Laced with the Promise of Summer
Summer Reading 2024!
June 15, 2024
The last waxing moon, I drove my 20-year-old SUV across town, afraid I’d miss my flight. Lyft prices shot up to 90 dollars for a 15-minute ride and an angel right here on earth got me to New Haven’s tiny municipal airport for my flight.
It had been five long months since I was in the land of music and dreams, of fables and cricks that rise. The warmth of home and the arms of my Mama. The smell of hotwater cornbread on cast iron. It was long past time for a one-way back to Music City.
The lush, the green, the hot-as-skillet-grease air thick with humidity that curls my hair and envelops each of us in a invisible cloud, the music, the cicadas far as the eye can see, the madness, the Friday nights turned Saturday mornings—I missed it all like a piece of my soul after months away. A few weeks in, and I cancelled my June return ticket in favor of an August one.
This is one last Nashville summer.
Like my summer plans, this book list changed quite a bit since I first drafted Summer Reading in late April. There are some stunners coming in fall that would have been for this season, but the wait is a worthy one.
In the interim, these novels, some old, some new, some close, some far away, are at the forefront of my consciousness as we amble into long days and firefly nights.
The door to other worlds is open, friends, and books like these are the keys. If you do nothing else these sun-bathed months, read something that calls to you. Even better? Get off the phone and live.
The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton
In the days that the sun never set on the Crown,1 ships aplenty set sail full of Englishmen bound for a new life in one of the far reaches of the empire. Like the True History of the Kelly Gang or the gunslinging cowboys of the Wild Wild West, New Zealand had its own crowd fighting for the King of the New World:
Gold.
Like California, New Zealand had its own gold rush, and Eleanor Catton’s Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries takes us all there. The adventure, the danger, the conflicting loyalties and intensity of survival in the rugged wild make for an epic bright as constellations.
The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa
Restless and impatient from being cooped up in the house too long, I borrowed the car and drove down the street to one of my favorite places in the city: The Bookshop. I had one plan: a blind date with a book. Shop owner Joelle handpicks novels and covers them with brown paper slips, a description sticker on the outside your only clue to what dances within the cover. No name. No author. Nothing else.
I walked out with three.
But the real surprise was Fernando, literary icon of Portugal whose magnum opus sat on one shelf of the store. The Book of Disquiet.
As I opened the cover, alongside glowing reviews from every major magazine under the sun, was this peculiar “endorsement”:
I couldn’t help but laugh and add it to my growing stack.
Considered by many to be the most important work in Portuguese literature, The Book of Disquiet is an autobiographical novel that bends genre between fact and fiction and telling his own life (sort of?) between two fictional characters: Vicente Guedes and Bernardo Soares.
I created various personalities within myself. I create them constantly. Every dream, as soon as it is dreamed, is immediately embodied by another person who dreams it instead of me. In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally.
To act is to exile oneself.
Based on that quote alone, I don’t know what to expect. And that’s exactly how I like it.
The Girls, by Emma Cline
Emma Cline’s literary debut The Girls is a story of women whose lives were upended by the Manson cult. Where news stories and documentaries focus on this man, myth, legend, Cline centers his victims in a similar approach to Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women about the victims of Ted Bundy.
This literary remembrance is a refreshing approach, highlighting the ordinary people whose lives were derailed by madmen instead of making famous the perpetrators, giving their attention-seeking narcissistic tendencies the exact exposure they desired.
Already, Cline opens the novel with a chilling line:
I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.
Swimming in the Dark, by Tomasz Jedrowski
Translated from Polish, Tomasz Jedrowski’s debut novel is a love story with all the longing a good romance needs. I can feel the asymptotic realization of desire waft up from its pages. Along with the summer romance comes a complication, but not in a clichéd way—the lovers are both young men in communist Poland, where their tryst is (very, very) illegal. To make matters even more complicated, one is sold out for the socialist cause, while the protagonist is just the type to defect.
I don’t know how many days we stayed at the lake, because each one was like a whole world, every moment new and unrepeatable. In a way these felt like the first days of my life, as if I’d been born by that lake and its water and you. As if I’d shed a skin and left my previous life behind.
The Safekeep, by Yael Van Der Wouden
Just after I said to my favorite professors and close grad school friends that “my summer reading is completely out of control,” and truly, I said it so many times, I got an email with a new release about post-World War II Netherlands and suspense and lots of things that made me add it here.
In Overjissel, a rural province of the Netherlands, the craters from Allied and Axis bombs have been filled and buildings repaired from the destructions of war. It feels more and more like people can finally move on. That is, until an unexpected visitor whose ways unsettle protagonist Isabel reveals the war is very much alive, even in their home of country idyll.
Reading Challenge Summer Update
June’s theme: Book by a First Nations author
My pick: There There, by Tommy Orange
Graduate and creative writing professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts Tommy Orange’s There There was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Its long-awaited sequel, Wandering Stars, was released earlier this year.
This story follows twelve people of First Nations descent that all travel to Oakland for the Big Powwow, and as we learn about them, they discover truths about their connections to one another that are unforgettable.
I barely read the synopsis because I just want to be surprised. This one has been a long time coming.
July’s theme: Book-turned-movie set in another country
My pick: In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Álvarez. Set in the Dominican Republic.
At the time fascists tried to rule the world and almost succeeded, as Hitler and his cronies drew the eyes of global leaders, there was a man that foolishly fancied himself a general, stars and all, on just over half a tiny island in the Caribbean. After a corrupt rise to power, Rafael Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist for 31 years until his assassination in 1961.
Through his reign, he was challenged by many brave souls. Three of them were the Mirabal sisters, all young women active in underground efforts to overthrow him. Today, they are hailed as heroes in the struggle for freedom, and their house in the countryside is a memorial museum.
Novelist and creative writing professor Julia Álvarez recounted their story in In the Time of the Butterflies. The novel was made into a film of the same name, released in 2001 and starring Salma Hayek.
August’s theme: Inside the mind of an animal
My pick: Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt
Grieving her late husband, Tova Sullivan starts a job at an aquarium on the night shift. She makes an unexpected friend in an octopus. Over time, it comes to the surface that this new friend knows what happened to Tova’s son, who disappeared in the Puget Sound years ago without a trace.
Another great choice for this one would be Lessons in Chemistry, which I wrote about here.
Aside from these, I have been loving the closeness with family, the hours-long conversations catching up with friends who have been like sisters to me for 10, 15, 20 years. I’ve been reading (oh so slowly) this feature about the journey of a monarch butterfly, novelists talking craft and an Italian WWII diary in The Paris Review and so! much! Bitter Southerner.
Long after the blanket of stars is over my head and my hours of rest before another long, hot day lessen and lessen, I nestle down beneath the covers, reach over to the bedside table, pick a book, any book, crack open the cover, and dream.
I hope you’ll join me with one of these or a Summer Reading pick of your own. <3
Next up is Part II of Country 31! You can read Part I here—I won’t spoil the country reveal if you haven’t seen it yet…
See you soon,
Sarah
P.s. If anyone here fancies Swedish pastry, I just wrote a mini vegetarian guide to Stockholm including the one local delicacy everyone should try if they have the chance. Bakeries near and far may well carry it, and I’m sure a recipe blog or two has a guide to make it at home!
P.p.s. Title is from Swimming in the Dark, page 18.
That being said, this was still reality of the British empire until…2022?