Summer reading is the adult version of school vacation's endless possibilities
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Version 0 of 1. The last of the summer reading lists are out – and with them, a decision that resurfaces every year, in one form or another: War and Peace, or The Girl On The Train? Homework or fun? New book or old? Could this be the summer, 18 years after starting it, that I finally finish The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich? Summer reading, as with other activities undertaken in August, is subject to the dim but unshakeable sense that miracles can be accomplished while on vacation. (This headline from the Onion sums it it up perfectly). Things happen in the heat; we know this much from Tennessee Williams. It might be murder, insanity or violently sublimated homoerotic desire, or it might be finishing Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Regardless, the lassitude brought on by the August sun can paradoxically open up new possibilities. Most of us are old enough to know that New Year’s resolutions don’t work. But the summer betterment program – to swim before breakfast, eat yogurt in place of bread or to get to the end of Don DeLillo’s Underworld – roars on unchecked. Related: The sun is out – so pass me my book and let me dream | Hannah Giorgis It is, obviously, a vestige from the long school vacation, when time moved differently and the obliterating effect of the heat and light held the promise of shedding old layers. This wasn’t necessarily a pleasant experience. “The world seemed to die each afternoon and nothing moved any longer,” wrote Carson McCullers in the Member of the Wedding, the quintessential long-hot-summer novel. Her protagonist, Frankie, is 12 years old, the age when, by the time September rolls around, half the heads in the class have shot up three inches. Hands forget how to write. Friendship groups rearrange themselves. Light years have passed, and everyone starts the school year brandishing shiny new versions of themselves. Some of that sense of transformation lingers on into adulthood. The sense of renewal that once came from buying a new pencil case or cracking open a clean exercise book is, many years on, no less childishly furthered by the current obsession for rearranging one’s drawers. Or finishing a prohibitively long novel. Or listening, for the umpteenth time, to the NPR Planet Money podcast that explains how the credit crunch happened. (Or, more accurately, doing none of those things – for most of us, “summer” is at most a two-week vacation, not a three-month sabbatical in which to fix everything. But merely thinking about these things feels like having done half the work.) Summer changes us. Boundaries blur; borders relax. In the space opened up by these currents, a hope remains that we might fudge something through our own sluggish systems. As I write, a friend on Cape Cod is trying to read to Infinite Jest. (“The footnotes! The footnotes!”). In past summers, I have crunched through books on Marx, World War One and Isaiah Berlin. Last summer, it was Turgenev. It’s not that I didn’t want to read these books; I did. But I know also myself too well. In the delirium of summer, we have the brief chance, perhaps, to act out of character. |