Summer Reading

An ode to public library summer reading programs & 3 books for hot weather and long weekends

Last week, the Great River Regional Library emailed to let me know my library card is about to expire. I’ll renew it when I’m home next month but hope they don’t give me a new card to replace the old. Made of thin, bright green plastic, it’s creased and torn and has been laminated over twice to hold it together. It’s like a time machine, because I can see it in the console of my mom’s old car; in the pocket of the thick canvas tote that used to hang by the door to the garage; in a neon drawstring bag on the handlebars of my kid-sized, silver-pink bike. I must have been a toddler attending story hours when I got the card, and nearly a quarter-century later, it sits snuggly in my wallet.¹

The library was a summer place, for visits after swimming lessons or community ed arts and crafts. A little older, I could bike into town by myself in fifteen minutes, even ten. I remember two things best. First, the smell: antiseptic and fresh in the entryway—shared by the police and fire departments—but sweet and dusty through the library door on the right, like construction paper and boxes of crayons. My second sharpest memory is of the small, square slips of Summer Reading Program paper stacked neatly by a cardboard ballot box. I was religious about these slips and the way they’d let me track the hours I read in 20-minute segments. I colored in the little clock outlines with glitter gel pens.

There were drawings and prizes every week—jump ropes and box sets of The Magic Treehouse—but I was giddy just slipping each completed paper into the box, feeling the air conditioning on my sun-screened shoulders, and grabbing new blank slips with their inky clock outlines which I imagined still felt warm from the printer. How many did I need to last me the week? How many hours of summer vacation devoted to American Girl mysteries or The Series of Unfortunate Events or Sarah Dessen?

Certain books slow down time and inspire those same feelings of awe and discovery as visits to the library did on summer afternoons. Since ours was a small-town branch, options weren’t endless, and my progress was visible as I read through the shelves of the chapter book section, then middle grade, then young adult. When new books appeared, I was curious; these were often backlist titles, years old and sometimes obscure. Yet I rarely pulled a book off the shelf I didn’t end up liking.

My three recommendations this week are titles that caught my eye unexpectedly and that I feel encapsulate distinct summer moods of surprise and discovery.

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Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 2019)

Lillian feels lost when, one smoldering, dead-end Tennessee summer, her ex-best friend from boarding school reaches out (they haven’t spoken in years). Madison recently married into a wealthy political family and is seeking a nanny for her mischievous twin step kids. Even though the former roommates had a dramatic falling out, Madison needs someone she can trust with a secret: when agitated, the twins spontaneously combust. As in, they catch on fire, become engulfed in flame, burn anything—or anyone—around them.²

This is a very funny book. The concept is bizarre, but Wilson’s execution is so matter-of-fact it’s easy to accept as plausible. There are ups, downs, and a variety of wild dramas, but there’s also the mundane, repetitive routine of grade school-aged kids’ summer vacation: Lillian’s time with the twins takes place in the swimming pool, on the backyard basketball court, and in their fireproof playroom.

I’d recommend Nothing to See Here if you’re looking for a warm, fuzzy, silly summer read that has real emotional weight—I’m smiling just writing about it. Wilson’s fifth book is a big-hearted novel about parenthood, privilege, found family, and misfits, and he tells the story with endless wit and honesty.

The Pleasing Hour by Lily King (Grove Press, 1999)

I bought my copy of The Pleasing Hour at a sprawling, rural, outdoor used bookstore over a humid summer weekend a few years ago. Its specifics aren’t as clear to me now as the feelings it evoked, of apprehension at a new experience, dreamlike unfamiliarity, loneliness and earnestness, being out of one’s depth, not knowing which decisions are the right ones, growing up.

Lily King is best-known for her 2020 novel, Writers & Lovers, but of the four of hers I’ve read, her debut is my favorite.³ The Pleasing Hour follows Rosie, a young woman running from personal tragedy, the summer she becomes an au pair for a French family. The narrative jumps between small-town America, a houseboat in Paris, a road trip through Spain, and Southern France. In Pleasing Hour, King’s prose and settings are lush, meandering, watercolor, delicate, subtle.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say there’s an affair, or that some storylines take place in a moral gray area. Rosie and the couple she’s working for, Nicole and Marc, are layered, flawed, and at times unlikable. They’re all hiding things, but these tensions intensify the heady late-summer atmosphere rather than distract from it. A thoughtful, slow-moving novel for reading on warm evenings when the sun sets very late.

Mouth: Eats Color: Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals by Sawako Nakayasu (Factorial Press, 2011)

Playful, joyful, mesmerizing. Sawako Nakayasu was translating the collected poems of Chika Sagawa , a young avant-garde writer from early 20th-century Japan, when she decided to work on a second more expansive project as well; she toyed with the arbitrary rules and expectations translators face (to be undetectable, “accurate,” and “faithful”) by writing a collection that included reworkings of Chika Sagawa’s poems, “anti-translations,” originals inspired by Chika’s work, and works by English poets whom Chika translated.⁴ In an interview for Asymptote, Nakayasu said:

Mouth: Eats Color was about the exuberance of multiple languages, an endless devouring, of letting the new language enter yours and change it. It’s as if translation in this case was an action and I was performing a kind of writing that results in something that’s not parallel in words, but parallel in spirit.

Mouth: Eats Color is experimental, abstract, and keenly intelligent, featuring poems in Japanese, English, French, Spanish, and Chinese. Still, it’s far from the dense, intimidating book you might imagine. Chika and Nakayasu’s poetry is energetic, refreshing, and bright with allusions to color and light. In an interview with poet Thomas Fink, Nakayasu drew parallels between the process of writing this book and being with her then-two-year-old daughter: “really being in those moments of free play with her is much like improvising with another artist – the simultaneous listening and responding and being present together to allow things to develop…” The pleasure she feels while writing Mouth: Eats Color was “a huge contrast from the usual feelings of agony and torment that come with translating poetry.” And reading this collection, I think, is an equal joy.

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I move continents in one week (!) and have been deciding which of the books I’ve accumulated in the course of this year to gift or donate and which to take with me. From what remains, I’ve built my own little summer reading list. At the top: Alice Munro’s story collection Runaway and Norman Rush’s novel Mating. I’ll dive in on next Sunday’s flight, or I’ll end up watching a movie or two. My next newsletter is for the film buffs: “If you liked Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, read these novels.”

If you’re looking for more…

• For readers whose interest was piqued by Mouth: Eats Color and Nakayasu’s concept of anti-translation, I’d wholeheartedly recommend Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s Mistranslation Series with BOMB Magazine.

• The New York Public Library has teamed up with the National Book Foundation to celebrate 75 years of the National Book Awards, and they’ve created a Summer Reading Adventure for nostalgic adults. By completing any of the activities in the challenge, you can enter into drawings for prizes like ice cream, water bottles, hats, books, and more. Activities include a pilgrimage to a literary site, swapping a book with a friend, reading outdoors, etc :,)

• I love Courtney Minor’s 4 criteria for summer reading: “frivolity, suffocation, sweaty, wandering.” She categorizes her summer reading list in her most recent Substack article.

1. I’m not in Minnesota often enough to check out books from the Great River Regional Library in person, but I use the app Libby almost every day, where my library card lets me check out audiobooks and ebooks. Would absolutely recommend if you ever read on a kindle or, like me, listen to audiobooks while commuting or working out.

2. In an interview with Wilson from ALA 2019, he mentions that spontaneous human combustion was a very present childhood fear / obsession of his—not Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or UFOs—which I think is so funny and endearing.

3. Writers & Lovers is about waitress / writer after the death of her mother, caught between relationships with two very different men; Euphoria, set in 1933, follows three young anthropologists in the jungles of New Guinea; Five Tuesdays in Winter is a sweet and intimate story collection; and I’m looking forward to reading Father of the Rain and The English Teacher.

4. Nakayasu muses, “It’s possible that I needed to do Mouth: Eats Color in the midst of the longer work I was doing on the Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa, as if I were letting off steam.”