Most lists that feature “summer reads” are really about giving you permission to read fluffy or even “trashy” stuff, and far be it from me to frown on the practice; there’s nothing wrong with some irresponsible light reading on the beach or on the plane. But for me, summer reads are a vibe, a vibe that combines ingredients of sun, water, wanderlust and perhaps a bit of experimentation.
Literature, for me, is a practical thing because it can invest real life with a sparkle that the poorly read can never see. A trip to Pamplona crackles with the romance of Hemingway’s long-dead characters. Summer on the Mississippi is haunted by the friendly ghosts of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The cypress trees of the Marin coast rustle with the whispers of Kerouac’s poetry. Literature can invest a place and a season with meaning.
So when I recommend summer books, I’m recommending the classics that form my personal vocabulary of summer vibes. The sun-baked towns of Spain, the sparkling mountain waters of the Rockies…even in a hammock in my back yard, I can live in these summer worlds with a book in my hand.
I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.
Summer issues a call to the mountains and the rivers - if you haven’t heard it yet this year, pick up a copy of Down the River, a 1982 collection of essays by Edward Abbey, the patron saint of desert cranks. In it, you'll find him floating western rivers, reminiscing about old friends, reviewing books, and taking potshots at everyone from developers to the National Park Service.
Abbey is one of my favorite writers in my favorite niche: literary nature writing. He has a valid claim to the title of 20th-century John Muir, but wrote like a combination of Thoreau and Tom Wolfe. Abbey’s occasional obsessions with politics are the weakest part of his writing, if only because they can’t help but be dated. When it comes to philosophy and literature, Abbey hasn’t aged a minute, though he died in 1989. The richness of his literary musings takes me back even farther, to great essayists like Montaigne.
Montaigne spoke familiarly of the Greeks and Romans, mixing anecdotes with arguments in a conversation for the ages, antiquity and modernity jostling elbows and exchanging riposte with the vigor of an enthusiastic soul. In the same way, Abbey parries and thrusts with Emerson, Thoreau, Goethe, and Edgar Allen Poe, but also modernists, post-modernists and contemporaries, like Ernest Hemingway, Rene Dubos, and John Barth.
And he does it from the great American West. Musing beside a campfire in Glen Canyon, walking down the dirt roads of Sonora, drifting the brown waters of the Green River or the green waters of the Colorado, Abbey is never far from his great theme; the plundered but still magnificent edifice of nature. You cannot read this book without wanting to get out there. And isn’t that what summer is all about?
The first recomendation was non-fiction, so now its’s time for something different - how about a passionate novel?
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