Ever since I can remember, summer to me has meant barefooted days spent stretched out on a blanket reading. I'd get lost between the pages, traveling through imaginary worlds for entire days, preferring to keep my eyes cemented to the book during lunch than to break the spell for even the few moments it took to gulp down a PB & J.
When I started working summer and evening jobs, then went to university out of high school it started to change. I still read fiction for my English lit classes, and squeezed in a few pleasure reads where I could, but it wasn't the same. I'd pick up the book and get the little buzz I always did from starting a new story, but I'd get through a few pages before either feeling guilty for enjoying myself instead of studying, or just passed out from exhaustion. There was no more losing track of time making friends of new characters, weaving my way through serpentine plot lines, breathlessly reaching the climax of the narrative, enveloping myself in the afterglow of a freshly finished book. Instead, I read with purpose. Absorb. Retain. Dissect. Synthesize. Regurgitate. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Over the course of the past few months, though, I've come back to fiction. Certainly at nowhere near the pace with which I used to consume books (and I still pass out from end-of-day exhaustion after just a page or two), but a lot more than I have in recent years. Even though I write and edit for a living, I find that I still have the energy and desire at the end of the day to drift off into another world. Maybe it's the heat, the late sunlight, or maybe it's just that I'm calmer and ready to revisit the time in my life when I wasn't too busy to just venture off into new territory.
Now that I have a real summer vacation coming up, one that doesn't involve much travel and therefore too much sightseeing to squeeze into a what seems like a minuscule period of time, I'm excited about what books to dive into. I have two weeks of time to once again slip between the cool pages and visit someone else's mind for a while.
So, I'm taking suggestions. What's your desert island book? A must read that maybe I haven't heard of? Or the newest thing you've come across--a hot new author or title? Give me something strange, something precious, something funny or something sweet--or all of the above.
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Diary of a Hopeful Starving Student
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Can’t wait to hear what you end up picking!
—Melissa
Recycled comment (with a few teeny tweaks):
As an English major, I used to look forward to summer every year so I would get to read the books I wanted to read. Not that I wasn’t reading great books in my classes, but I had hundreds more on my list and not enough time left on this earth to savor them all. Now, I’m lucky if I can sit down and read one physical book a year. That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped reading—I have a voracious appetite for audiobooks, getting my lit fix while simultaneously accomplishing something else, usually cooking.
Summers of my past are each associated with different books, most of them favorites. There was the summer when Michael and I read all of Salinger, including rare specimens like “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which we copied out of the library’s New Yorker archives. Our favorite is still Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, and Seymour, an Introduction. Other summer read-alouds: The Giant’s House, Charms for the Easy Life, Saint Maybe, Cat’s Cradle, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Dancing at Lughnasa, and everything by David Sedaris, our favorite still being Naked.
And then there are those books I would sneak off with to some tree-shaded part of campus during lunch breaks from my summer library job: Animal Dreams, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Brothers Karamazov, The Solace of Open Spaces, Standing by Words, The End of the Affair, Confederacy of Dunces, and Do the Windows Open?
Not to mention more greats I did happen to read in my classes: Invisible Man, The Color Purple, Catch-22, At Swim-Two-Birds, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Go Down, Moses.
The first book I read after graduating from college was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life—which should be required reading for everyone at OS, at least everyone who wants to read genuine insights into the writing process while nearly dying of laughter.
Here’s one I think you will especially appreciate. It’s a book of essays by Irish poet Eavan Boland (who still holds the title of my favorite poet after a dozen+ years): Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Times. If you want to read some of her poetry, too, Outside History: Selected Poems, 1980–1990 is a great place to start.
This is probably way more than anyone can read in a single summer, but it’s hard for me to single out just one when it comes to books. Thanks for inspiring this nostalgic trip through some of my favorite summer reads.
Melissa: You've given me a great list! Sorry i missed your original post.
Donna: Is it so obvious that I'm a dog person? It's on the list!
Patricia: Haven't read The Flying Troutmans, but i loved White Tiger.
Jessabelle: I'll add those too. At this rate, I'll have to increase my vacation time.