Summer Reading in the Penny Press!

As I’ve noted before, it’s a curious anachronism, this whole idea of “summer reading.” At the back of it is a picture of a world in which hard-working people breathe a collective sigh of relief around Memorial Day, say a jovial good-bye to their office mates, pack the kids in the station wagon, and head to the beach or the lakeshore. There, they open up the slightly dilapidated old house, uncover the furniture, sweep out the raccoon droppings, force open the stubborn windows, and settle in for a richly-deserved three-month summer vacation, an idyllic time when they can finally pick up those books they’ve been longing to read. It was in roughly this context that “summer reading” first became something the wealthier Romans might do when they and their households left the stewpot that is summertime Rome; this was the context in which the Better Sort in London might have packed some obscenely long French novels and made their way to their country estates. And it might have applied once upon a time to some sizable portion of the modern Western population.

But it hasn’t applied in a long time. Americans in particular work longer hours and longer years than any group in the nation’s history other than its slaves, and they are never even for an instant truly untethered from their workplaces (as Elizabeth Anderson’s brilliant though demagogic new book Private Government documents in detail). I know half a dozen young professionals who were required to give their bosses their cellphone numbers upon getting hired at their firms – their co-workers chuckled and said, “Yeah, just get a cheap phone with a new number for personal stuff,” and they willingly did so. Their bosses monitor their Facebook posts, their Instagram feeds, and their every peep on Twitter, and they themselves have never even seriously considered objecting, much less refusing – because the money’s good and there are benefits.

I know plenty of people who take vacations nevertheless, but those vacations are cramped, nervous, largely joyless affairs – they’re usually only a week long, they’re usually ruinously expensive, and the omnipresent intrusion of their workplaces isn’t the only thing destroying the allegedly restorative privacy of their time in the time-share: they also destroy it willingly themselves, spending all their time with their eyes locked onto video games or dating apps or the aforementioned social media. One young acquaintance recently booked a week-long beachside vacation with a friend he hadn’t seen in months, spent the entire time ‘swiping’ on quick-sex apps, and upon his return actually sighed and said, “I don’t know, somehow I just don’t feel rested.”

Summers, in other words, have disappeared – so it’s always a bit of a smile-inducing mystery to me that summer reading hasn’t gone with it. And yet it obviously hasn’t: from Southern Living to Entertainment Weekly to The New York Times Book Review, periodicals of all shapes and styles absolutely rely on the old wheeze. Indeed, that wonderful periodical Open Letters Monthly has been putting out a Summer Reading feature for years! The new one is up in the July issue even as we speak, although it’s typically brainy affair this time around, with writers chiming in on that decidedly non-summer subject, politics. Greg Waldmann writes about Dubliners, for instance; Rohan Maitzen writes about Jane Eyre; Sam Sacks writes about Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men; I myself wrote about the political setting of Anthony Trollope’s novel Phineas Finn.

From such a bill of fare it can be fairly observed that OLM is observing only the emptiest shell of the idea of “summer reading.” There is nothing summery about either our guiding theme or our individual choices; the thing is miserable midwinter reading in all but name. So pass the carefree summers of yesteryear.

In our defense, I notice that we’re not the only ones. The latest issue of the redoubtable Weekly Standard, for instance, bills itself as “summer reading” – and sports a great Mark Summers cover illustration featuring George Bernard Shaw and a raise-your-hand-if-you-got-it allusion to one of his stage plays. The front section of the issue is taken up with the heated political reporting and opinionizing that I now avoid like the Black Death (I get quite enough of it even by accident on social media, thank you very much … enough, anyway, to know that having just experienced their first great President, millennials are now getting a ringside seat for their first Nixon-level evil President – may they profit from the experience as their forebears did). But a large chunk of this issue is devoted to that billed “summer reading,” with reviews of some fourteen books.

It’s great stuff, but it hardly constitutes hammock-and-martini reading material. Douglas Bradburn enthuses over Kevin Hayes’ silly book George Washington: A Life in Books; Lawrence Klepp reviews Peter Ackroyd’s new brief life of Alfred Hitchcock; Andrew Roberts does his usual fantastic job reviewing Christopher Bell’s new book about Winston Churchill and the disastrous Dardanelles campaign; Forrest Gump author Winston Groom reviews Kevin Kosar’s new history of moonshine; Geoffrey Norman turns in a terrific piece about Tom Callahan’s new life of Arnold Palmer; James Gardner writes a strangely ardent and forgiving response to the new book of paintings by former president George W. Bush; Jon Breen writes a dense and fantastic appreciation of Mississippi Blood by Greg Iles; and on and on along those juicy, brainy lines.

You finish the issue brimming with opinions, objections, and the peculiarly definite but low-grade mental buzzing that always results from reading snappy writing about books. I read the thing in one sitting at my hole-in-the-wall lunchtime restaurant and immediately wanted to a) re-read the books under review that I’d already read, b) find and devour the books under review that hadn’t yet come my way, and c) fire off half a dozen emails – to the magazine itself, yes, but also to some of the reviewers and maybe even a couple of the reviewed authors, alerting them to this or that, congratulating them on a good blurb, perhaps consoling them with a reminder that Reviewer X is probably a raving dipsomaniac with the literary taste of a garden vole.

The one thing I didn’t especially want to do when I finished this Summer Reading issue was to refresh my martini and perhaps take a strong down to the beach. Instead, I finished the issue, paid my bill, and got back to work.