Everyone has his or her own definition of summer reading. For kids, the term usually refers to semi-required classics they have to choke down with the season’s Kool-Aid. For some people, summer reading means taking the time to catch up with the past year’s bestsellers, or to re-read some old favorites. For many, summer reading means “beach books” — but even that means different things to different people. To most, a beach book is hot mind candy — a mystery, an adventure novel, a romance; in other words, nothing too heavy on the noggin, but involving enough to take you away from the stressful workaday world you’ve left behind. Some people, though, see a beach book as that literary masterpiece they’ve been visualizing themselves shading their face with while relaxing on the sand.
Our theme here is In Search of Cool, but we’ve given lots of leeway to readers’ own interpretations of what that means. So what follows are some great summer reading recommendations, all of them cool in their own way. We’ve divided the suggestions into three categories. First up, just plain cool books, some writers and/or books whose hipness quotient will never be in doubt. Second, we recommend some current books that would make for pretty cool reading, letting you appear more literarily up to date than your friends thought possible. Third, some people react to hot weather by running the other way; so-o-o, for you readers who’d just as soon be in air-conditioning as sweating by a pool, we suggest some books whose setting or story will chill you out. Hopefully, something here will catch your eye. Happy reading, and have a great summer.
Just Plain Cool
The Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace. Wallace is one of those writers who practically define the cutting edge in current fiction. Wildly imaginative and hyper-ironic, he serves up his own skewed re-imagining of reality in books like the award-winning doorstop Infinity’s Jest; but we recommend a collection of short stories as a great intro to this contemporary master. Highlights: “Lyndon,” in which the narrator’s role as Lyndon Johnson’s most trusted aide spirals into a carnival ride of obsession; and the title story relating the absurd goings-on of punk nihilist Republicans.
The Powerbook by Jeanette Winterson. This British author has dazzled critics for a couple of decades now with her deconstructions of fiction, but despite that, Winterson is surprisingly accessible. In The Powerbook, the narrator, Ali, sits at a computer and retells tales of love and identity that are meant to give her cyber-readers a way out of their own selves. Highlights: a recasting of the Lancelot and Guinevere legend; an amazing tale of a 16th century Turkish girl who smuggles tulip bulbs into Holland disguised as a boy; and Winterson’s own snarky humor and snappy dialogue.
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac. Nearly 40 years after his death, Kerouac is still the embodiment of cool reading. Be really cool by forgoing his classic, On The Road, and jumping into this still underappreciated masterpiece about a summer spent as a solitary forest fire spotter (really!), and his autumn descent from the mountain into full-tilt 50s hipster San Francisco. Highlight: some of Kerouac’s most visionary, inspired writing, lofty enough to make you feel positively celestial.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith. This exuberant novel by a 20something British writer was one of the biggest fictional treats of the past couple of years. Two families in immigrant-loaded north London share the wild possibilities and cultural scramble of urban diversity, told by Smith with a great underlying compassion and a biting but hilarious touch.
Jack Cole and Plastic Man by Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd. Spiegelman, creator of Maus, and Kidd, the hotshot book designer of the moment, team up to pay tribute to Jack Cole, a wide-open cartoonist who created the tongue-in-cheek, wildly surreal crimefighter Plastic Man in the 1940s; he was also one of the artists who provoked the 50s’ anti-comics hysteria via his work for EC Comics. His proto-psychedelic work is generously reprinted here, along with Spiegelman’s loving tribute.
Cool Current Releases
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. The hyped lit hipster of the year, Foer has produced a story-within-a-story that interweaves a man’s trip to the Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandmother from the Nazis (largely narrated by travel agent Alexi in hilarious broken English), and the story of a family who lived in the Ukrainian shtetl the man (also named Jonathan Safran Foer) is searching for. Veering from satire to serious historical probing to magical realism, this novel is an entrancing juggling act.
Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard. The man who practically invented the turbo-charged mystery novel heads to the New South, as our reviewer put it, with the same subtlety William Sherman afforded the Old South. Think venal crooks, doofuses, and a denouement that takes place at a Civil War reenactment. What more do you want?
The Casa Azul by Meaghan Delahunt. A fascinating historical fiction whose starting point is the brief 1930s affair between artist Frida Kahlo and Soviet politico Leon Trotsky, when the latter was in exile in Mexico and being hunted by Stalin’s thugs. Delahunt expands from there, by short, urgent scenes, to an overview of 20th century revolutionaries, including surprisingly human episodes with Stalin. The underlying joy and the resulting personal tragedies of political passion are told here in a way that makes you forget it’s based on real events.
Boulevard by Jim Grimsley. In 1978, a young gay man from rural Alabama moves to New Orleans, “a city full of everything good and bad,” and learns a lot about life, reality vs. expectations, and sexual awakening. Grimsley paints a portrait of New Orleans that’s visceral and unforgettable, full of raw emotion, drugs, sweat, and real life. He’s not celebrating the netherworld of one-night stands made popular in 1970s gay fiction, but is in fact memorializing self-discovery and sexual affirmation.
This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich. A startling and lyrical non-fiction work about a place and a people most people know nothing about: Greenland. This is thrilling and vulnerable writing, alive with the land, its people, and their rich, spirit-filled arctic culture. Ehrlich intersperses her own digressions and comments, but “the real heroes,” as she calls them, are the polar Inuit whose joy and spirituality and self-reliance are a serious eye-opener for all of us in the smug, self-satisfied West.
And be on the lookout for:
The Wailing Wind by Tony Hillerman. Always a great summer read, the king of the literary thriller returns in another Navajo mystery that early reviews say is one of his very best.
Beyond Cool To Cold
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. A massive tome that could last you all summer, Winter’s Tale is, well, hard to describe. Set in New York’s Belle Epoque, it’s ostensibly a love story that then veers into a fantasy of the city captured by Winter. It’s about love and justice and God and everything else — and its overwhelming winter setting makes it damn cold.
The Shining by Stephen King. The basis for the Kubrick film, many critics say this is King’s finest book. A couple and their son are isolated in an old resort hotel in the Rockies — of course, in the dead of winter — along with malevolent spirits of some of the hotel’s former staff and guests. This one chills you to the bone.
The Endurance by Caroline Alexander. The book that launched the revival of interest in the era of polar exploration, this is a capsule version of the famed, and still unbelievable, 1914 Antarctic expedition led by British explorer Ernest Shackelton. It also includes breathtaking photography of the stranded ship and crew by fellow crew member Frank Hurley. This great, perhaps the greatest, true adventure story, complete with photos, will have you reaching for a blanket.
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. If you want to get away from the heat of the American South via reading, this ought to do it. Almost the entire novel, about a passionate but ill-fated love affair, takes place in rainy, wintery London, where a cold drizzle falls almost ceaselessly. Greene had a famously cool style, too, lending an emotional chill that stays with you.
A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. OK, if this one doesn’t cool you off, nothing will. I first read this book in August in South Carolina and I swear I remember shivering. The events of one day in the life of a prisoner in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia, this was written from Nobel winner Solzhenitsyn’s real life experience. Depressing as hell, but hey, if you want cold, then here you go. *
This article appears in May 15-21, 2002.
