What I Read Last Summer

Stories for all seasons

As a teacher and a scholar, reading is one of those things that I do all year round. I have what might be termed reading tranches—stuff I read for the purposes of whatever I may be writing, stuff that may inform my teaching, and stuff that counts as pleasure reading (though there’s occasionally overlap). I typically have work and fun books going simultaneously at any given time. But summer is a distinctive season, one in which the weight shifts to the latter.

In the summer of 2024, the emphasis was on fiction, which accounts for about two-thirds of my bibliographic diet. In the interests of clarity and utility, I’ll sort that diet into three categories, submitted for your consideration in the event you want to explore any of these titles—or are content simply to get a short summary.

History

Over the July 4^th weekend, I read Alan Taylor’s American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873. Taylor, the recipient of multiple Pulitzer Prizes, specializes in scrambling timelines and geography to give us fresh perspectives on the past. In this case, he looks at the mid-19^th century histories of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, all of which were undergoing a centralization as part of their development into modern nation-states. For Mexico and the United States, this involved war. Canada avoided it, but needed to overcome ethnic and geographic tensions and a complex relationship with Great Britain to come into its own. Overall, a good piece of storytelling.

Regular readers of Americana know that I am now embarked on Sestercentennial Moments, a chronicle of the American Revolution from the perspective of 250 years later. To that end, I read Mary Beth Norton’s 1774: The Long Year of Revolution. Recent scholarship has emphasized the degree to which the nascent United States had arrived at a state of virtual autonomy years long before the Declaration of Independence, and Norton’s work is of a piece with that of folks like T.H. Breen and Nick Bunker. To that end, I re-read Ray and Marie Raphael’s The Spirit of ’74: How the American Revolution Began. The only other work of history I read this summer is Carole Owens’s Remarkable Women of New England: Daughters, Wives, Sisters and Mothers, because I’ve been looking into the possibility of writing a book on women in colonial and revolutionary Massachusetts.

Mysteries

Every once in a while, I settle into a groove with lighter, plot-driven fiction (though I tend to get fatigued when confronted with large casts of characters and complicated scenarios). My summer began with Michael Connelly’s Desert Star, which united his grizzled veteran (now private) detective detective Harry Bosch with his emerging protagonist Renee Ballard, who works within the LAPD. I’ve also caught up with my old favorite Scott Turow, reading the last of his novels I hadn’t read, finishing up with Testimony, a story that stretches beyond his usual Kindle County (a thinly veiled Chicago) to the complex legacy of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s—it's a notably informative book. My biggest undertaking was a huge tome by Robert Galbraith, a.k.a J.K. Rowling, The Ink Black Heart. This is the sixth installment of her mysteries featuring private detective Cormoran Strike and his sidekick Robin Ellacott, an unconsummated love story nestled into a whodunit set in the world of graphic artists. I finished the summer with a visit to an old friend, Archer Mayor, author of some three dozen murder mysteries set in Vermont and featuring the stolid but sensitive Joe Gunther. This one, Marked Man, is set in Gunther’s home turf of Brattleboro (I read the novel while on vacation there) with a mob subplot set on Federal Hill in Providence Rhode Island, where I lived for a stint while in graduate school. It’s a great pleasure to read about places you know.

Fiction

I’m an Anglophile—I happily spend part of last summer in England—and in recent years have made an effort to read classic novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. So I was pleased when my friend and colleague Gregory Grene gave me Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel Tom Jones as a Christmas gift, which I immediately decided I would savor in July. It was a worthwhile excursion; As I got into it, I realized that the novel is a quintessential example of the picaresque genre that dominated Anglo-American fiction in the late 18^th century. Fielding’s ribald sense of humor was a welcome tonic given the moralistic, even censorious tone of so much contemporary culture.

I didn’t realize until compiling this inventory that virtually all of my literary reading this summer was entirely from across the pond—and that much of it involved short fiction. There was Irish writer Clare Keegan’s So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men, her latest set of gleaming miniatures that include Foster and Small Things Like These. Keegan’s stories are very short and pack a tremendous punch. I’m also a big fan of Kate Atkinson—her novels Life After Life and A God of Ruins are among my favorite novels of all time—but I found her latest collection of stories, Normal Rules Don’t Apply a bit disappointing in their glib magical realism. By contrast, I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories, because these pieces are set in a city I don’t know (the British-American Lahiri has settled in Italy and now writes in Italian; these pieces were translated). But they are simply wonderful: granular and yet archetypal stories of displacement and belonging. Great way to end the season.

The one American novelist I (re)read this summer was my old friend Tom Perrotta, whose first novel Election was published in 1998 and has since become a perennial—especially his character of Tracy Flick, embodied by Reese Witherspoon in the good (but different) movie of the following year. I read it because Election is on a slate of summer reads for students at our school for which I’m supposed to lead a discussion; though its cultural references are inevitably dated, Perrotta’s chronicle of a high school student presidency campaign continues to resonate.

I’ll end this missive with a couple honorable mentions of non-fiction: Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, tells the gripping story of a vividly rendered Westchester childhood and Yale education before the author’s close friend descends into schizophrenia, manages to graduate from Yale Law school, and ends up killing his fiancé in a moment of terror. (We’re told this at the outset; the story is reconstructed with an exquisite sense of craft, from there.) I’m headed into Labor Day weekend with Nate Silver’s brand-new On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, a chronicle of gambling culture—writ large—and its impact on American society.

So that’s what I did with my summer. Hope yours was satisfying, whatever your activity of choice may be.