Summer Reading

Summertime, and the reading is easy.

It's summer, and I'm reading. A lot. Maybe more than is normal or healthy. But I just can't stop.

I finished out the school year with Arcadia by Iain Pears. As I said in an earlier post, it wasn't a perfect book, but it was the perfect book for me at that time. In fact, I will probably read it again, just to try to figure out what I liked so much in a book that got very mixed reviews. It reminded me a little bit of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and a little bit of David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks.

There was a week or more when I just didn't have time for reading (ugh, I can't even believe I typed that). That last week of grading and wrapping up the school year, and then a few days of curriculum mapping. I didn't read much, but I made a lot of lists of books that I planned to read.

Then, summer break. Oh, summer break, I love you.

One of the deepest, most profoundly delicious reading experiences of my life: day after day, sprawled on the bed in the guest bedroom, I reread Marcel Proust's Swann's Way (the Lydia Davis translation). The first time I read Swann's Way I was in my twenties. Now, after having experienced marriage, divorce, remarriage, and years of living and losing and loving, this book was so much more profoundly beautiful to me. This book deserves a full review--later.

Then I read a short novel by Lynne Hugo, Remember My Beauties. This was for a TLC Book Tour, and my review will appear in July.

I followed up that book with Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I've been meaning to read for years. Housekeeping is a beautiful, stark, lyrical novel, profoundly moving and strange. Now I can't wait to read Robinson's Gilead.

Now I'm a little more than one hundred pages into Snow by Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. This is another book I've been meaning to read for a long time. The novel's protagonist is a middle-aged Turkish poet returning to his country after years of exile; he visits a small city to report on an election, but even more importantly, to investigate a rash of suicides of young girls. So far I'm finding Snow strange, immersive, and dreamlike.

So: summer reading is going pretty nicely.

I'd love to know what other people are reading this summer. Let me know what you've been reading, or what you recommend!