Summer Reading, of a Kind

Why not practice a form of reading that has nothing at all to do with the season?

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I must warn you at the outset, dear readers, that this column—after which I will take a break for a couple of months, resuming in August—will be a bit of a hodge-podge. Its main business is to encourage you to practice an idiosyncratic form of “summer reading,” to try it out at least. But before that, a bit on cicadas and Stephen King and horror fiction. And finally, after the main course, a bit of Ross Macdonald for dessert.

Wendy and I live in Wheaton, Illinois (have done so since we moved here from Pasadena in the summer of 1994). For several weeks now, our region has experienced a rare event:

2024 is a big year for periodical cicadas in Illinois, where Broods XIII and XIX will be emerging throughout much of the state at the same time. The simultaneous emergence is the first time since 1803 and will not happen again until 2245.

This conjunction, which still has several weeks to run, may sound like nothing more than a bit of a nuisance (although for a small number of our fellow citizens it’s a matter of great fascination). But for some of us, it’s deeply creepy, not primarily for the look of these creatures but for the unrelenting sound of them. I mentioned the invasion in an email to old friends who live in the Twin Cities. One of them went online and listened to our visitors; “it was like the sonic background to a horror movie,” she said. Deeply creepy. I found myself wondering whether Stephen King has ever written a book in which cicadas figure prominently.

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King has been on my mind for two reasons. First, he has a new book out (close at hand as I write), You Like It Darker, a collection that includes a novella, two long stories, and nine short stories. Second, I recently participated in a symposium on horror fiction (and horror more generally) presided over by Peter Leithart at the Theopolis Institute. The symposium consisted of a substantial essay by Justin Lee, an associate editor at First Things and himself an aspiring practitioner of horror fiction, with responses from five people (myself included) and a concluding reflection by Lee himself. I encourage you to check it out. “If you haven’t kept up,” I said in my response, “you will be surprised to discover just how fashionable ‘horror’ is across the board in so-called ‘mainstream fiction.’”

Now to “summer reading.” You know the shtick, which—even as it grows ever more contrived—continues to be trundled out annually. Here’s a recent sample from a Washington Post roundup:

Crime fiction thrives year-round, but summer is an ideal time to plunge into the genre when you’re not in the pool or the ocean. (Or maybe even when you are.) Here are some of the thrillers we’re most looking forward to this season.

But why is summer “an ideal time to plunge into” crime fiction, say? The claim is silly, embarrassingly so, and the same can be said of other familiar variants. I propose that this summer, you consider practicing a form of reading that has nothing at all to do with the season but that you may find beguiling, as I have.

Here's how it works. You’re reading a work of nonfiction—for example, Descartes’ Meditative Turn: Cartesian Thought as Spiritual Practice, by Christopher J. Wild, just published by Stanford. On the back of the book, the words “a dramatic conversion experience in southern Germany in the winter of 1619” catch your eye, and you turn to the formidably learned but lucid introduction. Before you’ve even finished that, your mind, unbidden, is spinning a tale. J. C. Scharl’s Sonnez Le Matins, featuring Calvin, Rabelais, and Ignatius of Loyola in a single night in Paris, comes to mind as an analogue, though it’s a verse drama rather than a novel.

My philosopher friends are free to avert their eyes. And what do such fancies—imagining the outlines of a novel that will never even be started, let alone completed—amount to, whether their subject is Descartes seen from an unfamiliar angle, or, to take another recent book from Stanford, Rosamund Johnston’s Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969? I find them exhilarating. They generate mental energy that can be applied to more mundane purposes. They are a reminder of the inexhaustible plentitude of the Real. Best of all, they simply happen, willy-nilly.

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Now the promised dessert. In my previous column, I wrote about the books Wendy and I have on shelves and in stacks in our bedroom, not least the pile of Ross Macdonald’s 18 Lew Archer novels on the floor next to the head of the bed on my side. I heard from a reader, a friend who already knew about my love for these books. He wasn’t exasperated or scornful, but he did wonder, he said, just why I made so much of them.

What could I say that I haven’t already said? I picked up a copy of Black Money (1966), a Book Club edition with a great dust-jacket and Post-it Notes throughout. The book seemed to open itself, and I found myself on page 175, at the start of Chapter 26: “It was still day, with a searchlight sun glinting along the sea, when the plane took off for Las Vegas. We flew away from the sun and came down into sudden purple dusk.”

What a paragraph! Archer quickly arrives at his destination, the Scorpion Club, “one of the larger clubs on the street.” He’s struck, as he often is, by the people at the slot machines: “They fed in their quarters and dollars with their left hands and pulled the levers with their right like assembly-line workers in a money factory. There were smudge-eyed boys so young that they hadn’t begun to shave yet, and women with workmen’s gloves on their lever hands, some of them so old and weary that they leaned on their machines to stay upright. The money factory was a hard place to work.”

In the course of Black Money, compact yet capacious, fast-moving yet measured, Archer enters many worlds within the great big world, including academia as it was in the mid-1960s. It’s one of the best novels of that wild decade. Give it a look if you have never tried it; re-read it if you have.