Summer, Reading
What is “summer reading” exactly? I’ve always been confused about this.
For some readers, summer is a time to dive into breezy—some even call them trashy—books. These might be stories with lots of romance or action or hijinx, novels seemingly made to get damp or sandy, and which you can leave in your Airbnb without looking back.
For others, summer is ideal for picking up the kind of weighty books they don’t have time for in the winter. I have friends who think July is the perfect month to finally take on Moby Dick, or The Magic Mountain, or Middlemarch. I myself first read Middlemarch in Vermont one August, and just typing out the title brings back that mountain view and uncomfortable Adirondack chair. (The Magic Mountain I read covertly under the table at endless, boring training sessions for a development job at Penn, but please don’t tell anybody.)
There is also assigned summer reading for kids in school. I can never decide how I feel about this. Of course, reading is good! Kids probably have extra time in the summer! So putting the two things together makes sense.
At the same time, I worry that requiring kids to read turns them off to reading. I mean, maybe you have to make them read during the school year, but in the summer could it just be voluntary? I don’t know, it’s thorny.
Luckily for students at Strath Haven High School (Celia Bookshop’s local public school), their teachers are offering a wide range of absorbing choices.
What high school kid doesn’t want to read the latest Hunger Games installment, Sunrise on the Reaping?
Well, maybe there are a few! In which case here are a handful of other (among many) great choices—and which I’d recommend for anyone, whether you’re in high school or not.
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott: a funny, tragic, surreal novel about a Black writer pursued by an enigmatic boy ghost. This one’s a National Book Award winner too.
Carry On by Rainbow Rowell: YA fantasy described as “a ghost story, a love story and a mystery. It has just as much kissing and talking as you'd expect from a Rainbow Rowell story—but far, far more monsters.”
1984: George Orwell’s 1950 classic, which just keeps getting more relevant all the time.
SHHS students can find a complete list of options at our Bookshop.org page, or check out our roundup on Instagram.
As for the rest of you, here are this month’s First Words recommendations: two stellar literary novels, a fun and smart academic mystery featuring a young Black woman history professor, and a fascinating history of our continent, written by a Finnish professor at Oxford, offering a compelling Indigenous perspective. As usual, I’ll take a look at each book’s first lines and ask what that opening might tell us about the pages to come.
Recommendations
Flashlight
By Susan Choi
Louisa and her father are making their way down the breakwater, each careful step on the heaved granite blocks one step farther from shore. Her mother is not even on the shore, for example seated smiling on the sand. Her mother is shut inside the small almost-waterfront house they are renting, most likely in bed. All summer Louisa has played in the waves by herself because her mother isn’t well and her father is unvaryingly dressed in a jacket and slacks.
But tonight he has finally agreed to walk the breakwater with her.
It’s strange to come back to this opening after finishing this long, dynamic, absorbing novel. This sea’s edge scene, set in a village in Japan, is the moment everything changes for Louisa and her family. But as we spend time with her, her prickly American mother, her Japan-born ethnic Korean father, and her odd and beautiful half-brother, we come to understand that what happened on this night on the breakwater was much stranger and more surprising than Louisa would know for decades. Flashlight is the kind of book that keeps opening up to reveal new information and levels of complexity, both on the level of the plot (I’m dying to tell you what happens in the second half!) and in the characters.
I’m interested in the slightly strange phrasings Choi uses in her opening sentences. Look at that second one: “Her mother is not even on the shore, for example seated smiling on the sand.” It’s grammatical, but the way Choi uses the “for example” is not quite the way that phrase is usually used.
Similarly, “Her mother is shut inside the small almost-waterfront house” is not a conventional way of deploying language. A different writer might say: “Her mother is inside the small house close to the waterfront.” Choi’s not-strictly-necessary “shut” emphasizes both the shut-in quality of the mother, and the way Louisa and her father shut the mother out. “Small almost-waterfront house” is just slightly off-kilter, suggesting a way of seeing the world that’s not quite ordinary or balanced.
What I’m trying to say: when you open this book—and I very much hope you will—be prepared for a tumultuous, surprising, deeply satisfying ride.
Bug Hollow
By Michelle Huneven
The summer when Sally Samuelson was eight, her brother, Ellis, graduated from high school and a few days later, he and his best friends, Heck Stevens and Ben Klosterman, drove up the coast in Heck’s ’64 Rambler American. They promised to be back in a week. Sally was the only one who went outside to see them off. She waved a dishrag and dabbed at pretend tears, then one or two real ones. “Bye, little Pips!” Ellis yelled from the back seat—he called her Pipsqueak, with variations.
“See you in the funny papers!”
The length and the flurry of information contained in the first sentence of this book make us feel that we are entering a world where things happen fast—and where people are often departing—both of which turn out to be true. This slim, rich novel by one of my favorite writers contains many characters and covers a lot of time, but this opening suggests that Sally and Ellis will be central to it, which they are—despite the thing I won’t tell you about that happens on page twenty. Brothers and sisters matter here, as do different ways of being a sibling. Or a parent or grandparent or aunt for that matter.
I love how eight-year-old Sally first pretends to cry and then finds herself actually crying. Sally and Ellis and their parents and siblings have many different ways of expressing grief, and all the other emotions too. In different chapters, Huneven inhabits many points of view as different characters experience the same events in different ways—although there are revelations and new unravelings as well. I devoured this book.
History Lessons
By Zoe B. Wallbrook
“Well, that went terribly.”
Daphne Ouverture, assistant professor of European history, scholar of modern French imperialism, and semi-professional rambler on the horrors of colonial medicine slammed her car door shut.“What are we talking about here on a scale of one to five?” The car’s Bluetooth speakers took over, brightening Elise’s light soprano. “
One being the time you set your date’s shirtsleeve on fire with the candle—”
This debut academic mystery about a brilliant Black assistant history professor who gets mixed up in an on-campus murder is a charming blend of light and serious.
You can see that in these opening lines as the professor, Daphne, complains to her best friend about a first date that ended abruptly after she spent too much time talking about Belgian colonial crimes in the Congo. It’s a funny opening—and a good set up for the romance that will bloom later between Daphne and a tall ex-police detective turned bookseller. But it’s also serious. Because the nineteenth-century Belgian colonial crimes were real, horrific, and globally significant. And being a new, female, Black professor at an elite university is no joke either.
History Lessons is breezy, funny, and filled with unexpected twists and turns. It’s also a lively portrait of academic life, the highs and lows both exaggerated just enough to make it fun for the reader. Female friendship, the hidden treasures of an archive, the taste of a good mango, and the possibility of justice are among the assorted pleasures celebrated in this engaging debut.
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America
By Pekka Hämäläinen
There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes something like this: Columbus stumbles upon a strange continent and brings back stories of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing new world as possible. Even as they clash, they ignite an era of colonial expansion that lasts roughly four centuries, from the conquest of Hispaniola in 1492 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.
Between those two moments, European empires and the nascent American empire amass souls, slaves, and territory, dispossessing and destroying hundreds of Indigenous societies…Indians are doomed; Europeans are destined to take over the continent…
Indigenous Continent tells a different story.
The story this readable, satisfyingly comprehensive account tells is, instead, of the long conflict between Native Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores, and of the Indians’ cultural and military domination for most of that time. Hämäläinen, a Finnish-born Oxford history professor, takes what he calls a middle persective—not too general, not too specific—as he guides us along a huge river of history.
Hämäläinen’s writing and approach are clear and straightforward. As you can see in his opening sentences, he uses usefully vivid verbs: stumble, rush over, dispossess, destroy. At nearly 600 pages, this is a long nonfiction history book for me to pick up (I listened to it on audio, which was great), but I was fascinated.
I learned a lot about the specific tribal cultures and their political strategies; how Indigenous relationships with French colonists were different from those with British, Dutch, and Spanish ones; and about the conflicts and jostling among different tribes.
The sections about the Lenape were particularly interesting to me since I’m here in Pennsylvania. And, wow, that Iroquois Confederacy! I had no idea how dominant and skillful they were. Well, there was a lot I had no idea about. It’s great to get a more well-rounded grounding in the story of this continent so many of us are living on.
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