2025 Summer Reading Ideas

HANGING WITH THE GREATS, EPISTEMIC LITERARY MAGAZINE PUBLISHED MY ESSAY ON THE POLKA DOT PURSE

Don't be dismayed when you plan your summer reading and can't buy the books because they don't exist! (https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/05/20/sun-times-sunday-insert-fake-books/)--here's a list of real books reviewed by a real reader (me!) which I heartily recommend for your summer reading pleasure. Most of these are in paperback and/or available through used venues.

Lolly Willowes - Sylvia Townsend Warner

A spinster aunt leaves her role as family babysitter behind and moves to the country where she moves into a woodland cottage and finds her true calling. Delightfully writing and a story filled with surprises.

The Places in Between - Rory Stewart

Another departure tale but this is a true story of diplomat and House of Parliament Stewart's solo walk across Afghanistan in 2002 with limited knowledge of the language, foul weather and only a large dog for consistent company.

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Reread this 100th anniversary masterpiece with an eye toward the mysterious background of Jay Gatsby rumored by some critics to have been passing for white in 1920's America, according to Janice Savage's 2017 book, Jay Gatsby: A Black Man in Whiteface. See the arguments at https://www.salon.com/2000/08/09/gatsby/

Clean - Alia Trabucco Zerán

From the first page, I was hooked on the story, the mystery, the voice of the narrator who speaks to us from a locked room. Estela is a domestic employee accused of murdering the child she's cared for since birth. There is much on class exploitation and domestic tyranny, as well as a devastating scene with a dog. The translation was flawless.

Any Human Heart by William Boyd

This fictional journal of the writer Logan Mountstuart kept me enthralled for the bulk of this bulky novel. I was sorry to see it end. Not a fan of roman a clef or historical fiction, here I was enjoying both, in a journal format, particularly the protagonist's encounters with real life figures like Hemingway or Joyce or Picasso or the Duke of Windsor. Settings were seductive, Oxford, Paris , Zurich, Bermuda or New York City. The spy tasks during WWII, the haunting prisoner of war years and aftermath, the art gallery milieu, the publishing business fascinated me.

My favorite quote from his Southern France retirement oasis of which he writes:"The pleasures of my life here are simple – simple, inexpensive and democratic. A warm hill of Marmande tomatoes on a roadside vendor’s stall. A cold beer on a pavement table of the Café de France – Marie Therese inside making me a sandwich au Camembert. Munching the knob off a fresh baguette as I wander back from Saint-Sabine. The farinaceous smell of the white dust raised by a breeze from the driveway. A cuckoo sounding in the perfectly silent woods beyond the meadow. The huge grey, cerise, pink, orange and washed-out blue of a sunset seen from my rear terrace. The drilling of the cicadas at noon – the soft dialling tone of the crickets as dusk slowly gathers. A good book, a hammock and a cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec. A rough red wine and steak frites. The cool, dark, shuttered silence of my bedroom – and as I go to sleep the prospect that all this will be available to me again, unchanged, tomorrow." I need only the hammock and cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec to supplement this fine book.

All Passion Spent - Vita Sackville West

Irresistible in the splendid writing, the characters and the triumph of Lady Slane, a woman of a certain age over those who have her "best interest in mind." An interesting meditation on aging as well as the historical role of woman, especially those of privilege.

The Offing - Benjamin Myers

reminded me a bit of another favorite, A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr, its emphasis on the English countryside and the arts discovered by young Robert Appleyard, the son of a coal miner, who has left school and is tramping through the byways of the seaside towns to the south, sleeping rough and picking up odd jobs following WWII. He meets Dulcie Piper, an opinionated nature buff thrice his age, motherly and foul-mouthed, who lives in a shabby cottage surrounded by overgrown weeds. Many of those weeds she uses to concoct nettle tea and imaginative meals. The boy stays on in an abandoned shed at night watching "the dipping shadow-shapes of bats chasing moths, (while) field mice carved the tiniest curving tunnelled run through the grass, and a barn owl watched on silently from its treetop promontory." He works to improve her land while she teaches him to read poetry, imparting her bohemian thoughts and independent philosophy, pointing out "the drab municipal buildings being constructed from cheap concrete. (By) Men, mainly. Where once we built towers to heaven, now we build frumpy sweatboxes for pen-pushers...The janitors of mediocrity. The custodians of drab and peddlers of dreck. We live in chaos and out of chaos comes war."

Myers has created a lyrical and lovely text about two disparate people forming a lasting friendship: "sitting here now by the open window, a glissando of birdsong on the very lightest of breezes that carries with it the scent of a final incoming summer. I cling to poetry as I cling to life." Could there be a better summer choice?

Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell

Many recommended this book to me and they are right. Why did I postpone it for so long? Fear of historical fiction? Pshaw! It is a beautiful book, the writing, the tale, the imagination. On Aug. 11, 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, was buried. He was 11 years old. The author's exposition of grief is extraordinary bringing a tear to my hardened eye.So many quotations to savor, i.e. this of his pregnant wife: "His mind is traversed for a moment, by an image of her body in its current astonishing shape, as he saw it last night; limbs, neat rib cage, the spine a long indent down the back, a cart-track through snow, and then this perfectly rounded sphere at the front. Like a woman who had swallowed the moon."

Still Life - Sarah Winman

Ron Charles of The Washington Post described Still Life as "a tonic for wanderlust and a cure for loneliness. It’s that rare, affectionate novel that makes one feel grateful to have been carried along. Unfurling with no more hurry than a Saturday night among old friends, the story celebrates the myriad ways love is expressed and families are formed." Set mostly in Florence, Italy in the sixties, it's kindred spirits of expats and locals seeking the things you go to Tuscany to find: art, music, food, escape and lots of heart.

And below are some absorbing nonfiction suggestions for summer reading:

Under the Sun: the letters of Bruce Chatwin

And other in print and out of print books of letters which I savor include: As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, Letters from Lost Thyme: Two Decades of Letters from John Joseph to Patricia Larsen, and In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor.

The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal

My progress was halted early in this book, perhaps because it moved into WWII and the beginning of the Holocaust in Vienna, but once through that section, I raced along with fascination on the trail of the netsukes and the warm, intimate revelations of the author as he digs and probes the stories of his family and their houses, their travels and collections in the 19th and 20th Centuries. A Russian banking family from Odessa, they set up concerns in Vienna, Paris, London on a par with and sometimes jointly with the Rothschilds, and continued to collect art. One uncle was a contemporary of Proust. Another had a fantastic library. Another gifted a palace, artwork and gardens on the Riviera to the French Académie des Beaux Arts. Highly recommended.One of many favorite quotes from de Waal:“Charles bought a picture of some asparagus from Manet, one of his extraordinary small still lifes, where a lemon or rose is lambent in the dark. It was a bundle of twenty stalks bound in straw. Manet wanted 800 francs for it, a substantial sum, and Charles, thrilled, sent 1,000. A week later Charles received a small canvas signed with a simple M in return. It was a single asparagus stalk laid across a table with an accompanying note: ‘This seems to have slipped from the bundle.”

The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives - Diane Johnson

The podcast Backlisted.fm alerted me to this unconventional biography of Mary Anne Peacock, daughter of the gothic novelist, Thomas Love Peacock, who married the Victorian novelist, George Meredith, famous for “The Ordeal Of Richard Feverel”, and “The Egoist”. Their circle included well known names, Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Unhappy in her marriage, Mary Ellen eloped with Henry Wallis, painter of “The Death Of Chatterton” (George Meredith was the model). The book is full of interesting snippets of gossip, of letters and news clippings giving a picture of the times for a disgraced wife.

Ex-Wife - Ursula Parrott

And one more reminder from Backlisted, Ex-Wife, published anonymously in 1929, was as good as promised when they recommended it as the feminine counterpart to Gatsby in describing the Jazz Age and what happens to young women who are caught between Victorian morality and the sexual revolution of the twenties. I salute the blurb's description of the narrator as "wedged between Edith Wharton's constrained society girls and the squandered glamour of Jean Rhys's doomed wanderers."The first person narrator, Pat, announces to her newest man, Noel:"Don't have any illusions about me. I have slept with more men than I can remember." That was exaggeration, but I had to exaggerate, lest I should understate.And he responds..."Whatever happened to you has made you poised and tolerant, and comprehending, and anyone who knows you should be grateful for whatever produced the result." But, in the all too familiar refrain, he's taken, and Pat continues the high life in search of a stable closure. Ursula Parrott sold 100,000 copies of the novel.

Other recent favorites were Small Rain - Garth Greenwell, the novels of Barbara Comyns (Sisters by a River), Martyr! - Kaveh Akbar, Absolution from Alice McDermott, and The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez, Winter in the Blood by James Welch, Ladies' Lunch: and Other Stories from the late Lore Segal, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, Prophet Song from Paul Lynch (not cheerful but compelling), my favorite teacher Martha Gies' essay collection Broken Open and Elizabeth von Arnim's All the Dogs of My Life.

Seeking out of print books, I first try Better World Books www.betterworldbooks.com who donate a volume to charity for every title you buy, and then I turn to Alibris.com (a non-Amazon vendor) or Thriftbooks.

And for more reading suggestions, try any of the books mentioned by Nick Hornby (Ten Years in the Tub: a decade soaking in great books), Peter Orner (Still No Word from You: notes in the margin), Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader) or Susan Hill (Howard's End is on the Landing, Jacob's Room is Full of Books).

Let me know if any of these end up in the hammock with you and what you thought.