What Counts as Summer Reading?
I don't know, stop asking stupid questions
Summer is an unlikely season for reading. What is it about primeval insect spawns and imminent forest fires that draws out that otherwise vanishingly rare creature, the bookworm? I don’t know. The illusion of more free time? The old habit of summer reading requirements?
What qualifies as summer reading, anyway? The parameters are hazy. For some a summer book should be effortlessly enjoyable, something you can finish over the course of a few listless, sunbleached afternoons, and maybe something you don’t have to much pay attention to. For others, the opposite. A summer book is just that — a single book you dedicate your entire summer to. But really, as with most contemporary phenomena, what counts as a summer book comes down to vibes. What is summer like? Better still, what should summer to be like? Your answer will likely inform your reading.
My own preferences tend to be transportive. For instance, right now I am reading The Unknown Matisse, a biography of the artist’s early years. This choice has less to do with Matisse, whose work I like as much as the next person, I guess, and more to do with my penchant for reading about France (and particularly late nineteenth century France) in the summer. I don’t know why. I’ve visited France twice, each time in the summer. Maybe it’s as simple as that. In any case, I’ve found that summer is the perfect season to read about a world and time which is both riotous and mundane, with its revolutionary airs and bourgeois pretensions, in the same way that summer contains both tizzy-ness and tedium, sometimes all in a day. (Remember Ulysses takes place on June 16.)
I also plan on returning to Joseph Conrad, the writer I read more than anyone else last year. But again, Conrad sort of fell in my lap: I had just finished The Wager, David Grann’s epic of the high seas, and I was going to the beach and needed something to read. No one would call Conrad a “beach read” — no one worth talking to, anyway — but as a former merchant marine, he writes about a lot about the ocean and the tropics in particular, which is enough for my impressionable palette. I’m sure I’ll also take down Faulkner, O’Connor, or Welty from the shelf, because they are Southern writers, and I live in the South, and the South is especially Southern in the summer. Impregnable logic!
I may or may not finish any given book. It doesn’t matter. I will put it back on the shelf and return again later, either in 12 months or, on a lark, two weeks. One summer I decided I needed to read as much as I could about Mississippi and ended up having a better understanding of the history, culture, and geography of that curious state than I do my own. I also ended up reading more about the Klan than I intended, or would necessarily recommend.
(Did you know the Klan is basically composed of a bunch of loosely affiliated, often rivalrous factions? Hatred abhors a cage, I guess, and is prone to multiplication. The Citizen’s Council was the Klan for country club members.)
So, yes, summer reading will take you to some strange places if you allow it. And you should! This is no time for strict schedules or curated agendas, much less required curricula. Let the business-psychos self-optimize and the personality-vacuums hoover away what crumbs and dander remain of our life online. The main thing for us normies is to be whimsical, and when a mood strikes, which may take time, to not ask why. Double down. Move freely from Guy de Maupassant’s Paris to Ernest James’s Bayonne, Louisiana. They have more than a little in common. Pick up a book, put it back. It doesn’t matter. Nothing is required of you. But a last word of advice: keep the thousand-page classic of Russian literature on the shelf. That’s what winter is for.