Issue 44 / May 2012
Who's Reading Who this Summer?
As the holiday season looms, and bookshop tables heave under the weight of summer reading offers, we ask authors to name two books they're planning to settle down with as they recharge their batteries. It's a time to catch up with old favourites, meet new friends, and plot the months ahead.
ELIF BATUMAN: I was deeply inspired by a recent item in the Wall Street Journal about the summer reading of Republican presidential hopefuls, including Mitt Romney, who was "spotted on the banks of the Great Salt Lake last Sunday working his way through The Incoherence of the Incoherence, the seminal work by the 12th-century Muslim philosopher Averroes." Romney plans to follow Averroes with Maimonides, immortal author of The Guide for the Perplexed.
Because I think summer is the perfect time for exploring incoherence and perplexity, I initially thought these would be my next two beach reads. But just a couple of paragraphs later, I learned that "Sarah Palin is rarely seen in the Alaskan woods without her dog-eared copy of Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics." Obviously that changed all my plans... again! I mean, OK, Maimonides is pretty confusing, but Kant said a lot of the same stuff and was even more confusing. Prolegomena, I'm told, is a sort of pithier, more analytic retelling of the Critique of Pure Reason - which is awesome, because the whole time I was trying to read the Critique of Pure Reason back in grad school, I kept thinking to myself, 'Come on Kant, quit sugar-coating it and just tell it to me like it is! Why wasn't Palin there then to nudge me in the right direction, preferably using her travel-worn copy of the third critique? I don't know, but who cares? Better late than never!
Elif Batuman is the author of The Possessed, published by Granta.
LUCY CALDWELL: The book I'm most looking forward to is Dermot Healy's Long Time, No See. The title is no exaggeration: it's been well over a decade since Healy's last novel, and I can't express how excited I am about it. I've had my copy a while, but I'm saving it up for the week I'll spend in Bantry, West Cork. It seems more appropriate to read it there than on a series of banal tube journeys in London. In the meantime, I've been re-reading his memoir, The Bend for Home, and keep having to stop to write down, underline, read-aloud-to-the-nearest-person particularly brilliant or witty passages. Healy is a real writer's writer: the sort who, five or six whiskies into the wee hours at a festival, other writers rave about. That's how I encountered him, during the first book festival I read at: another Irish writer there said I absolutely had to read Healy. Not enough hours' sleep later, I stumbled out into the sauna of a Washington DC day and bought A Goat's Song and The Bend for Home, and couldn't believe it had taken me so long to find him.
My other reading is actually re-reading. After attending a great panel discussion organised by English PEN on one of my favourite writers, Rosamond Lehmann, I'm working my way through her novels again. I'm currently on her fourth, The Weather in the Streets. It's a searing account of an affair in 1930s London: passionate, wild, desperate, desolate, tender - one of those books you hardly dare to hope, one day, you might write yourself.
Lucy Caldwell is the author of The Meeting Point, published by Faber and Faber.
MEAGHAN DELAHUNT: The top of my list for summer reading is Bento's Sketchbook by John Berger. I have just opened it - a beautiful gift. Like all of Berger's work it teaches us to look differently at the world around us and to think differently about the links between the personal and the political, the human and the natural world, the material and the sacred. It is an artwork in itself interspersed with his own drawings, riffs on the philosopher Baruch (Bento) Spinoza, life in rural France, and the importance of paying attention to the smallest things. My
second recommendation is anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor - the great travel writer and Philhellene. He died recently and I plan to re-read his books as my own tribute to what he gave the world. I'll start with The Mani - this book inspired me to visit the stonescapes of southern Greece many years ago. His love for the history, politics, wild beauty and character of the place is a delight. He was an adventurer both on and off the page and fought for the Resistance in Crete during the Second World War. Despite his penchant for the aristocratic life he never condescends or patronises. Contemporary Greeks loved and honoured his achievements and his artistic legacy and we should too.
Meaghan Delahunt is the author of The Red Book and To the Island, published by Granta.
ESI EDUGYAN: For a while, it seemed everyone I talked to was reading this one, and loving it. William Boyd's Any Human Heart is the diary of Logan Mountstuart, a charming, lusty, flawed but likable man writing his life through the twentieth century. Told in a diary-like fashion, it looks to cover a broad scope with an astonishing intimacy. Its protagonist is at various times a writer, art dealer, lover, and spy. I find as the summer months settle in that I look more and more to novels that introduce me to complex, introspective characters. Logan Mountstuart looks like he will have me hooked from page one.
My partner found Shelby Foote's Civil War Trilogy one of the most profound reading experiences of his life. Told in sweeping, novelistic fashion, Foote's epic history is considered by many the greatest work ever written on the American Civil War, and one of the most brilliant books in all of twentieth-century literature. At 3,000 dense pages, this might be a stretch to finish before the weather turns - but there's always next summer.
Esi Edugyan is the author of Half Blood Blues, published by Serpent's Tail.
STUART EVERS: I took my summer holiday early this year. I always try to take a mix of new books and novels that have stacked up and have, for one reason or another, remained stubbornly unread. For new books, I took a proof of Erin Morgenstern's deliciously readable The Night Circus, Steve Earle's surprising and affecting I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive, the latest Fred Vargas mystery An Uncertain Place, plus a reissue of two Robert Coover novellas, The Briar Rose and Spanking the Maid. For old books, I took Richard Yates's much maligned but incredible Disturbing the Peace, Don Delillo's Americana and Alice Munro's stunning The Pursuit of Love. I'd recommend them all.
In terms of what I'll be reading over the summer, however, two books stand out: Teju Cole's Open City and Ross Raisin's Waterline. Open City is right up my alley - a quietly devastating novel of immigrant New York, pitched somewhere between W.G. Sebald and Aleksander Hemon. I've read the opening three chapters and been utterly entranced by Cole's daring, urgent writing.
Raisin's second novel has a lot to live up to after the commercial and critical success of God's Own Country, but those who have read it are already lauding it is one of the year's best books. Set in the Glasgow shipyards in both times of plenty and of irrelevance, this is an ambitious and, I hope, successful novel.
Stuart Evers is the author of Ten Stories about Smoking, published by Picador.
LEAF FIELDING: William Boyd started out brilliantly with the wickedly comic A Good Man in Africa. Many writers have had trouble topping an early success, but Boyd just got better and better. All of his books have captivated me. He is, quite simply, Britain's finest living novelist. A magnificent storyteller, his range is extraordinary, his eye unerring and his depiction of character masterful. Any Human Heart is one of my top five novels. I shall probably have to re-read one or two while I await his latest title with keen expectation.
For years Andy Kershaw has been one of the radio broadcasters I most enjoy listening to. You always know where you are with this straight-talking no-nonsense man who might pop up anywhere on the globe and give you a concise, insightful account of what's going on there. I expect no less of him in his forthcoming book, No Off Switch, where he's dealing with his own triumphs and troubles rather than the problems of some far-off country. In this world of full of flannel and spin, you can expect Kershaw to tell it like it is.
Leaf Fielding is the author of To Live Outside the Law, published by Profile Books.
MATT HAIG: I'm planning on reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which I've already dipped into. I can't wait to read it properly, because the few paragraphs I've looked at show that this woman knows how to write. From all I've heard this should be a good read. One of those that seem to be about nothing but is in fact is about everything. It's interesting that Egan herself doesn't even refer to it as a novel, as it falls somewhere closer to a short-story collection in that it follows various characters then lets you catch up with them later on in the book and in their lives. A risky strategy, because there's always the likelihood you'll care about one character more than the others and be racing to find the next bit when they appear. But by all accounts I've heard she's pulled it off.
I'm also looking forward to reading Bed by David Whitehouse, which my publishers sent me. It's about a man who drops out of life by staying in bed, all day, every day, as a deliberate act of social suicide. The only rebellion in a world where everything happens all the time, but with no real meaning, is to do nothing. That's a great idea. It's a great premise, and a brave one too, as it is by definition about nothing happening. Simple ideas are always the best. It's got short chapters which I'm always a fan of. So that's what I'm going to be reading. In bed.
Matt Haig is the author of The Radleys, published by Canongate.
MARY HORLOCK: One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power is a witty and razor-sharp critique of lipstick feminism. This book asks if the height of female achievement is ownership of a designer handbag. It's a serious question and with chapters like: 'Sarah Palin, or How Not to be a Feminist', the author seems to slice with relish through contemporary culture and politics. The only reason I haven't read beyond the introduction is that it keeps getting taken off me. On holiday last month it was passed rather furtively between all the men (they were completely engrossed in it, I might add). In fact, I'm still waiting to get it back.
I've read and loved most of Kurt Vonnegut's novels but I've resisted Bluebeard until now. Because I worked in the art world for a long time, I used to hate reading about it. Now, this fictional autobiography of painter Rabo Karabekian is feeding into my research. Karabekian, portrayed as an important painter and friend of Jackson Pollack, served in the US Army camouflage unit in the Second World War: 'What illusions we gave the Germans as to what was dangerous to them behind our lines, and what was not.'
I'm currently writing the story of my great-grandfather, Joseph Gray, who really was a camouflage artist in the war, so to read Vonnegut's fictional take on the theme will be interesting to say the least.
Mary Horlock is the author of The Book of Lies, published by Canongate
DOUG JOHNSTONE: The first book I'm taking with me on holiday is The Donor by Helen FitzGerald. I've been a massive fan of her work in the past, she writes these amazing dark comedy thrillers that are part nasty hard-boiled noir and part literary chick-lit with lashings of very bleak comedy thrown in. It's a hard thing to balance properly, but she always pulls it off. The Donor has been described to me as 'Sophie's Choice but with kidneys', which is about as good a hook as you can get for a novel, isn't it?
The second book I'm packing is Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I'm a massive fan of McCarthy's work, I think The Road is probably one of my favourite books of all-time, but for some reason this one has slipped through the net so far. Set in the Wild West and all about a gang of scalp-hunters, it doesn't exactly sound like cheery reading, but I'm in the mood for some really dark, morbid storytelling. People whose opinions I trust claim it is McCarthy's masterpiece, so I can't wait to get stuck in. I can't see how it'll top The Road for sheer drive and insight, but you never know...
Doug Johnstone is the author of numerous books including Tombstoning and Smokeheads, published by Faber and Faber.
RICHARD KELLY: Two novels that I'll be packing for my holiday are Nimrod's Shadow by Chris Paling, first published in 2010 and recently commended to new readers by the Fiction Uncovered promotion; and Leporello by William Palmer, which originally appeared in 1992. Nimrod's Shadow is a two-stranded story of an impoverished Edwardian painter named Reilly and a young woman called Samantha who becomes absorbed in Reilly's work a century later. Leporello is the story of Don Giovanni retold - in dotage but with all due colour and spice - by the infamous seducer's former valet. I'm excited by the disparate canvasses I expect these two novels will offer, but they are also linked in my mind to some degree by a shared 
characteristic. I don't have any dogmatic views on what 'The Novel' should be or what sort of writing novelists ought properly to concern themselves with: my general hope (without meaning to sound Maoist) is just that a hundred different flowers blossom in the field of fiction. But I will own up to a particular admiration for a certain sort of novelist whose historical-cultural range and taste in subject matter is notably restless, ambitious and diverse - the kind of writer who makes no two books the same. Chris Paling and William Palmer are certainly two such novelists, and that's why I look forward to digging into both Paling's much-admired latest and what was the second of Palmer's five remarkable novels to date.
Richard T. Kelly is the author of The Possessions of Doctor Forrest and Crusaders, published by Faber and Faber.
ETGAR KERET: Many interviewers, after the question about what book you would take with you to a desert Island (the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, of course, so I could hunt lizards with it), ask what historical figure you would like to have dinner with. If I could have a dinner with one person on earth, it would probably be Ira Glass, and if the guy has some extra time, I'd love to have breakfast, lunch and five o'clock tea with him too. Glass's This American Life is the most inspiring radio show I've ever heard, and its documentary pieces have taught more about storytelling than any single living author or filmmaker ever did, and I was even lucky enough to contribute a few stories to it. So when I discovered a couple of days ago that this guy has edited a book of fourteen of his favourite pieces of journalism, all I needed to do is order it from Amazon and sit and wait by my mailbox.
The publishers actually sent me an advance copy of Hal Niedzviecki's Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened for a blurb. They knew I loved Niedzviecky's non-fiction and thought I would probably like his short fiction too. The odds are they were right, but just around the time I received it, I also had a hundred other little jobs that life had decided to throw my way. I've finished most of them and am now fashionably late to read a book I'm quite sure I'm going to like.
Etgar Keret's short-story collections are published by Chatto & Windus. His next, Suddenly a Knock at the Door, will be published in February 2012.
ALEXANDER MAKSIK: Among many other books I hope to read this summer, I'm looking forward most to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani.
I read Adichie's story, "Birdsong" when it was published in the New Yorker last year and I was so impressed that I promised myself I'd read her novels. Then, the other day, I saw a video of a talk she gave called "The Danger of Telling a Single Story." She was so smart, so incredibly elegant and so funny that I went out and bought Purple Hibiscus that same afternoon. 
I saw Chris Abani speak when he was in Iowa City last year. He talked a great deal about the importance of compassion in writing and making ethical questions central to fiction. I'm particularly interested in work that deals with ethical and moral complexity, so I was quite moved by his talk. I've heard wonderful things about Becoming Abigail, so that's where I'll begin, though I'm also looking forward to reading Graceland and Song for Night.
Alexander Maksik is the author of You Deserve Nothing, to be published by John Murray in September.
GERARD WOODWARD: My heap of books-to-be-read, if all gathered in a single pile, would reach up to my waist, so choosing what to read next can take almost as long as reading a novel. The first thing I've chosen isn't a novel however, but something I'm going to read for research. The novel I'm currently working on has a character who has a deep interest in the nature of laughter. Since I know nothing of the theory behind laughter, I thought I'd start with Freud's The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. I confess I've already flicked through the rather attractive Penguin Classics edition with its Magritte cover, and come across an analysis of a very poor joke that only a German lawyer of the 1890s would find at all amusing. So I'm not expecting a lot of laughs from this book, and am reminded of a remark made 
concerning the British fascist Anthony Ludovici, that 'some who'd read his Secret of Laughter had not been seen to laugh for a week afterwards.'
My other book will be The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, which I read a long time ago and have almost forgotten. This is also for research, as a large part of my novel is set in the early part of the twentieth century, and I thought Lawrence's letters would be a pleasant way of immersing myself in the thoughts and ideas of the time, and to reengage with an extraordinary mind. And they might be funnier than Freud.
Gerard Woodward is the author of Caravan Thieves and Nourishment, published by Picador.
LOUISA YOUNG: I'll be reading background for the novel I'm working on, as usual, which at the moment is a sequel to My Dear I Wanted to Tell You. I have some tottering piles of 1930s novels, fascist pamphlets and booklets of regional Italian dialects. Historical research is stratified: there are the books people were writing during the period in question; the ones they were reading, and then the ones written a few years later about the period by people who were there. Then there's me, who knows only what she reads. Hindsight is treacherous for writing in period.
My project, then, is to read Quer Pasticciaccio Brutto de via Merulana, (That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana) by Carlo Emilio Gadda, in the English and the Italian together. It's very hard work because my Italian is terrible; the language is not what we think of as Italian, it's a big pasticciaccio of dialects and slang; and it's all rather James Joyce anyway. I hope that not understanding won't really matter. It's an experiment. The book is a sort of thriller, with a detective and a victim, but you don't find out whodunnit anyway - apparently that's not the point. It is, all agree, a great classic. I'm kind of looking forward to it.
And when that gets too much, I shall read Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, because it is nothing to do with what I'm working on, and her English is clear, beautiful and comprehensible.
Louisa Young's My Dear I Wanted to Tell You is published by HarperCollins.
LILA AZAM ZANGANEH: This summer, sitting on the edge of southern Europe, I will read The Life and Memoirs of Casanova. I had long heard that Giacomo Casanova, the self-styled Chevalier de Seingalt, seer and sensualist, was also a gifted prose stylist, likely one of the best European writers of the eigtheenth century. Then, a few weeks ago, when I happened in London to visit my publisher, I was at a friend's house, browsing through his library. The Memoirs were the first thing that caught my eye, and I immediately asked if I might borrow the book. It's a fuchsia-coloured American edition, with an introduction by Erica Jong. 'He is a true eighteenth-century spirit,' she writes, 'more libertarian than libertine, a born vagabond and adventurer whose life reads like the lustiest of picaresque novels.' Yet lusty is hardly the right word, she readily admits. Casanova is, in his own words, 'a free agent', but never a pornographer. He never speaks of sex, but rather of 'conflagrations', 'seas of delight', 'ecstasies of enjoyment'. A ravenous appetite for life, deemed dangerous, perhaps, only because it manages this rare feat: Casanova was, by his own account, a supremely happy man. 
The other book I would like to read is The Garden of Eden by Hemingway. A dear friend, a writer, had recommended it some years ago, and I purchased a copy which resurfaced recently in my living room. Written on-and-off between 1946 and 1961, it's Hemingway's last uncompleted novel. Set near Aigues Mortes on the French Riviera in the 1920s, it tells the story of a young American writer, his sensual wife, and the perilous game they engage in when they both fall in love with the same woman. From the few pages I have already read, it sounds like Hemingway at his purest best:
'What are you thinking?' the girl asked.
'Nothing.'
'You have to think something.'
'I was just feeling.'
'How?'
'Happy.'
Lila Azam Zanganeh is the author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, published by Penguin.
Farhana Gani, July 2011
Tuesday, 5 July, 2011
Newsletter
Untitled Books
Your account
Register for an account and review books, comment on articles and build a list of your favourite reviews. Coming soon.
