What We’re Reading: Summer Holiday Reads
This week’s What We’re Reading, is really a “What We Will Be Reading” over the long holiday weekend. Hazel and I will be lounging on a dock up at our family’s lake cabin complete with so-tacky-they’re-cute plastic cups with fishing lures on them, a fire pit, and, of course, a pile of books. I couldn’t be more excited. Here’s what I will be reading this Fourth of July weekend. What books will you be slinging along in your beach tote?
My meaty book will be The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir by Kao Kalia Yang, published by Coffee House Press. Yang tells her family’s immigration journey from a refugee camp in Thailand to St. Paul, MN. This book has been getting great press lately and has been waiting patiently on my bookshelf for a few months now.
For a taste of poetry, I recently found a little volume of poems by Eugenio Montale at Half Price Books called Motetti: Poems of Love. Translated and introduced by Dana Gioia, and published by local Graywolf Press, the book alternates pages of Italian and English, which excites this rusty almost-Italian minor.
For the obligatory beach-side magazine, I’ll be catching up on the June issue of The Believer which I haven’t cracked yet (whoops!). The perfect magazine for a well-rounded literary sort.
And what about that “trashy” summer novel? Mine isn’t trashy, but it’s a light, fun read. Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn is playful novel I’ve read countless times over the years about a community on a made-up island who take their letters very seriously. With an overzealous government outlawing the use certain letters, our heroine Ella Minnow Pea leads this alphabet-crazed, tongue-tied adventure.
Enjoy you Fourth of July weekend, and tell me what you’re reading!
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Took a challenge and brought Ulysses…I think there will be more swimming on the beach than reading based on the forty page soliloquy I read last night…
Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee that I would not have the concentration necessary for Ulysses on the beach.
I’ll be bringing David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (which I have been carrying around in my bag for the last seven months). Very much looking forward to sitting down long enough to get past the first page.
Ulysses and Minnow Pea sound like great books to read by the fire and beach! Perhaps one can provide insight into the other.
I’m still working on a book called The Sufis. I bought it back in March but now I will finish it by the fourth. I would not have set that deadline for myself had I not read your blog nor would I have thought to write all of its significance to me, so thanks for the thought-provocation Hazel & Wren.
The Sufis is a book of stories within stories within stories. Lots of parables, quotes, and poetry. Lots of Rumi.
The Sufis is also one of the first books in a few years that I easily cleared a hundred pages of and was just able to get really lost in. So lost I think I’m going to start over from the beginning today. The online descriptions do not encompass much of its plot, if there really even is a plot… But I am never bored by it.
Last Summer, after seeing (funny enough) that my professor had it listed as a favorite on his facebook, I began to look for it. But no luck in Colorado, New York, or Boston. Most people have never heard of it…
It was only a back of the mind type of pursuit but for some reason I decided that I would only get it if I truly had the means, and only if I found it sitting on a shelf, in a bookstore. No ordering online, tracking it down, using the internet etc. I think I wanted it used.
I rarely write in books. I don’t dog-ear or highlight, underline, etc. I guess I used to think it was disrespectful or something but I’ve never given it all that much thought til now ha. Usually the things I wanted to remember I try to write down myself in my own notebook.
My version of the Sufis came with a gray blank canvas as the cover. It now has a drawing and several ink stains on the pages. When I finish it, I’m going to send it to my friend Greg in California….another thing I’d forgotten til just now, but had decided just a few pages in.
A couple of weekends ago at the antiquarian fair, I bought a little book called How To Tell A Tornado, published in the eighties. For five dollars and the price of postage, Its currently on its way to Maine to my friend Dylan’s house. The first few pages contain notes, quotes, doodles, and musings of my own, and then some from The Sufis, and another book, an introduction to Logic that was published in the early 90s, and sold for a single dollar by the Salvation Army. Later this Summer, Dylan and Greg will be on the road traveling in between Maine and San Francisco. The Salvation Army and Magers and Quinn, which is where I found the Sufis, are the first stores my sister-in-law took me to, when I moved here back in March.
Interesting how it feels like books are always traveling whether or not the reader is sitting still.
Sufis sounds wonderful – I hope I stumble upon it sometime soon! You brought up a couple really interesting ideas – just letting a book find you, instead of the typical other way around, and also the travel of books.
I love that you and your friends mail each other books with your notes! It got me in such an excitable tizzy that I’m going to have to start doing this, too. Timothy, one of our contributors, has mentioned that he does this, too, I believe. It’s yet another way to continue the conversation, but the fact that you are able to do it by physically sending the book with all its dog-ears and rough edges sounds so much more fun than chatting about it through email or over the phone. It takes on its own story then, a story within a story…kind of like the way you described Sufis.
I’m glad you let Sufis find you – that’s one of the things I love about Magers & Quinn, or any good bookstore really, is that you can go in there without any idea of what you’re looking for, but a great, one-of-a-kind book will find you and make an impression.
I’ll stop waxing on now. But thanks for the lovely ideas and discussion!