Summer Reads
The summer read, not to be confused with the beach read, is my favorite genre of book. By a league, honestly. A few qualities are required in order for a book to qualify at this upper echelon of imaginative engagement. All of my senses must be activated by the heady atmosphere. There is, preferably, imposing heat and pressure set against a compelling environment, wilting the characters into the sort of submission it takes to crack open their composed shells.
I need the book to grab me and have me. I think about summer books all day, whether the pages are in front of me or not. They’re sensory, bleeding into everything I’m experiencing over the time it takes to read them. I want to be sticky when I finish reading, like I just let sunblock melt all over me and have no plans for a shower.
I guess you could sum all of this up with the word erotic. But I don’t mean sexy.
So, quick revisit of what summer books are not: enthralling mysteries (though they could be) or sexy tristes (though they could be that, too). But these qualities do not make a summer read. They make a beach read. Which can be lovely, obviously. But that’s not what I’m talking about.
What I mean by the eroticism of a book is the way the combination of certain stories and language make you feel in your body, the way they make you notice the bloom in all that lives because your senses have been turned up-up-up by a piece of tremendous literature. It’s seeing the pool and jumping in without further consideration, not caring what comes after the swim. These pieces leave you balking at how the author wormed their way inside of you and hosted a private viewing of your most intimate colors, and then proceeded to paint a landscape with them.
All of this points to a handful of books for me, the books that make me feel alive in the physical world. Art should engage you, connecting your senses to the world at large and within, reminding you that they’re one in the same. Books - and novels, in particular - carry an ultra-powerful potential for this, as you’re invited into their experiences for days, weeks, months at a time. When I’m given the opportunity to jump in, I don’t always want to think about what happens next. These titles do that for me.
The Magus by John Fowles
The Magus (1965) tells the story of Nicholas, a young man who moves to a small Greek island to teach at a boys’ school after graduating from Oxford. His entitlement and illusions about himself are aggressively stripped away through a series of mind-bending experiences as he gets pulled into the world of an isolated villa on the other side of the island. It is the best of writing and the most intoxicating of atmospheres.
Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman
Call Me By Your Name (2007) is a love story with no restraints, cutting to the center of what it means to know yourself through intimacy with another person. To let yourself feast on what it is to be human and in love. It’s rare to achieve this sort of closeness without eliciting a cringe factor, but Aciman did it in the loveliest of ways. Reading this book feels like a homecoming because it celebrates humanity so wholly. (Also set at a villa, Italian this time, in the early 1980’s.)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things (1997) rings in your ears and fills your nostrils with jasmine. The story is set in Kerala and moves through the 1960’s to the 90’s, chronicling the folding and unfolding of a family marked by tragedy. Hauntingly beautiful, it will lead you down waterways of nonmorality you didn’t know were flowing through you all the while.
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
Our Man in Havana (1958) is the ironic story of a struggling vacuum salesman in Cuba who gets accidentally sucked into the British intelligence services. The characters are whacky, the situations are absurd, and it pokes jolly fun at the inner workings of government administrations, even foreshadowing political events yet to unfold in actual history. All this, set against a sumptuous, vintage Havana - muggy bars, dingy alleyways, and chaotic dance clubs.
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
The Lost Daughter (2006), so gracefully translated by Ann Goldstein, transports the reader to Southern Italy, illuminating a bright world full of shadows. You sit almost too close as you watch Leda, a middle-aged professor, reexamine her past while on a solo vacation to the beach. Ferrante shines an honest and penetrating light on the shadow side of motherhood while seducing you with scorching, pine-studded shorelines.
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is the Night (1934) chronicles the affair of Dick Diver - married to the beautiful, unstable Nicole and father of two young children - and the budding, young actor Rosemary Hoyt. A semi-autobiographical account of Fitzgerald’s life with Zelda, the story unravels on the French Riviera, where all the tanned bodies, dinners in the garden, and duels of honor cannot keep diamonds from turning to dirt in the strapping doctor’s palms.
The collection of stories, The Ebony Tower - specifically The Ebony Tower & The Cloud by John Fowles
The Ebony Tower (1974) tells the story of a biographer’s visit to the home of an old, secluded painter in the south of France. With a stunning setting and unnerving undertones, the visit becomes a sort of love triangle peppered with scholarly discussions on art.
The Cloud (1974) documents a picnic - also in France, this time in the countryside - thrown by a stylish yet pretentious group. The action takes a dark turn as the depressed Catherine’s bruised past is revealed.
Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour - specifically Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger
In Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963) Buddy Glass narrates the story of attending his older brother Seymour’s wedding on a hot day in New York City. Hilarious and heart-breaking, you find yourself pleasantly worn out by the end - having been driven through a sweltering day in a crowded, rented limousine with prodding strangers. It is sentimental unsentimentalism through a stunning lens.