can guarantee that you are not reading In Search of Lost Time this summer, unless you seriously hate yourself.

A pleasant alternative can be found in reading How Proust Can Change Your Life, a short literary biography masked as how-to guide on what Proust was then and is now. It’s really funny. Proust was a big ole ninny so reading about his fears and hangups can be quite reassuring, while garnering some knowledge on his epic work will make you — finally! — feel essential at your girlfriend’s rooftop dinner party.

Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss

A trend that I lament often, in public, and loudly, is the case of the husband/wife writer duo in which one half gets the bulk of the praise and attention, while the other has double the talent. Jonathan Safran Foer, a candidate for writer of least-likable, superficial writing in history, is married to a lovely woman named Nicole Krauss whose books achieve more depth in three sentences than in a hundred of Foer's self-congratulatory, twee-drenched pages. If anything, I recommend you read Man Walks Into a Room as a way to prove me either right or wrong. I am obsessed with any writer who can write in the voice of their opposite gender.

Krauss had me convinced that she was actually a dude who was being experimented on in a shady scientist's compound for their life-altering memory loss. Her first novel is so feeling without losing rationality and somber while only edging on fatalist in its few darker moments. She is brilliant and exciting; if you have to choose a writer within the Foer/Krauss duo, consult your desire to read deep, true fiction with a realist heart, and the latter will always reign.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

The title of this book is fucking gorgeous. I've always thought so, even years before I'd read it or knew what it was. In fact, "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter" is an amazing song by defunct synth-pop band The Anniversary, and I was obsessed with the song before I had even touched the book. I am a sucker for synth-pop and character development, so both the song and this book remain two of my favorites of all time. Carson McCullers just gets people — she understands how they interact, how they feel, how they process cause and effect.

I don't know what specifically makes me feel this way, but I am always quite pleased to read Southern literature during the summer. It feels right, like I am really just on a peach farm in Georgia instead of in a supermarket in New Jersey. I'm not saying this book is easy, painless reading — by no means at all will you get through McCullers' novel without weeping unless you're a soulless robot. But it is a great escape to a time past, in a place I don't know, and with a plot unfamiliar to anything I've experienced in my own life. The title, no matter how gorgeous, could never outshine the writing itself.

The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell

If you’re self-involved but in denial, you will be jazzed to find that The Interrogative Mood is the private answer to the shame in your narcissism. The entire novel, if one can call it that, is in question form, and is flowed out like traditional novel text — very pleasing to the eye.

All of a sudden, for the first time in your life, you are the protagonist of a best-selling novel and every question is for you and you alone! It is shamefully satisfying. Powell asks, “Do you favor a day of the week?” and “Isn’t it — forgive me this pop locution — hard being you?” Yes, it is hard being me, you say, and the book continues thusly as you get closer and closer to restoring your self-esteem. Even while you are glowing in the self-indulgence of summer, you will walk away from this book like a newly confident bird of paradise.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about satiation.

This is the third part in a series. You can read the first part here and the second part here. You can read the fourth part here.

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