Summer Reading Bliss: A Retrospective

 "There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work;    and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs."  

~ Henry Ward Beecher 

Now that summer is drawing to a close I realise I am really going to miss my reading time.

There is nothing more definitive of summer for me than lying in the garden with the sun spotlighting the pages of a book (or indeed, as the case was most of the time this year - indoors at a window brailled with rain...) Summer may be the best time ever for reading. All that light. All that time outdoors. All that sense of escapism - of time unfolding in front of you as a wide golden berth, an endless horizon to fill with all kinds of dreaming and imagining, books the perfect propellers to imagination's engine.  Whole days to read, late nights and lazy mornings, and as such, the ability to immerse yourself completely in different worlds, uninterrupted. Bliss, in a word.

'One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.' ~ Jeanette Walls

This summer I have been gluttonous in my reading, navigating narratives on rainy days, sunny days, early mornings and late nights. There is always though, one defining book for me each summer, one that the whole summer seems to hang upon and reverberate from. A book that I can tell you exactly every nuance of what weather was doing while I was reading it; a book that led to more books of its kinds and countless imaginings; a book that dragged me hook, line and sinker into its world and still has not let go. That book for me, this year has to have been the recent Pulitzer prize-winning 'All the Light We Cannot See' by  Anthony Doerr. 

                                                                      

“The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”  
 

This book is, as the title declares, a story full of light. Light in its most essential essence - revealing every little detail so as to illuminate this particular period in time, this particular story of life. The story is set during WWII in France and Germany, following the fates of two characters whose lives are intertwined -  Marie-Laure, a young blind girl who flees to St-Malo with her father when the Germans invade Paris and a young German boy, Werner, as he leaves the orphanage of his younger years to join the Hitler Youth and from there, the war. It is a story of war, but also of fate and character, of beauty and light. The writing, as I've come to expect from Doerr, is crystalline, rich in metaphor and image, sparkling with a poetic delight. The characters are all so memorable, so well-drawn that it was hard to close the page on them and leave them behind. It's a big novel, 500+ pages, but I sped through it, riveted by the dual narrative, the simultaneous plotting, the suspense, the beautiful language, the stories within stories.

I ended up then searching out other WWII novels (Suite Francaise, The English Patient, The Book Thief) so enthralled was I in that time.  But the story that Doerr tells is so unique and original, so unusual, that my search I know will be in vain. His shimmers like a fairytale but is also underpinned with a psychology that is so precise, and told in a voice that is so full of poetry and faith and hope.  It's the kind of book that immerses you in its story so much, especially its setting of St-Malo, the sea-swept walled town in Brittany, you will have not left it entirely when the story is over. (I can still smell the salt and see the narrow streets, the snail-lined hideaway, the shell-like house...) Anyway, you can read my Goodreads review of it: here. I highly, heartily, recommend it. You will learn new and surprising things about a time that is well-documented and what is most vital in a piece of fiction, be transported completely and irrevocably to the world of the novel. 

My guilty escapist summer reads (don't you just love those?) included nearly all of American author Sarah Addison Allen's novels. The experience akin to the succulent sweetness of a summer evening, the smell of sugar on the air and thrill of pink in the sky.  Sarah Addison Allen's novels fall under the genre of magic realism, but added to that should be romantic magic realism and whimsy. Her stories are light whimsical concoctions where conflicts dissolve and romances blossom with the help of a few magical stimuli (think floral food spells, eccentric family traits and characters, moon lore, fairy godmother ghosts, animate books and animals, and emotions manifesting in transformative ways.) All set in the lovely surrounds of North Carolina with quaint little towns and endearing characters. The author has often been compared to Alice Hoffman, but I'd say much more sugar-coated and whimsy-orientated. (Garden Spells, is, a bit like Practical Magic, but sweeter and more gorgeously decorative with food recipes and the like.) For me, they are also reminiscent of Nicholas Sparks films, but definitely with more quirky than cutesy elements and more original set pieces than predictable story-lines. Whimsical, wonderful, sensuous, feel-good feasts. 

 

They are also girly without being chick-lit - i.e. entirely consumed with love-life conundrums. They are whimsical, foody, dreamy and emotional without smacking of sentimentality, light quest narratives of becoming true to oneself. In a word they're lovely, with all its soothing connotations: cushy, cosy, charming and warm-hearted. Delightful reads that will transport you to worlds ruled by the heart. They are books to enjoy lying in daisy-spotted grass, the sun glinting gold lattice light on the pages, books to script daydreams by, all tinged with that rose-tint happy horizon glow of dreams coming true, if you just follow your heart (definitely a selling-point for summer evenings, when the light is long and lovely and softens any hard reality into a malleable dream-able one.)

Sound like the ideal summer fodder to you? Yep, if you need a break from serious literature and are a lovers of all things whimsical, these are my recommended choice.  

Other highlights of my summer reads included the sci-fi thriller (and soon-to-be-movie-release) 'The Martian' by Andy Weir; wallowing in the gorgeous language and light of Hardy's 'Far From the Madding Crowd'; the brutally stunning debut 'The Enchanted' by Rene Denfield; and the lilting and lovely weather-appropriate 'History of the Rain' by Irish author Niall Williams.

They say a great book is like an event and well if that's the case,  a variety of great summer reads makes for an eventful time. Every book I read in summer seems to stay with me more. Maybe it hearkens back to days of school holidays with an open, endless parade of reading time and the freedom of self-chosen material. Days at the beach round-reading with friends or early mornings in the garden trying to unreel the knotted words of classics  into a language that brimmed with gold, in hours that seemed gleefully stolen from life's frantic advancing pace. Reading is perfect for summer as it slows time down, even freeze-frames certain instances. You can press a moment between the pages of a book as well and delicately as you can a flower; there are in every book I've read from summers past, fragments of that time's goings-on preserved in their pages. Each book is a marker and a map of a particular summer's best-kept moments. That's why I savour summer reading. And now that it is coming to an end, there is always a certain melancholy. With it too, all those sunlit moments of endless basking, daydreaming, whimsy, freedom, spontaneity, possibility and panache, that are the hallmarks of summer's narrative. But while it lasted, sheer unadulterated reading/living bliss. 

Ah.

So what have been your favourite summer reads? What stories have coloured your carefree days with narratives of worlds foreign and afar? Transported you on their magic carpet rides against a backdrop of pink-frilled skies and silken soft hours? What have  been the makings of your storied summer? Here's to holding its stories dear, both read and written, both imagined and real.

~ Siobhán

Summer Shorts: Hello August

 

 “The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”

~ Natalie Babbitt, 'Tuck Everlasting.'

A short post this, but the above quote is just too good not to share here. I used to think August was the end of summer, nothing but its last dying amber embers. The sliding descent towards the routine of September, a month for kindling regret. Until I came across this quote that is. The reprieve of this first week sounds tantalising, doesn't it? What a wonderful way of looking at it!

I admit I have been largely absent from here for the past few months. A combination of sunny days and other priorities (which have included reading - lots of yummy summer reading!) have been the reasons (not to mention the fact that the longer you stay away - the harder it is to come back.) But I have noticed too that responses to this blog have fallen off considerably. Maybe I need to blog more often. Snazz up my content. Or maybe it is just a seasonal thing... with a quietude falling on the blogosphere.

Anyway, I hope to be more prolific this month. There are just so many things I want to write about! And I hope to maybe hear from some of you then.

Enjoy the last of the summer!

~ Siobhán 

Summer Reading

I've been absent from this blog for almost this whole month now. Two reasons mainly: 1. I've been too busy reading and 2. it's been too sunny to be indoors on a lap-top for more than what is duly necessary!

See summer is the best time to read. Sunny days encourage lolling outside and what better lolling accessory than a book I ask? All up and down the country and on sandy beaches on far shores, books are burgeoning. Book sales must go up so much in summer. Despite all the new technology out there, people's preferred method of relaxation on holiday is to lay by a pool/beach/air conditioner reading a book. A book is a real summer essential, a suitcase must. Even people who aren't voracious readers take to it in the summertime. And voracious readers all-year-round? Well they just go mad in summer, buying books to the quantity and speed by which other people buy ice-cream.

Summers when I was young were the best summers and reading featured largely in them, as it does now. I remember building a 'reading tent' in the garden to stay out all evening cold-free and midge-free and read (it consisted most modestly of a sheet draped on the clothes-line with a chair and flashlight/candle encamped underneath).  And lots of books were devoured there: Point Horrors as a teenager, classics like Wuthering Heights as I got older. 

To me, the best thing about summer (then and now) is the infinite stretch of reading time available. There are no 9-to-5 routine restraints, the months open up as a grand horizon with all the time in the world to lounge and read. Or, so it seems.

There's something about reading in sunlight that is so amiable. It's good for you: you're getting fresh air and a suntan while you do it, improving your mind and your immune system. It also feels less isolated an activity and more inclusive and sociable. While in the garden poring over pages, you are comforted that, at this exact moment there are many others positioned in deckchairs in their gardens too, turning pages and getting lost in stories while the sun beams down as a mega reading light amp. At least one neighbour as far as the eye can see anyway, and many more if I head beach-wards (yes, reading is even a beach activity - imagine that! Like the glory of the geek who just slam-dunks their way into the basketball team!)

Summer reading also adds to the book I think. Let me explain. I remember most vividly the books I've read under the glow of sunshine. 'Cloud Atlas' last summer is one. To this day I still associate apocalyptic dystopian futures and our overall connectivity with fresh mint tea and a frayed straw sun hat. And the year before that it was 'Life of Pi' and its stormy seas of shipwreck that characterised summer days of 2011. Before that, I remember the addictive turning of pages of the swashbuckling escapist adventure of Isabel Allende's 'Zorro' while riding out summer rain with hot chocolate aplenty (since then, hot chocolate on a rainy day in summer has become a must).  Every summer it seems, there's a stand-out book that defines the summer for me.

This year, my biggest 'summertime' read to date has been 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' which I finished a few days ago. It's a book I've been meaning to get around to for years, but was always put off for some reason. To me it just seemed like another war love-story cliché and I steered away from its dense unwelcoming prose. But as often happens with books, we are not ready to read them at one particular time for whatever reason, but then come back to them unexplainably, just as we drift back to potential suitors who seemed lacklustre before, but brim with light now.

Plus I came to it as I like to pick books to read in the summer that have a nice summery setting! Captain Corelli's Mandolin is set on a Greek island - you couldn't get more summery than that! I know this is a little biased, but hey, who wants to sit in the sun reading about the polar ice caps? Nothing more upsetting than to delve into a new book in mid-summer and discover it's set in the depths of winter! Sun it is, sun it has to be! In print and in presence. So I set off with this book to the garden and loved it from a few pages in. The writing is ornate and poetic, as well as humorous and self-deprecating. The story is beguiling and full of wisdom, the characters fully-fledged and memorable, the lessons grave and heart-touching. There could come along yet another book that will top this one, but this I feel, is the quintessential summer read. I can't imagine sitting by a fire in December reading about the blue skies of Cellaphonia and its turquoise clear waters, with the light so bright so as to make everything translucent. Nope. I need to fit the setting to the season.

Other books that I've been wiling away the sunny time gloriously with (and these come with a high recommendation!) include: 

'A Tale for the Time Being' - Ruth Ozeki 

This book has just been announced for the 2013 Man Booker prize longlist I see, and rightly so. It's an engaging and original story, told by two narrators, one who discovers the other's diary via the sea. Ozeki, who is of Japanese heritage, offers us a fascinating glimpse into Japanese culture here - from Zen Buddhism to suicide cults to kamikaze bombers in WWII - and it is eye-opening. One narrator is a teenager, Nao, and her reader who has found the diary, the author herself, Ruth. Nao lives in Japan, Ruth in Canada. As Nao recounts the story of her great-great- grandmother and simultaneously, her own personal troubles in life, Ruth's own self and story seem to take shape and emerge alongside it.

The title is a double-entendre: this story can be seen as a tale for our time, 'the time being', it certainly is in Nao's case, and in Ruth's; but it is also a tale for Nao, who describes herself as 'a time being' and anyone else who sees themselves as this also. It reflects on huge themes like the meaning and nature of time, war, the idealism of youth and the realism of adulthood, the dilemma of morality, what it means to be human, what it means to be brave, what it means to be noble in this world as well as love the world, what it means to be alive, really alive.  The structure is original, as are the characters and the story. The ending, especially, offers an intriguing question that will have your mind looped for days. In what for me, is a mark of a good book, you'll have to pause many times while reading it, just to look away for a moment and absorb the extent of its effect on you.

Another one that had me flipping the pages madly was:

'The Hundred Year Old Man Who Jumped Out a Window and Disappeared' - Jonas Jonasson

This is much lighter reading! It's hard to think of a novel that is not about war and tragedy and the worst of humanity when thinking of what constitutes a 'great book.' But gosh, is this book great - great in an entirely different way! It's laugh-out-loud funny as well as being completely clever and always a step ahead of your reckoning what will happen next. It's an adventure story to the highest degree (the action begins when Allan Karlsson departs his care home on the eve of his 100th birthday and takes off on a haphazard journey that'll see him make the acquaintance of criminals, comrades and even an elephant!)

The ensuing plot line is interspersed with reflections on Allan's life up to this point and well, what a heck of a life! Turns out unassuming Allan has rubbed shoulders with all the famous name of history  - from drinking tequila with Harry Truman to having dinner with Stalin. Allan sure gets about in what develops to be a comical story, an absurdist tale, a historical narrative of the past century in basic human terms and a common-sense critique of it, but above all,  a parable on freedom, a daring declaration that life does not end so easily just because we get older!

The author is Swedish and the book has been enjoying immense success since it was a bestseller there and then translated. It is so entertaining, you won't want to put it down and leave Allan for a moment in the midst of one of his high-risk escapades (my favourite - trying to escape Communist-controlled North Korea during the Korean War by comically impersonating a German official). And if you like history, especially the events of the World Wars and the Cold War, you'll love this author's take on it, inserting the main character into every historical event of importance since WWII with such ease and farcical pomp that it's damn hard not to believe that he was there, what with his calm demeanour and unshakeable faith in the importance of drinking and dining. I can see the movie coming shortly!

Summer is a time for blockbuster and bestseller books yes, but also, I find, a time for re-reading your favourites. One I always come back to in the summer is 'The Great Gatsby' (see 3 posts ago*) ~ but of course! It is set in high summer in grand old New York of the '20s with all of its outdoor parties, mint juleps, flapper dresses, summer love, oppressive heat and the attendant sweltering expectations of summer: "And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” Once again, I first read it in summer, and it's in summer that I keep going back to it. 

Oh, and what about all those unread classics we always put off till the summer? Everyone's guaranteed to have at least one on their list! This year mine's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'.  But, wait a minute. I think it was that last year too.... Oh well. Maybe the sun will fire up the motivation this year. Yep, some day now, I'll be travelling that Mississippi river... Life's too short for the classics I say, but in summer, it may prolong and pause itself just enough to get one dusty Penguin finished. Here's hoping...

Other 'summery' reads that I'm hoping to get to next include:

 -'The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel' by Deborah Moggach  - India is the setting for this, it can't get any hotter or sunnier than that now!

-'Letters to Juliet' by Lise & Ceil Friedman - the inspiration for the film of the same name, exploring the people who are behind 'Juliet's' replies to lovestruck letters in Verona (what could be more summery than Ital-eey with those olive trees and gelato and amore blossoming in the background...!)

-'Flight Behaviour' by Barbara Kingsolver - Because what could sing out summer better than a story with a host of Monarch butterflies at its core, set in a small town in the Appalachians? A sweltering setting and a summer motif, what could be better? See these are books you just wouldn't read in the winter!

Summer and winter (Christmas) seem to be the biggest book selling times. And notice too, how some books are marketed to the season? A host of chick-lit books adorned with covers depicting sandy beaches, parasols and cocktails by the pool invade the shelves at summer, while ones depicting couples wrapped in winter coats, snowflakes and roaring fires are the cover design of choice for winter releases. Seems it's not just me with the seasonal preference affixed, it's the markets too. 

How about you? Is summer your favourite season for reading? What's been your favourite read this summer? Your most-coveted? What does your summer 2013 of reading look like? Or better still, your all-time favourite summer read?

Do tell! It's sociable after all, summertime reading!

~ Siobhán

Summer Footnotes

And who says I can't do short entries? (In the interest of variety and spice and all that - and preventing tedium of course....) 

So here's a few short summer observations I'm sharing. Observation of course, being the inherent vocation of the poet/writer. The number one rule of writing. The first lesson in every writing class. The first page in every writing manual. It's a writer's 9 to 5 criteria (our only 9-to-5 anything for that matter!) Observation provides the seeds of inspiration. And if we water them and look after them, maybe they'll grow into something more. Whereas some are just meant to be random and fleeting,  'love ya and leave ya' type. But either way, they're good for the craft.

Anyway, a few signs that summer has arrived or, is definitely on its way (according to me) are:

-big blue cloudless sky  (cerulean blue wide vista, an undeniable banner of summer, hurray!)

-yellow roses in bloom (talking synaesthesia, June is the 'yellow' month of course - honey, sunlight, buttercups, pollen... and sherbet lemons)

-lawnmowers on the go daily (the soundtrack of summer, and freshly mown grass its smell, even though the end result could be baldy lawns...)

-cat on a hot tin roof (sighted yesterday evening: a young tabby lolling around soaking up the heat on a neighbour's aluminium shed roof)

-swallows darting around acrobatically, like electric bolts. (So that's why they're the en vogue symbol for free-spiritedness? Suits. Note-to-self: swallow tattoo on future to-do list.)

-chilled chardonnay al fresco (lazily watching the day recede into a pink and orange sunblushed sky, and then a midnight-blue, moonshine bright dark, accompanied by a glass of dissolved bubbles) 

-red geraniums (their curly heads in bloom by the front door, terracotta pot a deliberate reminder of continental culture)

-bees (the bees are back, buzzing and a bumbling in gardens; in admiration of their hard work and nectar-collecting sole focus)

-Watching 'A Good Year', the film adaptation of Peter Mayle's sunny Provence novel (my summer staple, Provence the ultimate distillation of summer)

What's your summer footnotes? Share please!

And in the spirit of summer - its numerous and glorious blooms, and its busy heralders, bees, here's a poem by Carol Ann Duffy, a sort of ode to bees and blooms, written for the Guardian  Review in response to the 2010 campaign to reduce carbon emissions. Recent studies of course, have shown just how vital bees are to our entire eco-system, so next time you're tempted to scream and shoo and swat them away, remember Duffy's words at the end here. 

Carol Ann Duffy by the way, is one of my favourite poets, especially for her language. I covet her lilting and sharply precise style, I really do! She is the one of the greatest poets writing today, and definitely one of the most accessible. 

No matter where you are, this poem will place you in a flower-filled garden, pronto. 

Let's hope our summer 'sighs in roses' and that we are 'smitten' by its fragrance. Enjoy.

~ Siobhán

'Virgil’s Bees' - Carol Ann Duffy

Bless air's gift of sweetness, honey
from the bees, inspired by clover,
marigold, eucalyptus, thyme,
the hundred perfumes of the wind.

Bless the beekeeper

who chooses for her hives
a site near water, violet beds, no yew,
no echo. Let the light lilt, leak, green
or gold, pigment for queens,
and joy be inexplicable but there
in harmony of willowherb and stream,
of summer heat and breeze,
each bee's body
at its brilliant flower, lover-stunned,
strumming on fragrance, smitten.

For this,
let gardens grow, where beelines end,
sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.