I read until late one recent night, absorbed in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
I had loved it as a teenager and enjoyed the BBC television production many years later. Always meaning to get back to it, I found my inspiration in Rebecca Mead’s recent book, My Life in Middlemarch. Mead grew up in the English countryside and first encountered Middlemarch while preparing for university entrance exams. She finds more to identify with in Eliot’s book than I do. Still, my reading is enriched by her research into 1830s England and her illuminating comments on the humble dramas that occur among family and neighbors in the village. The two books together are a great beginning to my summer, as I look at more free time ahead.
“Summer reading” can have an oppressive ring to it. I once taught English at a high school where students chose books from prescribed lists and were asked to write essays to bring with them on the first day back in September. Teachers had to read all of the books, meaning I found myself in Maine on vacation stealing time away from sailing to get through them. Because I’ve left that life behind, the choices now are truly mine. I hope those students from back then have recovered.
Some summers I read solo. I pick the books — several years ago I dove into the novels of Virginia Woolf — and just settle into them, content to record a few reactions in a notebook. During another summer, though, I joined with a few neighbors to read the mysteries of P.D. James, the recently deceased doyen of the genre. Her Adam Dalgliesh series, starting in 1983 with Death of an Expert Witness, brings to life English locations like an Essex manor house or a London museum. Dalgliesh is both a detective and a poet, and the perpetrators of the crimes are human beings, deeply flawed. Being a James fan for many years, I was thrilled to stumble on an interview with her at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London a few years ago. She was addressed rightly as “Lady James” and questioned about her connections with religion in life and in her books. Her intelligence and her warmth that evening have deepened my regard for her.
James is always high on my list of recommendations, and so are mysteries by Donna Leon, all of them set in Venice. Leon’s latest, The Temptation of Forgiveness, is on my list for this summer. Darker but compelling is Peter May’s Lewis Trilogy. The first in the series is The Blackhouse, occurring on Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. Edinburgh detective Fin Macleod, a native of the island of Lewis, is summoned home to investigate a grisly death in a barren landscape. As he does his work, he finds himself re-immersed in problems on the island he had tried to leave behind.
Other novels I’m looking forward to this summer include the new Michael Ondaatje Warlight, focusing on London in 1945, following the Blitz. I’ve already read half of the stunning Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid, telling of a refugee couple leaving a nameless country somewhere in the Middle East.
Hamid’s nonfiction is worth a look too. Many of the issues he writes about in Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London are both current and relevant. Though the chapter “Divided we Fall” is about his native Pakistan, Hamid’s observation that “the inability of our society to channel dissent into debate” applies to events in many places in today’s world.
I’m also looking forward to a second nonfiction book by the author of The Lost City of Z, David Grann. His latest is called Killers of the Flower Moon and tells the story of the ruin of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s with the discovery of oil there.
Whatever we select for summer reading, books can convey information, give us pleasure, make us angry, inspire conversation. They take us elsewhere, as we simply sit in a comfy chair in the backyard.
Years ago, a graduate school mentor showed me yet one more reason why books can matter so much. “The reader’s mind,” he wrote, “is the author’s box of paints. … What the writer communicates to the reader is made out of the raw material the reader already possesses.”
Rebecca Mead, explaining her devotion to Middlemarch, takes this one step further: “Books (give) us a way to shape ourselves.”
Mary K. Otto lives in Norwich.