Big books for summer

Long reads for a long season

Hey y’all,

It’s suddenly pool season in Texas. To survive the punishing heat, you have to go easy with yourself, not force anything. When the temperature starts to rise, I try work all morning until my brain melts and then I spend the rest of the afternoon on a raft, reading a book. Summer is when I’m really able to read without guilt or expectation.

Most of the year, I prefer reading short books, but in summer I like to sink into long books. Long to me is anything over 300 or 400 pages, but for the purposes of this letter, let’s say “long” is 500+ pages. (Some call them ”doorstoppers.”) 

I’ve got two big books going right now: Ninth Street Women, a joint biography of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler; and American Prometheus, the book that inspired Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

Both are what my son would call ”thicc bois”: 

We’ll see how those go. I really like a good long novel in the summer, so I’m also thinking about taking on Middlemarch or The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Maybe you’re looking for your own big book this summer? Here’s a list of ten that I like:

1. Don Quixote is one of the best, funniest books I’ve ever read. Everyone will tell you to get the Edith Grossman translation, and it’s great, but what brought me the most joy was switching between that and listening to David Case’s reading — his voices for the knight errant and his sidekick made me laugh and laugh.
   
   

2. Dune, by Frank Herbert. Texas in August is basically Arrakis. For me, this is not a book to read out loud or listen to, it’s one to just rip through and enjoy the world.
   
   

3. William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience speaks to the creative experience as much as the religious experience. Billy Jim could really write his ass off.
   
   

4. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is a boggy monster, but it’s full of wonderful stuff. If you want to go truly nuts, try the two-volume The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, which clocks in at over 1,000 pages.
   
   

5. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed is a 500-page interview arranged to cover Herzog’s career in chronological order. This book took me forever to get through, not because it was a slog, but because it’s so dense with insane stories and poetic insights, I was constantly stopping to underline.
   
   

6. Lizzie Goodman’s Meet Me In The Bathroom is an oral history of NYC music from 2001-2011. How much you enjoy it will probably depend on your familiarity with the music — I was eighteen and a freshman in college when I saw The Strokes in Newport, KY, in 2001, so it made me pretty danged nostalgic.