In Which We Read To Live And Vice Versa

Summer Reading

by KARA VANDERBIJL

It seems unnatural to read in the summer, when the only thing keeping us inside is the occasional electric storm. That is why it is of utmost importance that we find the books that enhance our experience of it rather than taking us outside of it. There are books that would prolong your best vacations and pillow your head in the sand. Do not read anything that you will take seriously. If you must, purchase a book on tape and listen to it while in your vehicle en route to a campsite in Vermont. The machines that keep us alive throughout the rest of the year become obsolete in these warm months. We are quick to believe the same of books. In reality this is the most beneficial time to read, outside the constraints of academic or meteorological obligation.

Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute

Most memoirs of childhood are summer watercolors. When we were children, summers were long — or at least we remember them as such. Most of Sarraute’s autobiography, penned when she was over eighty years old, takes place in the winter. Within it she converses with a failing memory. Questioning the significance of events one must recall using secondary sources or reconstruct with logic, she shares all the sensations of her earliest recollections: the color of a sofa she destroyed with a pair of scissors, the cool indifference of her mother.

Sarraute’s tendency to bend literary convention shines through in this, her last of works, as she uses her own life story to question the human ability to remember. Because she does not know for sure that the events of her childhood happened in the sequence or in the manner she recalls, she must use the gift of invention to create a life for herself.

Book of My Mother by Albert Cohen

Cohen disguises his memoir as a eulogy to his mother, which will irk you slightly as the book progresses. I had no trouble finishing this short reminiscence of a move from Corfu to Marseille, of marginalization as foreigners, of the complex relationship between a Jewish male and his mother — but I did have trouble liking Albert all the way through.

His mother represents nothing less than a female ideal, the connection to another world and the safety of traditions; his regrets about their relationship read like the ranting of a lovelorn teenager. One particularly poignant moment describes Cohen’s embarrassment about his mother’s accent and her insistence on knowing his whereabouts at all times. His shame transforms her into a bizarre conglomeration of the Madonna bending over her child in simple adoration, and of the Christ with stigmata. Plow through the overwhelming waves of sentimentalism to find his purpose; the story will soothe any tension out of a family vacation.

Losing North by Nancy Huston

“To be disoriented is to lose the east,” roughly translates the first line of Huston’s book. This is familiar to me. To lose the east in Chicago is to forget, almost absolutely, where anything is. Earlier I was trying to find a popular Italian ice shop in the neighborhood. “Where is the lake?” my companion reminded me gently when I very nearly lost my head at an intersection. We followed the grid of this city back to its steel giants and remembered. You will relate to Huston’s small essay best if you are a third culture kid, but even a small trip overseas will affirm the brilliance of its thoughts on the mottled cultures and languages of the expatriate.

Huston expresses this jet-lagged sense of vertigo better than any other writer I have encountered. She plays with her bilingualism like other writers play with literary allusion, claiming to have found her voice when she mastered French during her years at a Canadian university. As the most empathetic and amusing of travel writings, it should find its way into your carry-on.

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert translated by Francis Steegmuller

It is becoming apparent that I am incapable of reading anything in the summer that was not first written in French. What Flaubert’s letters say about him and the intricacy of his art delights anyone who has spent significant time reading his novels. “I’ll try to arrive some evening about six,” he writes to Louise Colet, his longtime lover. “We’ll have all night and the next day. We’ll set the night ablaze! I’ll be your desire, you’ll be mine, and we’ll gorge ourselves on each other to see whether we can be satiated. Never! No, never! Your heart is an inexhaustible spring, you let me drink deep, it floods me, penetrates me, I drown. Oh! The beauty of your face, pale and quivering beneath my kisses!” Tell me if you can find the same man in these pages as the one who knew how to best kill his darlings.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

To read this fascinating account of the World’s Fair and the people who had a hand in it is to become a true Chicagoan, I soon found out. Not for the faint of heart, Larson’s book follows the architects who built the fairgrounds — the “White City” — as well as America’s first serial killer, H.H Holmes, who victimized young women at the fair.

Do not pretend you are not fascinated with death and the men who choose to bring it upon others. Why would Larson choose to parallel the creation of a monster and the creation of the World’s Fair? The comparison is obvious — men at their best, men at their worst — and it employs all the good-versus-evil jargon we appreciate in a summer read.

Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Robbe-Grillet returns to one particular scene repeatedly in his novel: on a tropical veranda, a husband observes his wife and their neighbor, hidden in the penumbra whispering while ice cubes melt in their glasses. Although the tale rests on that most piercing of suspicions — the suspicion of unfaithfulness — Robbe-Grillet visits the setting more often, describing in painstaking detail the banana plantation, the way the sunlight hits shaded windows and angles on the grass.

This hostile environment, and the constant revisiting of the moment on the veranda, illumines the husband’s jealous obsession, as much as Desdemona’s handkerchief did for Othello. There is quite a bit of fruit in this novel. Is it possible to eat anything else in the summer? Very little satiates in the heat except the inkling that some other truth lurks beneath the details of the tiles underfoot, the soft linens of your clothing and the exchange of words in a moist evening. The dialogue in the novel rings false, but what is there to be said in August?

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Some Southern acquaintances were telling me about how you cannot live in downtown Charleston unless you are of old money, and then proceeded to laud the Confederate flag. This story should be lesson enough to read Stockett’s literary debut, should you read any bestseller in the next months. It alternates between the first-person narratives of privileged white females and their black maids in 1960s Mississippi, thus exploring civil rights on almost every level of society.

There are practically no male characters in this book, but I have not yet decided whether or not Stockett did this on purpose or whether she does not know how to write them. What the novel lacks in profundity it makes up for with its unabashed treatment of themes we thought to let lie at rest forever with Harper Lee. Read it before August 12th, and then go cool off in a dark theatre with the movie.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather

The land is a wild, unpredictable thing, which you will forget until you run out of gas somewhere in West Texas with no Dairy Queen in sight. In Cather’s short masterpiece, several immigrant families attempt to tame it. Two characters share the kiss of infidelity at a gypsy wedding. People die off regularly, and a kitten is rescued in the first few pages. Must I convince you of its other merits? I do not know if you have been to a place lacking in human presence, but I have. It is a frightening thing to be alone with nothing but the sky.

What Cather’s characters dream of most is security and protection — the very things that the earth cannot give them, and that their conflicts prohibit them from giving to each other. We do not love this book as much as we love Cather’s My Antonia, because we have forgotten what it is like to want soil and to live at the mercy of the land. In writing about people that are strange to us in culture and desire, Cather reminds us of our roots.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find an archive of her work on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. You can find her website here.

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

jayne mansfield

"Desire (piano demo)" - Alela Diane (mp3)

"Long Way Down (acoustic demo)" - Alela Diane (mp3)

"Eastward Still" - Alela Diane (mp3)

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)

In Which We Find You Something To Read This Summer

Summer Reading

by JANE HU

This is the first in a series.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

I know. You're thinking, "Duh." I know. But I had not read Middlemarch until this summer. It always loomed before me in its sheer and sprawling magnitude, which is also what makes it the paradigmatic summer read. Dorothea Brooke quickly becomes a commonplace in any book-nerd’s vocabulary, but she’s not by any means the only actor in Eliot’s novel. There's Tertius Lydgate — the over-ambitious doctor whose dreams begin to unravel, rather tragically, from the start — and Casaubon, who, presented before any romantic girl, should invoke all the important questions (“How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!”; “Mr. Casaubon is so sallow”; “Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?”). Even small characters round out, if only due to the imaginative range inspired by Eliot’s sympathetic eye. Not only witty and intelligent, Eliot is endlessly mature in her insights. The sentences that make Middlemarch a page-turner are also nuggets of enlightened gold.

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh came to resent the fact that Brideshead Revisted was his most celebrated book. The lush sentimentality of Brideshead makes it the novel most unlike his others. Nearly two decades after its publication, Waugh would do, perhaps, what he does best: satirize the extravagant manor drama in the conclusion to his war trilogy, Sword of Honour.

The savage ironist comes out with both pistols cocked in A Handful of Dust. Tony and Brenda are married, but that doesn’t stop Brenda from her affair with John Beaver. Lies accumulate and both sides seem to know the score, but that doesn’t stop them from keeping up all pretenses to sincerity. There will be jokes you’ll want to retell your friends — jokes that will make you (I swear!) LOL — but these won’t translate well out of context. They’ll just have to read the whole damn thing themselves. 

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

Incidentally, Tessa Hadley recently recommended this novel on her list, Five Best Books: Betrayals of Love. One would be remiss not to agree with Hadley: The Heat of the Day is most strikingly a love story. But it is also a postwar narrative, stitched with the precarious threads of paranoia, espionage, interrogation, and, yes, finally betrayal. Bowen places her characters amid the foggy hours of summer’s dusk, where a step toward the bar means to risk confessing — or leaking — too much information.

As heroine of this detective tale, Stella Rodney exemplifies the double agent: torn between Nazi spy Robert Kelway and his pursuant, the counter-espionage agent Robert Harrison. Bowen’s choice of names does not, of course, result from carelessness. The entire novel rivets the reader with twisting wordplay that makes the text itself into a document to be scanned with scrutinizing care.

Less than Angels by Barbara Pym

There are a lot of modernist lady writers who have unjustly fallen out of vogue, print, and the ever-contemporizing discourse on the canon (which says, really, so much about the canon). It’s not just that a lot of intelligent texts penned by women have been prematurely left behind, but also that so much delightfully entertaining literature has been kept from our hungry eyes.  

Less than Angels is an academic satire on a group of anthropologists at the African Institute in London and it is better written, smarter, and sharper than that other one (Lucky Jim). If writing today, Pym might disseminate some sassy social commentary on a blog that would, each time, tap into a cultural tic. It’s not too late, though, to read her now. 

The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan

The Comfort of Strangers is a slim book, but that’s not the reason anyone reads something ten times. No matter how familiar, McEwan’s sentences keep on giving. Each time you return to Mary and Colin lounging in their Venetian hotel, you’ll be charged with a greater sense of uncertainty and anticipation despite how — or more likely because — you know the ending. He’s a writer who can do that. Every new detail will slice deeper as the prelude to an impending break from innocence.

Taking directly from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, McEwan lures his lovers into the same labyrinthine city and subjects them to an infusion of pornography, sex, and carnality that, at times, resembles a Lynchian daydream. A heat emanates from the novel — interwoven with a blur of white linen — that might make your beach experience seem relatively cooler. 

Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

“Everything is Green” — a short (short!) story in the collection titled above — was the first thing I ever read by Wallace. It is also my favorite thing by him. Those 700 or so words are like panacea for the heart. They will make you feel things you thought your ironic, discerning, postmodern non-self no longer had the fragility to feel. Those last three sentences will knock you about a bit and leave you searching for those lost pieces that will help recall your vulnerability again. Wallace is at his best when he intimates that love still has the capacity to make one culpable — for potentially anything or anyone — in this world.

Aside from “Everything is Green,” the other stories are punctuated with subtitles or historical quotes from magazines that make them perfect for reading in transit. Once, immersed in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (the longest of them all), I started riding the same line back and forth, end to end, in order to finish it. I probably should have just gotten off, but Wallace’s words are terribly conducive to motion. Sentences like “The lover tries to traverse: there is motion of travel, except no travel,” while seductively ambiguous, are also profoundly tender. In "Little Expressionless Animals,” Alex Trebek asks, "Is there such a thing as an intellectual caress?" Yes! Certainly! But, don’t forget, Wallace goes far beyond the head. A Wallace’s sentence is perpetually "giving up its shape in a gesture that expresses that shape. See?" So that content— thought — becomes also a gesture, a caress. 

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys might be the darker companion piece to Out of Sheer Rage on this list. Both narrators seek to complete their magnum opuses. Both recognize, rather openly, how this more or less won’t happen. Both continue onwards with the task. It is this persistent faith — overpowering all futility and shame — which makes Chabon’s protagonist and Dyer’s narrator both so exasperatingly sympathetic.

Like Dyer’s book, Wonder Boys is madly playful, but Chabon makes his protagonist even more self-willed in his delusions that, because we grudgingly care about him, it often hurts. Grady Tripp embodies the despondent professor and fading author as he blunders through Chabon’s campus novel, besieged by his own self-contradictions. At first I think I hate him, but then he opens his mouth and says something beautiful. 

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer

Dyer’s pseudo-memoir begins with aims to tackle an academic book on D. H. Lawrence, and amounts to a 232 page first-person narration of this maddening tussle. While Lawrence’s name appears on nearly each page, the novel is only tangentially about the author. Dyer is too distracted and restless to get down to the task of writing, so he goes travelling instead, bounding back and forth between London, Rome, Paris, Greece…unable to settle anywhere for long since stillness immediately brings only dissatisfaction. We follow the breathless pace of his mental and physical journey (where not much, honestly, happens) eagerly. The book is a viciously funny monologue — a couple hundred pages of exquisitely readable whining. It’s also a travelogue, punctuated by rather stunning philosophical insight and sometimes, goodness forbid, even literary criticism.

At one point, Dyer questions the novelistic form, as he yearns for something more compatible with lived experience: notes, letters, thoughts that exemplify the act of becoming rather than retrospectively pieced-together states of being. His phrases reenact the errant (and frequently banal) movements of self-destructive behavior in ways that are therapeutic to the reader and, presumably, also writer. He wishes the book to be “not a history of how I recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing.” It’s not merely “look-no-hands” prose, for we actually believe Dyer in his aimless, sometimes careless, search for faith from unexpected sources. Finally, you will laugh.

The Giant, O'Brien by Hilary Mantel

Are you fascinated with lists? Tabulations? Catalogues? Collectors? Hunters? Binomial nomenclature? Language systems? Historical fiction set in the 18th century London (but written in the 1990s)? Enlightenment ideals? Giants? Freaks? Monsters? Frankenstein? Diseases? Bodies? Animal fables? Sapient pigs? The distinctions between moral pain, physical pain, and emotional pain? The very history of pain? The incommunicability of pain? Regarding the pain of others? Allusions? Expostulations on print capitalism and commodity culture? Ireland? Or perhaps Scotland? Medicine? Experiments? Surgery? Corpses? Crimes? Bioethics? Torture? Cruelty? Sex? Science? Wonder? Magic? Cures? The afterlife of pain? The afterlife itself? Whichever way you spin it, Mantel’s stories nearly recommend themselves. The novel stitches together the narratives of the eponymous Giant and a scientist-of-questionable-ethics John Hunter. It will be unlike anything you have ever encountered. 

The Complete Letters of Henry James: Vol 1 & 2

James wrote a lot of beautiful novels, but most of them might stand to be too meandering in their verbosity and too static in their action to amount to any riotous summer reading. Letters are my answer to bite-sized James without being sacrilegious (anyway, it’s rather unimaginable that anyone might abridge him). James wrote a lot of beautiful novels because, well, everything that man touched turned to crystal-refracted insight, so you can damn well bet that the letters are better prose than most could ever dream up, given infinite time, a keyboard, and a backspace. “There’s no telling where my pen may take me,” he muses to his mother in 1869.

Describing the American individual, James writes, “There is but one word to use in regard to them — vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Their ignorance — their stingy, defiant grudging attitude towards everything European— their perpetual reference of all things to some American standard or precedent which exists only in their own unscrupulous wind-bags—and then our unhappy poverty of voice, of speech and of physiognomy—these things glare at you hideously.” (Other times he checks himself: “But I must stay my gossiping hand. . . .”) But James was a grand American—the best kind there is; the type that leaves America for some time. Frequently, James would sign off: “Thy lone and loving exile.” Beyond all this, his correspondences offer a counterpoint to James as the mythic man of studious seclusion, where one can experience — almost unmediated — the reeling joy, the vitalizing discernment, that is so crucially tied to his genius. 

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

For many, the defining feature of Netherland is its status as a post-9/11 novel. Others emphatically describe it as first and foremost a postcolonial re-writing of The Great Gatsby. It’s also a detective story set in the dazed summer months. Hans van der Broek — Dutch-born American immigrant — is left in New York by his London-bound wife and son. He subsequently befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, an American dreamer from Trinidad. However you read it, Netherland is politically thoughtful, while also rhetorically sensitive and stunning.

O’Neill handles Hans’s ethical impasses (no matter how confusedly they compound) with quiet sympathy, and treats cricket as the moral barometer that might finally redeem us. If so many “readable” novels don’t leave enough breathing space to let you simply think, then Netherland is an exception: “I was bowled over. I had never considered the possibility of undiscovered factors.” What the novel says is underpinned with the swiftest strokes of intelligence — a plurality of “factors.” Yet, how it is said never fails to move on an individual level. Be careful. You might end up feeling the right emotions for the wrong reasons. 

Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

In the fall of third year, I took to putting those accumulating New Yorkers to use and began toting them to the gym. I’d ride the elliptical and read until either the machine or the small print wore me out. I’d stumble along the treadmill while quietly mouthing Sam Shephard’s dialogue. It was through this routine that I discovered Moore’s story "Childcare", which had, by the time of my reading it, been expanded into a novel, The Gate at the Stairs. This I would not have promptly registered had I not been so enraptured with Moore’s protagonist, Tassie Keltjin, as to Google her. Needless to say, the novel was bought. It’s a Chekhovian bildungsroman set in the American Midwest — this generation’s version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for small town 20-somethings.

Full of lyrical turns and natural imagery, The Gate at the Stairs is compelling even when depicting the most quotidian phenomena. Tassie goes to college and babysits a recently adopted mixed-race baby. She falls in love, sort of. She grows up. Sort of. The most common criticism of Moore’s novel is that Tassie sounds wildly wise beyond her years — her voice is too witty, too mature, too world-weary. But, I’m thinking, “Nah, girls are sad when they’re twenty. They frequently long to feel heavy. At least I did.” For me, Moore got Tassie right.

Jane Hu is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer currently based in Berlin. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels.

"Slow Motion" - Patrick Wolf (mp3)

"The Days" - Patrick Wolf (mp3)

"Time of My Life" - Patrick Wolf (mp3)

More Books To Fill Your Idle Time

Part One (Tess Lynch, Karina Wolf, Elizabeth Gumport, Sarah LaBrie, Isaac Scarborough, Daniel D'Addario, 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)

In Which Summer Reading Lasts As Long As You Want It To

Summer Reading

by KARINA WOLF

Compleet Molesworth (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle)

Hilariously illustrated, the Molesworth series recounts the eponymous character's years at St. Custard's, a 1950s English boarding school. Half the fun is deciphering the slang; the anti-hero's misadventures prefigure Harry Potter and Burgess' Nadsat lingo. Also clears up any niggling questions you might have about parts of speech:

Social snobery. A gerund 'cuts' a gerundive:

Against Nature (Joris-Karl Huysmans)

For the budding aesthete and all levels of control freak (meaning, of course, all New Yorkers), Huysmans offers a solution for anyone who wants to escape the discomfort and ennui of seaside and summer. I took another look during a bad trip to Nettuno, which is the Italian twin city to Belmar, NJ.

This is anti-beach reading in the best sense. A wealthy Parisian retreats to a country house in order to devote himself to a life of aesthetic refinement and dies as a result of his excessive pleasure. The book's plot is said to have directed the behavior of Wilde's Dorian Gray, causing the main character to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism.

You Can Get There From Here, Shirley MacLaine

I love Hollywood memoirs and I love Shirley MacLaine. She can be the most scenery-chewing of actors and often writes the purplest prose; she is also candid, funny and connected—she knows everyone. In this volume (there are quite a number), she chronicles working for the McGovern campaign and traveling as a delegate to China.

Scandinavian authors who I'm going to read: IMPAC award-winning Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses; the Norwegian Norwegians read instead of Nazi-sympathizer Knut Hamsun, Tarjei Versaas (The Ice Palace); and Scandinavian crime writer Henning Mankell (The Man Who Smiled).

The Best of Myles (Flann O'Brien)

Collected works of the Irish humorist best known to Lost viewership as author of The Third Policeman.

I just spent a month rooming in an 100 degree, un-air conditioned apartment with three PhD students who felt compelled to quote Homer at the dinner table: "That would be Chapman's Homer—the Homer of Keats? The version used by Shakespeare?"

These vignettes kept me from triple homicide. O'Brien, writing as Myles na gCopaleen, composed the columns for the Irish Times. Keats and Chapman are depicted as Hope and Crosby-esque pals whose misadventures conclude in puns worthy of the Marx brothers.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbles here. She twitters here.

"La Dolce Vita" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"Universe" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"Broadway" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"League Chicanos" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"Kissed By You" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)

"La Ritournelle" — Sebastien Tellier (mp3)