Embracing the challenges of summer reading
Small rulers and pencils are stashed in junk drawers and in old school supply bins around my house, all prizes from when my daughters joined summer library reading programs. I remember the first time I participated in one in my new hometown of Monroe in the Hudson Valley, after we moved from
New York City when I was about 8. I read books about West Point and gnomes.
Get this — they have summer reading programs for adults, too. Somehow I missed this trend, but I’m in.
According to the American Library Association, summer reading programs have been with us for a while. They began in the 1890s as a way to encourage kids, particularly those who didn’t have to do farm work, to read during the summer.
I printed out a reading chart from the Bethlehem Public Library. The theme is “Tails & Tales,” and is inspired by creatures both mythical and real. Here are a few challenges: Read a graphic novel, read outside and watch a movie based on a book.
If you do have younger children, these programs present the perfect opportunity to help make up for an academic year that some might describe as hellacious. Parents are worried about kids falling behind, and library summer reading programs might help. And there’s no pressure.
Another adult challenge this summer for me is diving into the work of a particular author. You know when you stumble upon an author and then read everything they’ve written? I’m doing that with Deborah Levy by reading her “living autobiographies” trilogy, which includes “Things I Don’t Want to Know,” “The Cost of Living,” and her just-released “Real Estate.”
These books speak to me as a 54-year-old woman. This is a period of change and also finding my sea legs after raising two girls and putting their needs first. I’m looking to Levy, who is a few years older than me, for guidance. “Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together,” she writes in “The Cost of Living,” which I’ve now read twice. She is writing about her life after selling the family house due to her divorce, but she doesn’t go into the intricacies of divorce. The book is about her life going forward and also about making a living as a writer.
“I became physically strong at fifty, just as my bones were supposed to be losing their strength. I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting.” Thanks to a supportive friend, Levy finds a shed to write in, also a nod to Virginia Woolf ’s “A Room of One’s Own.”
“Things I Don’t Want to Know” touches on Levy’s life growing up in South Africa and her father, who was a political prisoner. Their family knew Nelson Mandela.
In “Real Estate,” Levy takes stock of the places she and other women have lived and written, like Marguerite Duras, who bought a “major house” with screenplay money and wrote “like a brute.” The shed resurfaces: “I had written three books in that dusty shed. Its tranquility had given shelter to my writing at a time when my long marriage was shipwrecked and I was struggling to hold things together.” (I’m also grateful that Levy reintroduced me to Duras.)
There are details throughout the books that I love, like keys, her electric bike and a banana tree. And her encounters at parties make me laugh and think. Her keen eye for these everyday things adds texture and warmth to these autobiographies. I’m also reading one of her novels, “Hot Milk,” right now. Levy’s fictional books are often nominated for the Booker Prize — and they are excellent. But her autobiographies as a working writer will go down as blueprints for living.
A neighbor is moving and put out a number of books, a few of which I nabbed and will go with me to Maine later this summer. They are newish books: “The Vanishing Half ” by Brit Bennett and “There There” by Tommy Orange. Finding new free books is delightful, and so is finding old books. Last year, a man, also moving, put out beautiful old books. They were not quite free, but cost a quarter each, which is practically free. I scooped up “Tennyson: The Complete Works” from 1882; “In the Arctic Seas,” a journal by Captain Francis Mcclintock about the fate of Sir John Franklin, which is dated 1859; and a flowered book of “Favorite Poems,” that was owned by Mrs. Horace Griffen of Gilboa, which is undated — but really old too.