Seasons often insinuate themselves into literary memories. When it comes to summer reading, some people remember beaches and romance, others public transportation and politics. There seems to be no defining setting or content. We asked some authors about their favorite memories of summer reading, and their plans for this summer’s reading.
Allan Garganus, author of the novels “The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All” and “Plays Well With Others,” and the short-fiction collection “White People”:
I think the quintessential summer reading experience I had was in the 5th grade when I read “Robinson Crusoe,” by Daniel Defoe. Oh, I love that book; it is still one of my favorite five or 10 books ever written. The first time through, I realized that if I read a chapter a day at the beach with my parents that I would finish it too soon. So I broke it down into a paragraph a day, and then I got to a sentence a day, and then I got to a word a day, and I cried when it was over. You know how it is. I think that’s the way it is with really great books–you feel that your life is going to end when the book does. You want a big one when you begin it in the summer so it will last you all the way through August.
(This summer) I’m looking forward to reading “Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” by Randall Kenan, which is a sort of autobiographical survey of being black in America in which he travels and interviews people all over the country. I’ve loved his fiction, and this is a book I’m looking forward to.
Ruth L. Ozeki, author of the novel “My Year of Meats”:
Books I’m looking forward to reading: Natalie Angier’s “Woman,” and “The History and Social Influence of the Potato,” by Redcliffe Salaman, W.G. Burton and J.G. Hawkes.
A book I’m planning on re-reading because I love it is “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing,” by Melissa Bank. It’s a story about a young woman growing up, and it’s very funny.
The book I plan on finishing is Don DeLillo’s “Underworld.” The big books are great in summer because if you get tired you can always use them as pillows when you are at the beach.
Hope Edelman, author of “Motherless Daughters” and “Mother of My Mother”:
Books on my shelf waiting to be opened are “Split: A Counterculture Childhood,” by Lisa Michaels; “The Handyman,” a novel by Carolyn See; and “1185 Park Avenue,” a memoir by Anne Roiphe. I picked up (Roiphe’s book) because I enjoy her columns in the New York Observer so much and I think she is smart and literate. I want to be her when I grow up.
Last summer I read “Hula,” a novel by Lisa Shea. I bought it in Iowa City. I was there for the summer writing festival, and I would read it at night in the hotel after my daughter fell asleep. I remember reading it by the night light.
My daughter was born in October (1997), so the summer before I read “Child of Mine: Writers Talk About the First Year of Motherhood,” edited by Christina Baker Kline. Also I read “Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year,” by Anne Lamott. It’s funny and poignant, written in diary form, about being a single mom with a colicky baby.
Paul Krugman, author of “The Accidental Theorist” and “The Return of Depression Economics”:
I tend to be big on history and certain kinds of science fiction. It’s all escapism of one sort or another. The book I’m not letting myself look at until I get to our summer place is a big science-fiction novel by Neal Stephenson called “Cryptonomicon.”
Last summer I was on a family trip to New Zealand and Australia and I read “Otherland: River of Blue Fire,” by Tad Williams, another big science-fiction book.
Bebe Moore Campbell, author of the memoir “Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad” and the novels “Brothers and Sisters” and “Singing in the Comeback Choir”:
This summer I want to read Nikki Giovanni’s new book of poetry, “Blues: For All the Changes.” It’s the first collection of new poetry from (her) in a long time. I want to re-read it and savor it.
My favorite summer reading memory is when I first read “Sula,” by Toni Morrison. My life wasn’t as hectic as it is now, so you know I remember just having time to reflect on how magnificent that work really is.”
Geraldine Brooks, author of the nonfiction books “Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women” and “Foreign Correspondence”:
Last summer I had sort of a glutton’s journey into memoirs because while I was writing one myself (before then) I went on a fast; I didn’t want to be too influenced by what other people had done. So I had a stack I was longing to plunge into, and I think my favorite was Jacki Lyden’s memoir, “Daughter of the Queen of Sheba.” The writing was just lush and delicious. I thought it was so interesting that she tells the story of a difficult childhood but manages to suffuse it with love at the same time. It was this loving portrait of a very complex person.
This summer I’m trying to do something a little different; I’m looking for a novel I can lose myself in. I’ve just sent away for a book called “Hiam,” by Eva Sallis. I’m interested in it because she is an Australian woman and an Arabic scholar by training. What she’s done in her first novel is write about a woman from the Arab culture who is a migrant in Australia going through a crisis in her life.
Connie Rose Porter, author of the “Addy”/American Girls series, and two novels, “Imani All Mine” and “All-Bright Court”:
Physics is my No. 1 favorite reading material, and I’ll be reading “The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report,” by Timothy Ferris. For fiction, I’ll be reading Bebe Moore Campbell’s “Brothers and Sisters.”
Last summer I read “Miss Ophelia,” by Mary Burnett Smith. I was home, at Virginia Beach, and I would read after coming in from gardening.
Jane Tompkins, author of the nonfiction book “A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned”:
When I was very young, about 12 years old, I remember reading “The Deer Slayer,” by James Fenimore Cooper, in the afternoon in a house in the Catskill Mountains.
My most memorable (summer book) is almost unbelievable: “The Golden Bowl,” by Henry James–on the beach on Long Island while I was in college. I mean, it is one of the most difficult books to read that’s ever been written. I love James, and I think I was reading it in preparation for a course, but I can’t believe I had the concentration to read “The Golden Bowl” on the beach.
Last summer in the Catskills, I read Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain.” I did reviews for the Raleigh News and Observer, and I was reviewing it, and I just remember the pleasure of the prose in that book and the pace. It’s something of a slow-paced book, so that kind of goes with the slow pace of summer, lets you enjoy the details.
Tony Horwitz, author of “Confederates in the Attic” and “Baghdad Without a Map”:
I like to write and also read books about history and adventure, so my perfect summer read from last summer was “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West,” by Stephen E. Ambrose, on the Lewis and Clark expedition. We live in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and by the time I finished his book I wanted to climb over the back fence and just head west into the hills. Instead, I think I went and made some ice tea and sat by the air conditioning, but it was a nice fantasy.
As for this summer, it seems that ice is hot these days. I recently read and enjoyed “The Voyage of the Narwhal,” by Andrea Barrett, which is a novel about arctic exploration. So I thought I might try “Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage,” by Alfred Lansing, about the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica. It sounds like a soothing read for a July or August day in Virginia, but beyond that it really sounds like a white-knuckles, historical adventure. A place I have absolutely no intention of ever going. I’m not into reading about nice places that I plan to go; rather, adventures I’ll never take except in my imagination.
Ana Castillo, author of the novels “So Far From God,” “The Mixquiahuala Letters” and “Sapogonia”:
I remember the summer that I read most of Eduardo Galeano’s “Memory of Fire.” I was familiar with him as a political writer and a journalist from when I was in college, but that year he had a very successful trilogy of fiction based on the history of Latin America. I got all these books, plus (his) past books in Spanish, and went to Mexico.
This (vacation) was a promise I made to myself when I was in labor with my child: If I survived, one of these days not only was I going to go see the ocean but I was going to go to a Mexican resort that was in one of the telenovelas (Spanish soap operas) my mother was watching. It actually took me about four years, but I went to that resort with another writer, and we had stocked up on Galeano’s books, wonderful books, and we read to each other. I really savored all of it. The history of Latin America, the way he tells it, and being at this resort. We read and sunbathed, and so it was a major treat.
