Summer reading lists abound with new titles, fresh off the press, and unread by anyone but editors, reviewers and, if we’re lucky, proofreaders. Or they teem with older books readers have heard about, or belong to a category of interest.
Presidential biographies are on top of my list these days, put there by David McCullough’s “Truman.” That’s why “Theodore Rex,” Edmund Morriss’
biography of President Roosevelt, and “Team of Rivals: The
Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, sit on my bureau, ready to be cracked like a couple of walnuts.
And then there are the books that are old favorites, those you read when you were younger and return to later. I think of these summer re-reads as a kind of literary comfort food, mashed potatoes and meat loaf or a stack of Oreos.
For me, that means a handful of novels by Sinclair Lewis, one of America’s Nobel Laureates in Literature, whose satirical attacks on America’s roaring twenties society, charmed me in high school and college, some five decades after they were written.
- “Babbitt” — the story of a buffonish Business Booster who tries, fails to escape, the conformity of his fate
- “Dodsworth” — a story of marital love and dissolution set against the Grand Tour of Europe
- “Arrowsmith,” — a romantic view of a research scientist working to cure tropical diseases
From Reviews to Rereads
“The relationship between reader and book, like all relationships that matter, changes over time,” Anne Fadiman writes in the foreword to “Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love,” the 2005 collection she edited and the inspiration for this post.
She continues:
When Fadiman was editor of The American Scholar, a venerable literary journal that this year marks its 75th anniversary, she hunted for a departure from the obligatory books section, a space generally filled with reviews of new books.
“The solution seemed so obvious I wondered why every magazine didn’t do it: we’d open our books section with an essay not on reading something new but on rereading something old,” she recalls.
Thus, in each issue, “a distinguished writer chose a book (or a story or a poem or even, in one case, an album cover) that had made an indelible impression on him or her before the age of twenty-five and reread it at thirty or fifty or seventy.”
The result, Fadiman writes:
They include:
- David Samuels on “Franny and Zooey,” by J.D. Salinger
- Katherine Ashenburg on the Sue Barton books, by Helen Dore Boylston
- Vijay Seshadri on “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
- Patricia Hampl on the journals, letters and stories of Katherine Mansfield
- Pico Iyer on “The Virgin and the Gypsy” by D.H. Lawrence
- Phillip Lopate on “The Charterhouse of Parma” by Stendahl
And my favorite:
- David Michaelis on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band”
Fadiman is a gifted and stylish writer, and a creative editor. (Disclaimer: She published an essay of mine; but even before it was accepted, I felt the same way about her.) Sadly, she left the magazine in 2004 over a budget dispute..
She’s also wise, as when she considers the distinction between child and adult readers and the difference in their reading habits.
“It is customary to speak of children as vessels into which books are poured, but I think the reverse analogy is accurate: children pour themselves into books, changing their shape to fit each vessel,” she writes. “We haven’t become ourselves yet, so we try on literary identities, fantastic at first and then close and closer to home.”
An Early Rereading Favorite
That helps me explain the galvanizing power of the book that launched my writing life when I read it at age 12.
“Youngblood Hawke,” by Herman Wouk, published in 1962, chronicled the life and death of a poor writer who skyrocketed to fame like a July 4th firecracker and then fell to earth in fast-vanishing wisps of light.
I was a poor kid from a rich suburb and I poured myself into the book, devouring its 783 pages in a marathon of late-night readings.
In the 45 years since then, I changed. I am a writer still dreaming of riches (my first choice, over fame) and trying to write stories that might keep a reader up way past bedtime. But as a writer in his late fifties who hopes his best work lies ahead, I find myself much more concerned by Hawke’s binge writing, denial of serious illness, manic spending and other destructive tendencies.
Upon rereading, Wouk’s novel seems like an outdated B-movie, complete with elliptical sexual situations. But I still get excited reading about Hawke’s dreams of literary glory and his gargantuan work ethic. And I remain saddened by his inability to avoid the writing curses that ultimately killed him.
Fadiman also helps me understand my current preoccupation with nonfiction, an obvious choice, perhaps, for someone who spent 22 years as a reporter, but mystifying still since my dreams focus on writing fiction.
As we grow older, she concludes, it’s much harder to absorb a book into our aging vessels.
“I think that’s why so many children prefer fiction and so many adults, prefer nonfiction,” she writes. “As we age, we coagulate. Our shapes becomes fixed and we can no longer be poured.”
So this summer, as I read new books, I’ll revisit old ones, too.
“It helps you remember what you used to be like,” Fadiman writes. “Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary.”
What books will you be rereading this summer and what miniature memoirs do you think will lie within their pages?
P.S. I hope everyone has a fun Fourth of July. I plan to, so you won’t see me here again until Friday.
