Summer Spines

Three weeks. Five books. One chair.

The mountains are blooming and the light is long and I have a chair picked out. There is a lake near it.

I have published every Thursday since October and I love it and I am not going to be dramatic about taking a break for three weeks. It is July. That is the whole reason.

The plan is to sit down with something enormous and be no use to anyone for as long as my kids will allow, and to look up and not know how long I have been sitting there. Everyone else is off on their own glorious open air adventure. So am I.

Read something this summer that has no argument anywhere in it. That’s the really good stuff. That’s most of it, actually.

Here’s where I’d point you.

Land, by Maggie O’Farrell. Ireland on either side of the Great Hunger, from the writer who did Hamnet, which is still the book I reach for when I am trying to understand what grief does to someone. This one is bigger and it does not flinch from the size of what it took on. If you take one thing off this list, take this, and give it a whole week, and do not read it in twenty-minute pieces before bed. It deserves an afternoon and a long light.

The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), by Rabih Alameddine. Raja is sixty-three, gay, a beloved philosophy teacher at the high school he himself attended, and he lives in a small Beirut apartment with his mother, who takes his wanting a closed door as a personal injury. Six decades, told out of order, nested. It won the National Book Award and the whole thing is the voice. He is so funny, and so charming, and so hard to stop listening to, that you are most of the way into a war before you notice he has walked you there.

The Calamity Club, by Kathryn Stockett. Oxford, Mississippi, 1933, the Depression closing in and Prohibition running out, told by a twenty-four-year-old with no options and an eleven-year-old in an orphanage who has already learned not to count on anyone. It is six hundred and thirty-four pages, Stockett took seventeen years after The Help to write it.

Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer. An American with no Italian takes a job he does not understand for an elderly Baronessa in a villa falling down around both of them. Greer won for Less, this one is looser and happier and completely unbothered.

Into the Blue, by Emma Brodie. AJ wants to write for Saturday Night Live and ends up, years later, cast opposite the boy from that one summer, who is famous now, in a science fiction show neither of them takes seriously. It spans decades and it commits to a strangeness that some readers bounce right off and some don’t. Brodie is writing about timing, which is most of what a love story is ever actually about.

See you in August.

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