As a schoolboy, I spent my summers devouring books. Not quite in the way Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry” suggests, but close. I remember treasuring the library reading cards, which most of my classmates quickly trashed or tore to spit wads. The early cards were made of layered pasteboard and featured cartoon bears in silhouette pouring over open books with HONEY on the front. I remember that they half absorbed the titles inked in my Martian-seeming scrawl. Titles like The Golden Book of the Crusades, The Horse in America, Ethan Allen and His Green Mountain Boys, You Were There at the Battle of Gettysburg, Robinson Crusoe. When I returned each volume, the librarian briskly stamped COMPLETED! on my card, and back I went to the shelves to see what other lore and thrills were available.
We had books at home, of course. My father read Luke Short and Louis L’Amour westerns, the Perry Mason series, Christian books to help him in his Sunday School teaching, The Law of Arson and other technical books on investigation and interrogation. A few copies of Readers Digest Condensed Books gathered dust on the shelves – Marjorie Morningstar, Youngblood Hawke, Peyton Place. My father and his father both collected books on winning friends and displaying poise and assertiveness. My grandfather also bought Pulitzer editions of Sandburg’s Lincoln biography series and Freeman’s Lee, which he kept locked in his barrister bookcases (prized possessions for a farming insurance man) and which I never saw him touch.
Most of the year, however, I was occupied reading textbooks and age-appropriate novels like Tom Sawyer or daunting behemoths like Oliver Twist, all in preparation for some test or summary. But summer was freedom, the plunder of the branch and downtown libraries accessible, my parents and grandparents happy to see me playing the studious bear obsessed with honey. After all, there were so many more unsavory sorts of mischief I might get up to. Or so they thought.
So: summertime, the living easy, fish jumping, cotton high, nothing can harm you. Without having heard of Sir F. Bacon, some books I tasted, some devoured, some digested thoroughly. I even remembered a few and to this day, for nostalgia, traffic jams and a useful mirror, I keep a pocket copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in my car. Freed of what we would now call the syllabus and multiple choice questions, I chose books by their titles, their covers, their authors’ names, their smell and color and illustrations, size and typeface. But I judged them by my own lights and was free from any responsibility to defend my choices.
Of course, my reading life has changed over the decades, and even though I get to select most of the books I read (and reread) with my students, I’m limited by what courses I’m allowed to teach (Cold Mountain with my Appalachian Lit students last fall, Hombre with my course in The Western Novel on the Page and on the Screen in the spring, Morrison’s Home last winter as a specimen for teaching my interns how to write a review). And I have little to say about the contents of the short story manuscripts submitted to Shenandoah between September and May, little to say about their number and the pace I have to read them. Night after night I plunge into the stacks and electronic files with hope and dread, following the Saxon recommendation to expect the best but never leave the house without my spear. I admit that I don’t read every story from muzzle to scut. In fact, I follow Flannery O’Connor’s regimen: “I stop when I feel I can do so without experiencing any sense of loss.” Rough but handy, that plan.
Summer reading, however, more closely resembles childhood reading in both the whim of my choices and the sense of urgency (the living not being all that easy, after all). “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date,” wrote Shakespeare, so I never set aside the O’Connor Rule; I may borrow or buy a book but abandon it pretty quickly, if the rewards are not swift. Following this habit, I may never read Leviticus again. Perhaps I should note that I certainly can’t apply this kind of triage to student essays and stories from September to May; I have to eat the whole ox, even if the first bite tells me the meat is tough. (Johnson again)
In my next entry, I’ll say a little something about some of the books I’ve read so far this summer, but anyone who’s read this far deserves a warning. I don’t think much on the list falls into that Summer Reading/Good Beach Book category. And nothing about zombies or super heroes, about which I suspect I already know more than I’ll ever need, even should an apocalyptic emergency arise.
Teaser:
Point Omega by Don DeLillo
The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch
Life Among Giants by Bill Roorback
A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr
3 Civil War books, two collections of poems, one short story collection
(and for my comments on two books about Patsy Cline, see the last Snopes post from June)
Meanwhile, “I romp with joy in the bookish dark.”
