The Possible Reading of Summer 2011

I really like to make summer reading lists. Even though I inevitably abandon my planned reading each year (there was this one summer when I actually read three whole books on my list before getting distracted by other, newer, shinier books), I keep making these things every year. Beyond the simple, compulsive pleasures of listmaking for its own sake, it’s nice to imagine that I’ll have enough downtime to read ten or more books in one summer, as unlikely as that may seem when I have love, work, outdoor concerts, summer movies, Muppet Show DVDs, and many other things ready and waiting to distract me. This time of year, I’m mainly drawn to books that look to be funny, light, short, and reasonably full of novelty, as well as compact enough to comfortably carry to the park and back (though I do have one rather unwieldy coffee table book on my list). Here’s what sounds good to me this year:

archy and mehitabel, Don Marquis

This will almost certainly be my favorite-ever book of free-verse poems written from the point of view of a cockroach telling stories about his urbane alley cat friend. (The premise is that the cockroach bangs out each poem on Marquis’ typewriter late at night; the poems contain no capitalization and little punctuation because a cockroach is not strong enough to hold down the shift key and hit other keys at the same time.) It’s also supposed to be one of the funniest books written about 1920s New York.

At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman

Fadiman’s  previous essay collection Ex Libris, one of my very favorite books, deals with her passions as a bibliophile; this one, which I’ve heard is equally awesome, looks to be more broadly concerned with various of her life’s obsessions. Judging by her essay titles—“Ice Cream,” “Coffee,” “Moving”—some of her obsessions are shared by me.

Carnet de Voyage, Craig Thompson

Here we have the only book by Thompson that I haven’t read yet. I love Goodbye, Chunky Rice and Blankets, and this looks like a really nice change of pace for him: a travelogue stitched together from notes and sketches he took down while traveling in Europe and Morocco several years ago. Judging from the pages I’ve flipped through, his art just keeps getting better and better.

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, John McPhee

The most fun I had reading a book last year was when I finally got around to reading my first John McPhee book, Giving Good Weight, with its warm, observant essays about the New York Greenmarket, competitive pinball players, and eccentric chefs. I’ve heard this book is a good next step, and it definitely sounds intriguing enough: it’s about a hybrid aircraft—part airplane, part airship—conceived in the Seventies and shaped like, indeed, a prodigiously big pumpkin seed.

Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

I just have not read enough Terry Pratchett. It bums me out. I’ve read and loved several of his books, but I just don’t generally think of him when I’m looking for light reading. I’ve heard that this one, which deals in part with a murder mystery involving golems and werewolves, is one of his funniest, so I’m going to use it to try to get back on the Pratchett wagon.

The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway

Friends have been prodding me to read this novel about the aftermath of a very bizarre apocalypse for a couple of years, and I do love me some dystopic science fiction. Apparently there’s something to do with a thing called a Go-Away Bomb, which is supposed to be an effective deterrent because it permanently alters the fabric of reality within its blast zone. Amazingly, it doesn’t work quite the way it’s meant to. This one should be an enormous amount of fun.

The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

Yeah, this is one I should really have read at least twice by now. I’m a fan of Gaiman in general, and his previous young adult novel, Coraline, is pretty much the best thing he’s ever done as far as I’m concerned. Yet somehow this book, which has been praised by people I love and respect and has now won seemingly every last award it was eligible for (the Newbery and Carnegie and Hugo! I mean, when does that ever happen?), hasn’t made it to the top of my stack yet. This requires rectification.

Hitchcock/Truffaut, Francois Truffaut

This is the large, unwieldy book on my list, full of anecdotes from Hitchcock’s filmmaking career, all the way from the mid-1920s to 1980, and illustrated with pretty black-and-white film stills and production photos. I expect to learn plenty about how some of my favorite movies got made.

Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

I actually read this one last month to get a head start on my list, and it was quite fun. I remembered the resolution of the mystery from having seen the movie version years ago, but that didn’t really take much away from it. It’s really one of Christie’s more audacious plots, perfectly in keeping with her normal formula and willing to take that formula to some of its more outrageous extremes. I’m being vague so as not to spoil anything; suffice it to say that Hercule Poirot is as incorrigible and amusing as usual, and setting the whole story on a snow-bound train adds some fun restrictions to the action.

Week-End Wodehouse, P. G. Wodehouse

Aah, this is the stuff. In the last two years, I haven’t even tried to get through a summer without reading a P. G. Wodehouse book. His writing, more than anything else I can think of, is perfect summer reading: fast-paced, utterly ridiculous, filled with some of the funniest jokes every written in English, and truly well-crafted and tightly plotted in a way that you might not notice because you’re laughing too hard. I’ve already talked about how I named my blog after a line of his; now I’m chuckling as I think of this one paragraph he wrote about the joys of playing with a rubber duck in the bathtub. Week-End Wodehouse is a selection of some of his best-loved stories and excerpts, including many that I haven’t read yet. I can’t wait.

N.B. I stubbornly refuse to put unpublished books on reading lists, even lists of books I probably won’t get around to reading anyway; nonetheless, I’ll admit that next week I’m planning to drop everything in favor of starting George R. R. Martin’s long-awaited (and sometimes rudely demanded) novel A Dance With Dragons, which will probably keep me up late at night like every other book in his Ice and Fire saga has already done.