Some readers feel the season is optimal for tackling overlooked classics, those big books never assigned (or finished) at school, the masterworks that seem essential to life's education. War and Peace remains the Summer of '97. The summer of '04 was spent in the Alps - well, not literally - with Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Last summer? A festival of Roth.
Toward exploring the bounty of summer reading, we queried regional authors and independent booksellers about their seasonal traditions, favorites and current ambitions.
"Whatever I tend to be writing determines what I'm reading," says Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling Eat, Pray, Love who now lives in New Jersey near the Delaware River. "The only sad thing about making my living as a writer is I've lost the ability to be a casually inspired reader. Right now, I'm writing about marriage, so I'm reading books on the subject."
Gilbert has written award-winning fiction and nonfiction, but tends toward the latter in her suggestions. "One of my favorite books ever, which I tend to reread, is Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan, which resonates even more now that I live in New Jersey," says Gilbert, a world traveler.
Her sister, Catherine Gilbert Murdock, author of the young-adult novels The Off Season and Dairy Queen, says, "Before I was ever a children's book writer, I was a passionate children's book reader. I still prefer them to anything written for so-called 'adults.' "
Christian Bauman, author of the novels Voodoo Lounge and The Ice Beneath You, acknowledges that his reading habits differ with the seasons. "It's a different time with a different mood, just as with food, things tend to be heavier in the winter," he says. "This summer, I'm really attracted to shorter and briefer novels. The British have this great tradition of the brief yet powerful novels, where in America all the writers seem to think they need to weigh in with 800-pound books."
