The book blog on the L.A. Times site has been featuring a series of interviews in which they ask writers which books they remember from their experiences of summer reading as children or teenagers. Today Lisa Brackmann talks about reading Ursula LeGuin.

It got me thinking about my summers during high school as a teenager in suburban Houston. I lived in the Clear Lake area, a suburb that was raised up out of cow pastures when LBJ got Congress to site the NASA headquarters in southern Harris County. Having been built out of nothing, the area lacked certain basic services, such as public transit and sewers, while there were plenty of shopping centers and subdivisions having Grand Opening Celebrations. (The soulless suburb has been the site of many violent tragedies, chief among which were the Andrea Yates murders in 2001.)

Another basic service the area lacked was a library -- or rather, there was one tiny library, a two-room structure in one of the subdivisions.  To get to it, I had to ride my bicycle more than five miles , much of it over a state highway grandiloquently dubbed "NASA Road 1" (now named somewhat more humbly "NASA Parkway"). I would scour the shelves for fiction that looked remotely interesting, carry two or three books home in the basket of my bike, read for the next ten or twelve hours, and then repeat the exercise (and with a more than ten mile round trip, it was exercise) the next day.

I remember trying to get as much fiction as I could that depicted adult life and relationships, hopefully something with some sex in it, though even then I shunned crap like Sidney Sheldon and tended toward literary fiction. I read Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pyncheon, Marge Piercy, probably some John Updike. I know I tried reading John Gardner's The Sunlight Dialogues, and even thought I found it too difficult to really follow, I managed to finish it.

Most memorably, I read On the Road in a scruffy paperback someone had donated to the library and which it sold me for 50 cents -- I still have that paperback, now completely falling apart but with the classic hyperbolic marketing copy on the cover: 

This is the bible of the "beat generation" -- the explosive bestseller that tells all about today's wild youth and their frenetic search for experience and sensation. 

The back copy was even better:

Wild drives across America... buying cars, wrecking cars, stealing cars, dumping cars, picking up girls, making love, all night drinking bouts, Jazz joints, wild parties, hot spots. This is the odyssey of the Beat Generation, the frenetic young men and their women, restlessly racing from New York to San Francisco in a frantic search for Kicks and Truth. 

Sure sounded good to me! What teenager isn't on a frenetic search for experience, and sensation, and Truth? Especially one marooned in a desperately sterile suburb surrounded by boobs (i.e. my classmates). More than twenty years later, I wrote a novel, set in 1960 in which one of the main characters is a young man who has read Kerouac and swallowed whole everything Kerouac wrote about, from the hipness of jazz poets to the fractured version of Buddhism contained in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. 

I wonder what Kerouac's generation read that turned on the lightbulb for them -- the book that told them there was a whole world to explore, that they didn't have to conform to the lowest expectations of the adults. I don't know -- but I know what today's teenagers should read that carries the same charge: Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. Even its cover (the U.K. paperback, anyway -- pictured at right) evokes the themes and feelings contained in Kerouac. Now that would be a memorable summer read.