Best bets for the beach
What we’ll be curling up with as we lounge poolside this season:
We serve up a selection of summer novels to help you pass the time, including an offering by Molly Ringwald — yes, that Molly Ringwald, of The Breakfast Club fame.
June 4
Nick Harkaway: The Blind Giant: How Human Connection Will Redeem the Digital Age
Are you worried the interweb is sapping your attention span, so the only texts you can read without fidgeting are short blurbs such as this? Not to worry, claims Harkaway — by flitting from blog post to video to tweet, you’re able to synthesize information and consider ideas from many points of view, in a way our ancestors never could have done. The sciencefiction author and tech blogger’s book offers thoughtful, cliché- free insight into how we may be able to use technological developments to our advantage. Assuming we can concentrate long enough to read it.
June 5 Joydeep Roy- Bhattacharya: The Watch
Rejecting the idea that ongoing armed conflicts are for journalists, not novelists, this Indian- American writer has set his third book in presentday Afghanistan. On one level it recasts Sophocles’ tragedy
Antigone, telling the story of a local woman who approaches the U. S. army base her brother had attacked, hoping to bury his body. But it’s also a contemporary rumination on a clash of cultures and ideologies. Roy- Bhattacharya tells his story from multiple, conflicting points of view; this is fiction that forces us to react, to feel, perhaps even to change our minds.
June 11
Pasha Malla: People Park
What a curious book. For his first novel, Malla — whose 2008 short- story collection
The Withdrawal Method won Ontario’s Trillium Prize — drops us without warning in a world tilted about 10 degrees from our own. In the island city of People Park, inhabitants swill cider instead of beer, passionately follow women’s professional sports and are governed by a pseudo- Masonic order that finds itself threatened by an anarchic magician. Written in breathless prose, it’s oddball fun, and Malla proves himself as a writer who never takes the easy way out.
June 12
Mark Haddon: The Red House
Haddon’s first book for adults, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, is about a boy with Asperger’s- like symptoms and obsessive attention to detail; in this, his third, a similar obsession appears in the narrative. Flitting between the minds of eight characters gathered for a family vacation, Haddon describes their interactions, desires and faults in all of their minutiae. The results are alternately vexing ( as the characters’ self- involvement wears one down) and exhilaratingly imaginative. Recommended if you like a challenge with your summer reading. And sentence fragments.
June 12
Jess Walter: Beautiful Ruins
Let it not be said that Walter isn’t a brave writer: his last two books were comic novels about 9/ 11 and the financial meltdown. His latest, moving between 1962 Italy and present- day Hollywood, tells the interwoven tales of a deluded ingenue actress, a failed- author- turned- car- salesman, a faded alt- rock star who turns to musical comedy, and a young man who tries to build a tennis court on a cliff. Rather than pitying the characters, we come to admire their resilience — and Walter’s own capacity to pull heartstrings as he bashes funny bones.
June 19
Alex Stone: Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind
It could be that, upon publication of this book, its author will be dragged into an alley and sawed in half, his remains stuffed into a top hat and fed to a rabbit. Not only does the “part- time conjuror” take us backstage at the World Championships of Magic, but he also visits psychology labs to uncover how magic tricks fool the mind, thus potentially giving audiences the tools to see beyond illusion. Will all be revealed — or will all copies mysteriously vanish?
June 21
Karen Thompson Walker:
The Age of Miracles
If the Earth’s rotation inexplicably started to slow, surely people would enjoy getting more sleep on longer days? But in Walker’s big- splash debut ( sold for $ 1 million in the U. S.), it causes panic. Narrated by a preteen California girl, the book starts off much like a Young Adult dystopia but thankfully never goes where you’d expect. It’s both a lament for vanishing ways of life and a suggestion to do what The Police once recommended in song: “When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still around.”
July 17
Liza Klaussmann: Tigers in
Red Weather
Klaussmann has the kind of CV that could easily make other writers jealous: The great- greatgreatgranddaughter of Herman Melville, she filed dispatches to America about film and TV from Paris before sparking an eightpublisher auction for her debut novel, set in Martha’s Vineyard, where she spends her summers. The book, set from the 1940s to the ’ 60s, explores the dark side of privilege, stirring elements of the noir into a New England oldmoney setting. And to ratchet up the envy, its narrative, told from five points of view, is deftly written indeed.
Aug. 18
Molly Ringwald: When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories
Apart from one cuttingly funny tale about an actor who finds work opposite an animated polar bear, this collection of interrelated stories doesn’t read like the work of a moonlighting star of stage and screen. Rather, it’s full of carefully observed tales of domestic intrigue, involving infidelity, grudges, self- delusion and gender dysphoria, told in clear, savvy prose as if by an intimate of the characters involved. Clearly, Ringwald has left the Brat Pack far behind.
Aug. 25
Martin Amis: Lionel Asbo: State of England
In a recent Daily Telegraph interview, Amis mused that he hasn’t been offered an MBE because he’s perceived to have had it easy ( his father being literary lion Kingsley Amis). But more likely it’s because he writes books such as this, an excoriating satire on contemporary England as anti- intellectual, celebrity- besotted and money- revering. Its epigraph intentionally misquotes The Baha Men, of all people: “Who let the dogs in?” Unsurprisingly, Amis moved to Brooklyn last year.