Summer Reading, August Edition
I guess it was predictable, but this summer is going way too fast. Tomato season is upon us. A handful of weekends separate us from Labor Day. I woke up the other morning, and the air was so fresh and crisp (even in New York City!) that it almost carried a chill. I suppose there is a little bit of sadness to this, but can I tell you something? This is my favorite time of year. August always has the slightest tinge of melancholy. I love it even more for that.
I love the quiet loneliness of Park Avenue on a summer evening. I love the sound of cicadas in Central Park when I’m out for a run. I love the sense of the neighborhood being emptied out. And because you know this isn’t going to last forever, because there’s such an obvious end date looming on the horizon (Labor Day, school starting back up), it reminds you to soak up every last moment.
When I worked in publishing, August was the slowest month of the year. The bosses would decamp to their beach houses, or take long trips to Europe, and even if they were still sending emails, those emails tended to be fewer and farther between. There was one summer in particular, when I was an editor at Random House, that was unbelievably slow. It was so slow that I was worried (I wasn’t getting enough submissions, I wasn’t working hard enough, etc), but then I decided—so what? Come September, it would get busy again. I would be putting in enough hours to more than make up for this. So I decided to try and enjoy my August guilt-free.
That was the August I discovered the pleasure of eating lunch outside (and, consequently, realized just how sad that sad-desk-salad-life, which I had long been living, really was). You have to be strategic about getting sunlight in the canyons of Midtown, but I found a little public plaza on West 57th Street, which got a full blast of sun right around when I took my lunch break. I would position my chair to face south, and eat my salad from Cognac (RIP) or Fresh & Co or Balducci’s, and read my book for a good 60 or 90 (!) minutes, and it felt like a vacation, right in the middle of the work day. And good thing I had all that reading time on my hands, because that was the August I decided, for God knows what reason, to tackle that marathon of a political classic, What It Takes.
When I worked in publishing, this was something of a pattern. August was the time of year that I tended to read very long and slightly random books. How about 1200 pages on the 1988 presidential election to go with your sunburn? How about the bafflingly complex syntax of The Ambassadors by Henry James for those sleepy summer days? Sure! Why not! (Both are undertakings, but both are brilliant. If you’re a junkie for history and/or politics, I highly recommend What It Takes, which is more pertinent than ever these days, given that Joe Biden finally had What It Took. And, not gonna lie, at times I grew impatient with The Ambassadors, but part of the deep and soul-changing satisfaction of that book is the effort. The complexity is the beauty.)
Summer reading can mean a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It means a hundred different things to me! Ripping through a gossipy family drama while sitting by the pool; concentrating on a dense work of literature in the air-conditioned chill of a Metro-North train car. There was the summer I first encountered Nabokov’s Speak, Memory as a broody teenager lying on a rocky beach in West Vancouver. There was the summer I decided to embark on re-reading Harry Potter (prompted by Binge Mode; bless you, Binge Mode) for the first time since Deathly Hallows was published in 2007.
There was last summer, our first Covid summer, when I finally read Middlemarch (texting my real-time reactions to the dear friend who encouraged me to pick it up); when I finally read Beloved (perched on the window seat in my parents’ living room, the breeze across the field picking up the scent of warm hay); when I finally read Be Here Now (quiet mornings on the screen porch, glass of iced coffee going slick with condensation).
This summer of reading has been all over the place. At Andrew’s urging, I read Michael Crichton for the first time (Sphere, which is so much FUN, and makes me understand why Crichton was so wildly successful). I finished the Cazalet chronicles (saying goodbye to those characters was devastating). I am re-reading Strangers Drowning, because that book seriously shook me up when I read it a few years back, and I feel ready for another dose of shaking-up. And I just finished reading the aptly named Summer by Edith Wharton, which is maybe less well-known than her society-centric novels, but is just as perceptive in a different way.
**
I still haven’t been on a plane since Covid began, but we’ve been moving around more this summer, taking mini-trips within the Northeast. We spent June out in Montauk, and spent parts of July visiting friends in Connecticut, friends upstate, family in Philadelphia, family in Rhode Island. We’ve had friends over for dinner at our no-longer-new apartment in New York. It’s been such a gift, getting to see so many loved ones—inside, maskless, absent those twinges of apprehension. It’s amazing how quickly that sense of normalcy returned. Here I am, hugging you, breathing the same air as you, doing the dishes beside you, waiting with you for the coffee to finish brewing, and it feels normal! The speed of this readjustment surprised me, to be honest. But the speed makes me glad, because it reminds me of how flexible we human beings can be; how capable we are of adapting to new conditions, as they come. (Yeah, obviously we don’t always adapt in the way we should—I read the news like everyone—but what I mean is, it’s within our power to do so.)
And thank God for that. Who knows what could change as the summer keeps unfolding, as the summer turns to fall? What can we count on? What is absolutely, positively, one hundred percent certain? Well….pretty much nothing, I’d say. But here is a thing that I know for sure! If you’re reading this right now, you made it through a hellacious year-and-a-half. No one did that for you. You made it.
Lately I’ve been feeling the return of a certain quiet, both internal and external. Most of our socializing was packed into the earlier part of the summer. I crossed out a big goal last week, running my first half-marathon. We have some good things to look forward to this August (a wedding, a long-awaited reunion with a West Coast friend); but we also have some time to do nothing. Time to eat ice cream, and read good books, and feel the warmth of this world, a world which can be beautiful and difficult all at once; a world that is still here for us, even as the headlines turn grim. Time to soak this summer up, to stay as present as possible, because we don’t know what comes next, and this has always been true, but Covid has a way of really driving that truth home.