« In Which Books Are The Natural Analog To Summer »

Summer Reading

by BARBARA GALLETLY

I love the summer, love simply being warm and nearly naked amongst tons of strangers, and I love the moment I fall into the first wave and lose my breath in cold water.

But there is another part of me that has a terrible time trying to sit down in the sun and concentrate for very long — the page is too white, the contrast of the text too high, my floaters bounce around my eyeballs and I worry about what I should do (move!) or why or when I should do it (soon, anyway), or how to get home (it will be difficult unless I leave now) or whether I’m wasting time or being antisocial (yes!). Usual summer concerns? So for me it’s almost always a terrible time to pick up a long classic full of plot intrigue that I wish I’d already read.

This year summer is a particularly hyper-sensitive or frenetic or just “crazy” time of transition for me because I'm moving, and as I was reminded recently by Lydia Brotherton, I have to deal with my Saturn return issue too. So I’m now scrambling around, sorting and packing and saying goodbye again, lying awake at night with wide eyes.

Those night times I feel less and less like myself and more like Esther in the beginning of The Bell Jar. (Well not entirely, but that’s another fantastic thing to read in the summer, of course.) Sharp pinging around the brain prevents me from thinking too straight about anything practical, though that's really all I should be doing.

Perhaps consequently I’ve been gravitating towards reading something with a meditative or challenging quality, books I can start and finish in bed and worry about the rest of the night or while I’m supposed to be concentrating on something else. There is something quite serious about each of these books, but each is also complete and alive and beautiful, and please disregard my descriptions in favor of writing down these titles and walking right over to the bookstore or the library.

From the Observatory by Julio Cortázar

From the Observatory begins “This hour that can arrive sometimes outside of all hours, a hole in the net of time…” The book itself will become one of those hours. I was published first in Spanish in 1972 but came out in English from Archipelago Press this June 15. The galley was the best thing I took from the Book Expo this last May.

The short volume is illustrated with really stunning photographs of the Jaipur observatories built by Maharajah Jai Singh almost three hundred years ago. The images are incorporated almost seamlessly into the text, which actually tells us a lot about the mysteriously difficult life cycle of the European eel, Anguilla anguilla, and how the constant migration of the species corresponds to Jai Singh’s undying monuments to the night.

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

If you have never read Clarice Lispector please do so right away. Lispector, a journalist and (I think more importantly) a brilliant fiction writer, died of cancer the year this book was published. Here in telling the story of telling the story of a destitute and unattractive young woman named Macabea, she casts a net over the pain of living life, especially when poor and hungry, and that of choosing and writing a story.

Lispector pokes at why one might or must write, the writer’s ability to expose the truth or even just a true story. And all the while the novella overflows with the urgency of the author’s and narrator’s and main character’s disturbing mortality. 

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

You’ve probably all read this but I can’t help myself. First of all, Anne Carson — swoon. Secondly, I am eager to read If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, but I haven’t done it yet.

Towards the end of this magical little book the main character, Geryon, develops a photograph of his first lover, Herakles, and finds him aged, “watching likeness come groping out of the bones” in the acid bath. Herakles has perhaps become aware of the pain he has wrought. Geryon feels the flesh of his own power too, and in this way he emerges substantially from the verse. This is certainly a great metaphor for the book as well. I guess what I mean when I say magical is simply “inspirational,” in the strictest sense, although the word has been treated so unfortunately of late. 

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis

Have you read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis? If not, give yourself a present. There are several reasons to keep it close at hand at all times. 

Cursivism by Will Hubbard

Will described his book as a collection of riddles rather than poems. Each poem is self-contained and filled to its brink. Each is composed in uncomplicated prose, but the miniature portraits contained in each one are stunning, often quite complex. I only mean it in a positive way when I say this is an excellent book to read in bits, moments when a pause becomes essential or inescapable.  

A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

I think it might be the heat that plucks out my heart and mounts it on my sleeve. But anyway, even if you aren’t in love (better if not, and if you read these you’ll see what I mean) I think the summer is a good time to think about it, and so doing to reassure your heart that it still works.

A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes and Bluets by Maggie Nelson fit into this strange collection of books I’m suggesting. By lumping them together I don’t mean they have anything to do with one another, though they aren not completely unrelated, but each is wickedly upsetting as a consequence of being just so perceptive about the things and feelings that hurt us most. 

I have been thinking about taking back my statement about classic-long-wish-I’d-read-it novels because actually I really want to read The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein. I have been fascinated with the idea of cutting a book in three ever since I read Janet Malcolm’s really fabulous biography of Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Speaking of which, I do suggest Two Lives as well because you won’t be able to stop thinking about it. Also I believe it is Anne Carson in Autobiography of Red who points out that the period between Homer and Gertrude Stein was "a difficult interval for a poet." I can’t help but agree — it’s surely just my limited education talking.

Barbara Galletly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. She twitters here and tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the best bookstores in New York and Los Angeles.

This is the second in a series. You can read the first part here, you can read the third part here, and you can read the fourth part here.

Photographs of the author by Trent Wolbe.

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Our Novels, Ourselves

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, Elisabeth Donnelly, Lydia Brotherton, Brian DeLeeuw)

Part Two (Alice Gregory, Jason Zuzga, Andrew Zornoza, Morgan Clendaniel, Jane Hu, Ben Yaster, Barbara Galletly, Elena Schilder, Almie Rose)

Part Three (Alexis Okeowo, Benjamin Hale, Robert Rutherford, Kara VanderBijl, Damian Weber, Jessica Ferri, Britt Julious, Letizia Rossi, Will Hubbard, Durga Chew-Bose, Rachel Syme, Amanda McCleod, Yvonne Georgina Puig)

The 100 Greatest Novels

Why and How To Write

Part One (Joyce Carol Oates, Gene Wolfe, Philip Levine, Thomas Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Don DeLillo, Anton Chekhov, Mavis Gallant, Stanley Elkin)

Part Two (James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov)

Part Three (W. Somerset Maugham, Langston Hughes, Marguerite Duras, George Orwell, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, Robert Creeley, John Steinbeck)

Part Four (Flannery O'Connor, Charles Baxter, Joan Didion, William Butler Yeats, Lyn Hejinian, Jean Cocteau, Francine du Plessix Gray, Roberto Bolano)

Comments

[Alex]

I would like to actually consume Autobiography of Red. Like, eat it. That's weird isn't it? But, oh man, it's so incredible; I hope you love it. I'm a little jealous that I can't read it again for the first time.

[Patrice]

I am leaving for the bookstore!!

[stephen]

I'm a big Cortazar fan but did not know about "From the Observatory." Cool.