Summertime & the Reading Will Be Easy

July Fourth is the official opening day of Beach Reading Season, and I've been invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch (um, book) before a major league barbecue at Hampton Beach, N.H., on Sunday.

Well, no, that isn't true. But as we roll into the holiday weekend and all those languorous summer hours to follow, reading--particularly "beach reading," whether or not you're literally at a beach--does matter to more people. The pressure is building among both dedicated and seasonal readers who are searching for the perfect summer books. What should they read? What shouldn't they read? What if they don't have time to read everything they take on vacation? What if they waste time reading the "wrong" books?
        
To smooth this annual transition to biblio-beach mode, booksellers, publishers, newspaper columnists and bloggers compile lists of summer recommendations. As an industry, our helpful advice to the public is simple: buy lots of great books, read them voraciously, and then buy more.
    
For those of us in the book trade, however, it gets a little more complicated. We read for a living, so what do we do on our vacations? I'd like to share a little strategy I'm using to enhance my hot weather reading this year. I plan to read well, but slowly--Dog Days of summer slow.

Once upon a time I was a slow reader, in the best sense of the concept. I lingered over pages, paragraphs and sentences. I underlined. I copied sections into commonplace books. I read aloud to any unsuspecting soul who happened to enter the room: "Listen to this."

From Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient: "Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise."

Before I started as a bookseller in 1992, I was practically monogamous when I read. I could spend a month with a book, six months with an author. Pages were covered with marginalia. I lived in them for long periods, then moved on, as if strolling a narrow garden path rather than weaving through rush hour traffic.

Suddenly, however, I had to change my game and learn how to read faster without sacrificing concentration, comprehension and pleasure. At the bookstore, customers thought I was a reading machine. They would sometimes ask, with unmasked awe, "How many books do you read a week?"

The answer is, as you know, complicated. I cheated. Ours is a world with stacks upon stacks of guilt-inducing ARCs waiting for their turn; of 50-pages-and-out reading. The relevant question from my customers should have been: "How many books do you finish a week?"

I did, however, learn how to be a more promiscuous reader during the 15 years I spent as a frontline bookseller and I haven't shaken that habit. Often I have three, four or five books going at once, and continue to cast my eyes with longing at the endless stream of new, tempting titles that come across my desk.

I don't necessarily like this feeding frenzy mentality, but it's what we work with in our profession. We're expected to know a little something about a lot of books; a little more about several key books; and a lot about a chosen few. We do our best to oblige.

Which brings me back to my reading plans for the summer. Beginning this holiday weekend, I'll experiment by slow-reading some of May Sarton's journals. Slowing down will take some practice after all these years, just to avoid getting the bookish bends. My transitional period currently involves a frontlist fix of Alan Furst's Spies of the Balkans and Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

There's another paragraph in The English Patient I like. Hana is reading again, this time to herself: "She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams."

Sounds good to me. It's summertime, and the reading will be easy.--Published in Shelf Awareness, issue #1224.