Summer Reading

One of the great things about summer vacation has always been the unstructured time that allows reading for personal pleasure. The school year was always like a dark tunnel that allowed almost no time to read other than keeping up with a few essential periodicals and, of course, reading student essays. This is a pathetic position for an English teacher to find himself in, but the predictable pattern was that any novel I started after Labor Day was not likely to be finished until Christmas vacation, and if I dared to start something else at that time, it would not be finished until spring break. At that point I was likely to give up entirely until summer started. I could usually read a half dozen sizable novels during that glorious span, choosing and consuming books even more quickly while traveling abroad when there wasn't even household projects or gardening to get in the way.

Now, summer reading can extend year 'round, but I thought I'd use this blog space to record--perhaps seasonally--comments and reactions to what I'm reading. Jan used to ask Englophile readers to recount and review their summer reading in her first or second edition of the year, so naturally, anyone reading this (either of you!) is encouraged to add your own book picks or comment on whatever I've said here. Just click that "comments" link below and you're ready to blog.

THE DANTE CLUB/Matthew Pearl: A literary mystery set in post Civil War Boston/Cambridge. The sleuths here are the American poets Longfellow, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr., not Jr. the jurist., who does, though, figure here peripherally), their publisher and the historian George Washington Greene. Together they form the "Dante Club," whose devotion is the first American translation of Dante's Comedy. Before Longfellow, the mastermind of the project, and his helpers can even get through The Inferno, Boston's civic elite start falling one-by-one to a serial killer with a penchant for copying Dante's hellish designs. Our club realizes that America's cultural advancement depends on finding and taking out the killer without letting on their understanding of the pattern at work. A first novel; brilliant combination of detective fiction conventions with literary history. Wonderfully researched, buoyant writing.

VERNON GOD LITTLE/DBS Pierre: The quirkiest, most outrageous novel I read this summer. The stylistic homage to Catcher in the Rye is unmistakable, but Pierre makes Salinger seem a little timid and restrained in all directions. Teenage protagonist Vernon G. Little (middle name varies with context) takes us on an insightfully guided tour of trailer trash Texas in the grips of a school shooting hysteria. Black comedy with a silver lining. This is an invigorating must-read for teachers who have plowed though Catcher time and again.

THE LIFE OF PI/Yann Martel: I'd "conferenced" this with several students last year when it was Santa Barbara Reads' novel of the season, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much more there is to the book that I'd previously thought. This is great reading no matter how popular it gets. Martel starts with an authentic sounding "author's note," which blends logically and immediately into the novel so as to smoothly blur the distinction between fact and fiction. Perhaps I'm just gullible, but I got thinking this really happened. There's powerful commentary here about Man's relationship with animals and the essential nature of living creatures. Controlled, precise prose that deserves the accolades heaped on it.

THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE/T.C. Boyle: Boyle writes 'em faster than I can read 'em, but it's hard not to get caught up in his characters and their lives. This one takes us to Battle Creek, Michigan in the days of the charismatic health nut Dr. John Kellogg and the breakfast cereal boom, sharing a good deal of territory with Boyle's other tale of American health fads for the pre-income tax monied class. It becomes clear just how much ground vegetarianism and alternative medicine has had to make up to reach modern-day acceptance.

PASADENA/David Ebershoff: A big, sprawling, melodramatic novel, consciously retreading ground first covered by the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy. In fact, the opening chapters welcome readers with a brilliant evocation of Wuthering Heights re-set in Southern California in the waning months of World War II. Having grown up in Pasadena, it is particularly easy to follow Ebershoff's meticulously detailed narrative and descriptions, but the story is about interesting people as well as interesting times. It's an intricately built love story of grand scope that makes you want to tell someone "the story," just as it's being set out in the novel by a real estate agent providing what amounts to "full disclosure" for an important piece of property she's trying to move. Jan hates it when I do that, so it has been difficult keeping it to myself. The writing takes us back to an earlier era when people felt things deeper but talked less than we do now--or at least than contemporary authors portray. It's satisfying reading, but takes a little getting used to if you're coming off something spare, understated, or persistently ironic-- John Updike or Phillip Roth, for instance--but give it a chance to grow on you.

Happy reading,
Chas.