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Saturday 28 May 2016

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Gaby Wood on summer reading

Gaby Wood shares her tips for summer reading – with a caveat on all such recommendations.

Kate Atkinson, author of 'Life after Life', winner of the the Costa Novel Award 2013. Her first novel, Behind The Scenes At The Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995
Kate Atkinson, author of Life after Life, winner of the the Costa Novel Award 2013. Her first novel, Behind The Scenes At The Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 Photo: Andrew Crowley

Last July, we ran a piece that suggested that if you had young children, “summer reading” was a bit of a misnomer. “Every summer there are Summer Reading Specials which make the torment all the more gruesome,” wrote Toby Clements – accompanied by a Summer Reading Special. “What will William Boyd be reading this summer? What about Colm Tóibín? Pat Barker? When you are on your eighth reading of 'The Gruffalo' that morning, it is easy to think badly of these sorts of luminaries and their ideas of what summer reading is all about.”

My solution this year was to take plays – slim, and oddly responsive to interruption. If you’re in the middle of David Hare’s 'Skylight', for instance, you can be back in the grip of that same conversation hours later without any need to refresh your memory. The scene, after all, has been set by you, and the rest is as vivid as if you were listening to neighbours, wherever you happen to be.

Of course, people have been known not to finish books even without the help of children. A staple of those summer reading lists is the delusional determination to grapple with Proust (now that he’s easier to carry on a Kindle). In these pages, we organised our summer reading list geographically – yes, we did ask Colm Tóibín, who offered an erudite literary tour of Spain; no, we didn’t feel the need to remind you of 'Lost Time'. Other well-known novelists and adventurers wrote about parts of the world they knew well: Amit Chaudhuri chose books about India, Elif Shafak Turkey, and so on.

But one of the things that’s difficult to reflect in our pages is the real, read life of a book – and some do suddenly turn into summer phenomena. It happened with One Day, and again with The Slap. The following for Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow grew gradually and continues to expand. Jennifer Egan’s last bestselling book was a word-of-mouth hit long before it won any prizes.

This year, Kate Atkinson’s latest book, Life After Life, has become a summer favourite, as has Jess Walter’s paperback Beautiful Ruins. From the Man Booker longlist, I’d recommend NoViolet Bulawayo’s extraordinary 'We Need New Names'; from earlier this year, John le Carré’s most personal spy novel, A Delicate Truth, and – a rather different proposition – George Saunders’s witty and heart-stopping short story collection Tenth of December. You don’t need me to tell you that JK Rowling has colonised this month’s market, with the paperback of The Casual Vacancy and the crime novel she’s so cross about.

But these suggestions may be as redundant by now as the joke that went around after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos acquired one of the world’s great newspapers: “If you bought The Washington Post, you might also like…” Because you may feel that summer is almost over. So it’s worth recommending some things further ahead. This autumn brings new novels by Jonathan Coe, Jhumpa Lahiri, Thomas Pynchon, Donna Tartt, Margaret Drabble, to name a few. Almost worth booking a staycation just to read them.

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