Summer Reading!

I’ve been out of school for three years now, and I haven’t had assigned “summer reading” in eight.1 But even so, there’s something special about reading this time of year. Maybe it’s the long days—Sleep-wise, I tend to be pretty synced-up with the sun (imagine that) and so, with dawn coming as early as 5:30 some mornings, I found myself with a lot of AM reading time.

No matter the reason, I read a whole bunch of books this summer. Some of those books I really loved. These, in chronological order, were my favorites:

I’ve already covered this one. Needless to say: Great book.

For a long time this book has lived in my brain among “books other people read in high school.” I knew people had strong opinions on the dialog, I knew there was a guy named Tea Cake, and I had a vague inkling that a flood was involved. That was it. So imagine my delight when I picked this up back in June and discovered that… GEEZ, Zora Neale Hurston could WRITE.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Now that’s how you start a book!

There’s something so lovely about discovering a book that you enjoy on its own terms while also recognizing the material that other, later writers you love would draw from. I was finding seeds of Toni Morrison everywhere in Their Eyes Were Watching God, not just in the unflinching, tender complexity of its characters2, but in Hurston’s unwillingness to compromise her vision, her style, or her “gaze,” as it were.

Something Toni Morrison (rightly) gets a lot of credit for is her choice to write in a way that consciously, if subtly, decenters white folks as the assumed audience and/or critical readership of her books3. Something I’d heard many times about Their Eyes Were Watching God (especially from readers, like me, of the Caucasian Persuasion) was that the dialog, rendered phonetically, was somewhat “uncomfortable” or even that it “didn’t age well.” And to be honest, as a knee-jerk reaction, I kind of get it. At times it reads not dissimilarly to some of the more cringe-worthy eye-dialogue in, say, Faulkner or O’Connor’s work. But I think it’s important to remember that ZNH was a trained anthropologist and a native of the same region she’s writing about, not to mention a damn good writer.

White Southern Lit, even work by writers who were “progressive for their time,” has a long and unfortunate history of phonetic dialog for non-white characters. Even writers like Faulkner, who rendered basically all dialog phonetically, often reserve their most extreme “misspellings” for his Black characters. To some extent, yes, I think this was a desire for accuracy, for faithfulness to real-life dialects, no different than it was for the other characters. But let’s be honest: There is also a tendency in Faulkner’s phonetics to define an “other,” to subtly reinforce the hierarchies of the plantation South, embedded in his renderings of speech.4 Maybe this was unconscious in Faulkner’s own mind; maybe not. Regardless, it’s there.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, I think, aims to do the opposite. Hurston had no interest in toning down real-life speech patterns for anyone’s comfort or conditional respect. She has no interest in bending over backwards to convince you that these characters are smart or complex or fully-realized “despite” the fact they talk like that. They are fully-realized people and they talk like that and it’s downright beautiful—musical, even—as soon as you get past its unfamiliarity on the page. And Hurston’s choice to put this vernacular speech alongside such masterfully “literary” narration is surely no accident either.

It’s in that spirit, that writerly defiance, that I find a clear line from Hurston to Morrison and to so many other writers of the late 20th and 21st century. Their Eyes Were Watching God is absolutely worth a read, or a reread if you haven’t picked it up since high school. It’s short, it’s fast-paced, it’s great. Read it!

What a lovely surprise! This book was a standard “NYRB Classic I’ve never heard of with a cool cover that was $4 at Small Friend so I bought it” situation. Many such cases! And, as is so often the result, what a payoff!

This is a quick, hugely understated little book. It’s a grim vision of Los Angeles, of class dynamics and of the whole movie business, and a barely-veiled commentary on what the Hollywood machine can do to its aspirants. In a lot of ways it felt like a West-Coast Great Gatsby, though I have to say I liked the writing a whole lot more than Gatsby.5

I suppose it was all there in my voice—the mixed, the contradictory emotions which I so carefully tried to keep under control. Now I found myself resentful of the fact that I’d talked about them at all. Besides, she’d heard it all before: I was sure she’d heard it all before. Possibly in a scene that was a close duplicate of this: the car parked in the hills, and two cigarettes, and the town below looking as hell might with a good electrician.

If that quote alone doesn’t have you logging onto Thriftbooks, then I dunno what to tell ya.

So much ink has been spilled about Lonesome Dove, and if I’m being honest, I don’t think I have a whole lot to add to the conversation. Is it my new favorite novel? No. Is it a great book, a whole lot of fun, and about as technically “perfect” as any book of this length I’ve read? That’s a very specific question, reader, but since you asked it: Yes!

Every year for my family’s annual beach trip I pick a long-ass book and take the opportunity to devour it in a way I otherwise wouldn’t have the time for. Last year was Moby-Dick (a genuinely awesome beach read), this year was Lonesome Dove.

Lately I’ve seen a lot of people extolling the wonder of reading big books like this as slowly as possible, and I think that’s great. There’s an enormous joy to be found in slowmaxxing a big book over the course of, say, a six months, particularly if it’s a certain kind of book. Some books are best encountered at a stroll. BUT

SOME BOOKS, however, especially one as rootin’ and tootin’ and downright immersive as Lonesome Dove, are best enjoyed at a gallop. There was something magical in sitting by the ocean for hours at a time and motoring my way through this book, not in a rush to finish, but simply to spend as much time per day within its pages. Sometimes it’s fun to read the way Pac-Man eats dots! Get off my back, okay!

And seriously, read Lonesome Dove if you haven’t. No matter your chosen pace, it’s got a whole lot to enjoy.

Remember that Faulkner guy I brought up earlier? Well I meant all that I said about his warranting criticism—we will never run out of things to unpack about Faulkner’s work and legacy. But dammit, Bill could write a helluva novel!

I read As I Lay Dying for the first time last summer, and I really enjoyed it, but I definitely felt like a lot went over my head.6 When I reread it this July, I still felt like a lot went over my head, but my also, holy moly this just might be the greatest book ever written.

She looks at us. Only her eyes seem to move. It’s like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there. She does not look at Anse at all. She looks at me, then at the boy. Beneath the quilt she is no more than a bundle of rotten sticks.

I loved this book. It’s incredible. There’s so much going on, so much to untangle, so much about metaphysics and language and memory and family and God and the South and—

Well, it’s a great book. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Faulkner has a well-deserved reputation for his difficulty, but while As I Lay Dying is by no means “easy,” it isn’t nearly so syntactically overstimulating as Absalom, Absalom or even as The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s prose feels almost dialed back in As I Lay Dying. If you weren’t reading closely, I think it’d be easy to miss some of the absolute weirdness going on in this book. But even with the linguistic pyrotechnics dialed back, this book contains a lifetime’s worth of material to sift through.

If I were to pick a desert island book, it’s this one. It managed to unseat A River Runs Through It as my favorite. It even drove me to the unthinkable: JSTOR. No book has ever made me want to go to grad school like As I Lay Dying, and that’s saying something. If you take nothing else from this post, take this: READ. THIS. BOOK.

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In the same vein as As I Lay Dying, Death in Spring blew my mind with its sheer weirdness, subdued as that weirdness was. Rodoreda had a real knack for delivering bizarre, sometimes horrifying information, through sentences that are both completely matter-of-fact and totally unique.

If you’re like me, then “Catalan folk-horror via high modernism that may or may not be about Franco’s Spain” will already have you digging around for your wallet. But if you need one last push:

He came back empty-handed; and as if everything were about to recommence, the bee returned and entered the flower and the man approached his tree. He stepped backwards into the tree … I had turned my head, and when I looked back at the tree, I saw only the cross and the four nails on the ground. The bee was buzzing furiously before my eyes, like a pouch with yellow and black stripes. Tiny.

I bought two other Rodoreda books, Camellia Street and War, So Much War, as part of Open Letter’s Women in Translation month sale, and I’m looking forward to getting to those soon.

I am (somewhat arbitrarily) declaring that my “summer reading” ended with 2666, a book I’m still figuring out how to even discuss. As is so often the case with Bolaño, I’m not sure what exactly I loved about this book, but I’m sure that I loved it.

Bolaño’s books are always so dreamlike and yet so mundane; nothing really happens and yet somehow the whole world is contained within them. I was talking to my mom about how much 2666 has baffled my ability to describe it, and the best way I could come up with was as a treadmill on a trans-continental flight: You spend 900 pages feeling like you’re going nowhere and then you look up and you’re on the other side of the world.

Should you read 2666? I dunno.7 I just know I’m glad I did.

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