Guest AuthorSince Wednesday, it’s officially been fall. Fall is my favorite time of the year.
Crisp leaves falling from grand trees, cool but pleasant weather, and the quickening of the daily pace as the lull of summer drops off and families and children come back from their summer vacations.
The beginning of fall is also the end of summer reading.
Such a divide would seem superficial, except that summer reading is generally seen as a somewhat lightweight endeavor, or less than serious.
But summer reading for me is reading at its most ambitious. I tend to take on the heavy-hitting books of literature or history. Last summer, it was books such as Trollope’s 900-page “The Way They Live Now.”
This year, I aimed to read George Eliot, Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust, in addition to, slight books of contemporary interest.
But it’s the fat, door-stopping books that test my stamina and reading prowess, and as something of burgeoning highbrow, the only reading I take with more than modicum of seriousness.
Which reminds me to pooh-pooh President Barack Obama’s summer list. Initially, when I read the president’s list, I winced.
He had short books, for example, like Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Lowland” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” – rarely a long, ambitious book, like his choice of Ron Chernow’s “Washington: A Life.”
It says something about the president’s reading priorities, which are expressly and unforgivably political-minded. And it says something about the intellectual toll the presidency can take.
At one point, the president was a sophisticated and dedicated reader of weighty work, say, Derek Walcott’s collected poetry. But that the president was reading, at least one book I read (the Coates), up there at Martha’s Vineyard prevented him from being totally condemned in my eyes.
(Though I still condemn The Washington Post columnist George Will for saying that George Pelacanos [a good writer, yes] was literature on C-SPAN and that Will, a man known for his Oxbridge pretensions, was reading his Washington, DC-Anacostia novels as the main fare of his summer.)
But I digress.
So this summer has been a mixed bag for me. Gratefully, I finished Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina – a book with a plentitude of human interest and the joys and sorrows of human existence. It was pleasant, often riveting and unforgettable imaginative voyage. So I checked Tolstoy off.
But a 900-page door-stopper can also get in the way of other reading. So I dropped Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” feeling as though her heavy, plodding narrative style would make her a hard finish in a summer season of large literary ambition.
So I rationalized, and said, she’s for next summer.
I went onto a spate of short works: John Swed’s “Billie Holiday: The Musician, the Myth, and the Symbol”; Milan Kundera’s “The Joke”; Bernard Bailyn’s “Sometimes An Art: Nine Essays on History”; Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”; Thomas Nagel’s “Mind and Cosmos” – all proved good, even great books.
But they were also a psychological avoidance mechanism for Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” – notorious, in literary history, for its sententious quality and precious subject matter.
And Proust represents the failure of my lofty ambition. At present, I am on page 117. This, after a month and a half of pursuing the pages with avidity. Proust has proved unconquerable.
I am only consoled by the fact that this is not unusual.
The British Independent once did a survey of the summer season’s most “unfinished” books. The list amuses: Stephen Hawkings’s “A Brief History of Time”; Thomas Picketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”; and Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch.”
So yes, the curse of too much ambition. Despite my summer disappointment, fall is here and the cool, elegant flow of this time of year makes me buoyant and expectant.
Chris Timmons is a native Floridian, bird-watcher, editorial columnist, and fellow with the James Madison Institute. He lives in Tampa, Florida, and his opinions belong to him alone. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
