Midsummer Reading

There are a few weeks left!

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

This is something between a Note and a regular post: I saw

Sarah McCraw Crow

’s post on summer reading (and re-reading) this morning and realized I had never responded to

Ann Kennedy Smith

’s summer reading post, which I had bookmarked to do weeks ago…. It’s still August though! I’ll use this break from my regular programming to account for some of my recent and upcoming reads. I’m grateful to these posts by Sarah and Ann for the prompt…. if there are other summer reading posts I’ve missed, please share them below.

What I’ve read recently:

• Miranda July’s All Fours.¹ The plot is indescribable, really, but it manages to be both experimental in style and just plain hilarious. A woman sets out to drive across the U.S. from L.A. to New York City. She gets sidetracked before she even leaves California. July treats this opening like a prompt for an improvisation.

• Clare Mackintosh’s A Game of Lies and Ruth Ware’s One Perfect Couple. Summers are for mystery reading and these are two of my favorite authors. Coincidentally, both set their stories in the world of reality TV for plot and suspense. These new releases weren’t my favorites of their works but they hooked me anyway.

• Zadie Smith’s The Fraud. I’m still reading this, which I picked up for its historical/fictional treatment of the Tichborne Claimant case in Victorian England. I thought it would be good context for a historical novel I’m working on with a friend that is set in 1880s London. Smith comes at the Tichborne story at an angle, so it isn’t really that relevant for my own writing, but it’s slowly building a Dickensian world of interesting characters.

• I’m also 66% of the way through a year-long reading War and Peace with

  Footnotes and Tangents
  . We’re literally in the middle of the Battle of Borodino now. It’s horrifying and gripping.

Still on my TBR list:

• Glynnis MacNicol’s I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, for the Parisian pleasures it promises.

• Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, because I love a sci fi novel with good world-building and the time travel in this one sounds like fun. Like the Smith book, it has some real Victorian events to anchor it, which appeals to me.

• From Sarah’s and Ann’s lists I’m adding Natalie Dykstra’s Chasing Beauty on Isabella Stewart Gardner and Griffin Dunne’s family memoir The Friday Afternoon Club. Both may be more meaty for September—

I realize from Sarah’s post that I haven’t re-read any old favorites yet this summer, which I also used to do regularly. What should I re-read? I already indulged in a lot of Agatha Christie rereading earlier this year, but there are always more of those, amazingly. Suggestions welcome! I like my reading road maps to include some serendipity. These last few weeks of summer are precious. Savor them!

1. I apologize to my international readers that all of these links are to U.S.-based Bookshop. I don’t have a comparable source for independent bookstores in other countries. These books should be readily available in other English-speaking countries, though perhaps not yet translated into other languages.