Entertainment / Books

The best of summer reading

The Quarry, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, And Sons among Toronto Star reviewers’ top 20

Illustration for Summer Reads

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ILLUSTRATION BY RAFFI ANDERIAN/TORONTO STAR

Illustration for Summer Reads

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The woman on a beach in Catalonia, along the coast of Spain, was sprawled on a towel, turning the pages of Sidney Sheldon’s The Best Laid Plans.

It was the late ’90s and we were driving from Gibraltar to Barcelona. With several stops along the way — including Malaga, Murcia and Valencia — I had packed Arundhati Roy’s recently published The God of Small Things.

But I never got more than 30 pages into my vacation book. And when I saw the woman on the beach, baking in the sun, languid and serene, I suddenly realized why: Roy’s dense prose simply did not lend itself to the blazing heat.

Instead of lurching into overdrive, my brain craved neutral. Instead of being challenged by narrative, I just needed to be entertained.

As Henry Ward Beecher, the 19th-century American clergyman, once observed: “There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labour, that summer reading belongs.”

On the beach, near a dock, in a hammock, on a deck, reading in the sunshine dates back to the ancient Egyptians. About 4,000 years later, the blocks and hieroglyphics have given way to paperbacks and touch-screen tablets. But the basic human impulse to be moved by words and ideas endures, even if our preferences have learned to adapt to the seasons.

There’s probably a reason Fifty Shades of Grey was published in the month of June and Ulysses came out in February. The books we consume, generally speaking, cleave to a broader cultural pattern: winter is for working and summer is for relaxing.

Have you ever seen someone flip through Dostoyevsky at Wasaga Beach?

In August of 1894, the Boston Globe dispatched a reporter to a local library. To survey what the city was reading, a librarian rattled off what had been checked out the day before: one science title, two historical books and 52 pieces of fiction.

Craig Fehrman, who retold the story in a brilliant essay about the history of American leisure last year, quoted the librarian as saying: “I could tell by looking at a library record what season of the year it was even if the date was not attached.”

In the summertime, our books are like our clothes: lighter, breezier, more colourful. We don’t want to pull ahead, we want to be carried away. We want fantasy to trump reality, one page, one character, at a time. We throw ourselves into fictional chapters to escape the daily grind and forget, however briefly, that winter will soon return.

Our reading habits, as it turns out, also need a summer vacation.

The Top 20

Here’s a list of 20 recent and forthcoming releases suitable for summer pulled together by our reviewers Alex Good and Emily Donaldson.

You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt

(Penguin, 304 pages, available now)

Set in Washington and Moscow in the ’80s and ’90s, this crackerjack debut about a college grad who gets wrapped up in a conspiracy 10 years after the death of her best friend is a rare triple threat: funny, suspenseful and intelligent. ED

Hellgoing by Lynn Coady

(Anansi, 240 pages, July)

Few writers sketch the complex world of today’s 30- and 40-somethings as shrewdly as Coady. In this new collection she lays bare inner lives of baffled desperation in realistic stories that sting. AG

Feral by George Monbiot

(Allen Lane, 318 pages, available now)

Though Monbiot makes the case for repopulating Europe with long-absent species like beaver, bear and wolves, he’s not suggesting that Canada is some kind of ecological utopia; au contraire: the British activist decries how Canada’s transformation into a “thuggish petro-state” threatens its environmental future in this lively polemic. ED

The Traymore Rooms by Norm Sibum

(Biblioasis, 728 pages, August)

Veteran poet Sibum’s debut novel is set in a Montreal walk-up and features a small cast of characters but nevertheless takes on all kinds of early 21st-century Big Questions about evil and decadence, politics and philosophy, war and terror. AG

Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser

(Little, Brown and Co., 480 pages, available now)

Awash in gorgeous, minor-key prose, de Kretser’s fourth novel about two unrelated characters — one from Sri Lanka, another from Australia — whose lives are shaped by voluntary and involuntary travel is a genuine tour de force. ED

Imaginarium 2013 by Sandra Kasturi and Samantha Beiko

(ChiZine, 350 pages, July)

If you’re looking for something a little off the beaten path for your summer reading you’ll probably find it in this second annual anthology of the year’s best Canadian speculative writing. A trippy collection of SF, horror, fantasy and other enjoyably disturbing odds ’n’ ends. AG

Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff

(Doubleday, 128 pages, July 16)

The Canadian-born humorist and essayist completed this book shortly before he died last year at the age of 47. Rakoff’s novel (his first and last) gives a gently satirical portrait of America through a century-spanning series of character studies written in rhyming verse. ED

Across the Pond: An Englishman’s View of America by Terry Eagleton

(WW Norton, 178 pages, available now)

Admit it, we all like to see our neighbours to the south getting tweaked and it’s even more enjoyable when it’s done with a British accent. In this brief collection of comical notes from abroad, literary critic Eagleton offers some personal and philosophical observations on contemporary American culture. AG

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

(William Morrow, 181 pages, available now)

When Gaiman was 7, a lodger who lived in his family’s home purposefully killed himself by stealing then crashing their car. The author’s first adult novel in almost a decade (“probably my best,” he’s said) hews closely to the facts while injecting a dose of sinister, Gaimanesque otherworldliness into the mix. ED

The Spanish Armada by Robert Hutchinson

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 404 pages, available now)

Yes, it’s an old story and you probably already know who won, but for fans of military history and the age of sail this fast-moving and thorough account of the Armada will hit the spot. Hutchinson is particularly good at going behind the scenes of the English and Spanish war efforts. AG

The Quarry by Iain Banks

(Redhook, 336 pages, available now)

The great Scottish writer Banks was working on the final chapters of this novel about a boy whose father has terminal cancer when he was diagnosed with inoperable gall bladder cancer himself this past April. The Quarry is published posthumously, but only just: Banks died June 9. ED

Taipei by Tao Lin

(Vintage, 256 pages, available now)

Young, hip, digital, subversive, global, autobiographical, experimental, divisive . . . Lin’s latest novel looks to build on his reputation as the voice, or anti-voice, of a generation. You’ll love it or hate it. AG

And Sons by David Gilbert

(Random House, 448 pages, July 23)

A funeral on Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side turns into a major society event when word gets out that A.N. Dyer, a legendarily hermetic, Salinger-like author, is to deliver the eulogy; Gilbert’s second novel could, likewise, turn into a major literary event if it lives up to all the breathless anticipation. ED

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

(FSG, 448 pages, available now)

New Yorker writer Packer views the last 30 years of changes in the American economy through the lens of a collection of private and public lives. Fascinating social reportage that leaves you with a lot to think about with regard to where things are heading. AG

A Marker to Measure Drift by Alexander Maksik

(Bond St. Books, 240 pages, July 30)

Widespread praise for Maksik’s previous novel, You Deserve Nothing, was tempered by controversy when he was accused of cribbing his own storyline from an affair he’d had with a student. This one, about a Liberian woman living in exile in a cave on a Greek island, is presumably less autobiographical. ED

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

(Mulholland Books, 384 pages, available now)

What do you get when you put a feisty cub reporter on the trail of a serial killer who is zipping around Chicago in a demonic time machine? In this case, you get a well written, cross-genre page-turner and one of this summer’s top beach reads. AG

Once We Had a Country by Robert McGill

(Knopf, 394 pages, Aug. 6)

Set during the Vietnam War, the protagonist of McGill’s long-awaited second novel is an American schoolteacher who is abandoned by her draft-dodger boyfriend after the two come to Ontario to establish a commune. ED

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

(Knopf, 336 pages, available now)

Nothing says “summer reading” like Hiaasen’s violent comedies set in the sunshine state of Florida. Expect more eccentric characters, intricate plotting and rough-and-tumble funny stuff from a guy who has this formula down pat. AG

Muse by Mary Novik

(Doubleday, 336 pages, Aug. 13)

A tunic-ripper set in 14th-century Avignon, Novik’s follow-up to her gushingly reviewed, Giller-longlisted novel Conceit gives us the story of Solange LeBlanc, Petrarch’s muse and lover. ED

The Summer is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved by Joey Comeau

(ChiZine, 220 pages, July)

Summer isn’t just fun and games. When 11-year-old Martin heads off to summer Bible camp, he might as well have gone straight to hell. Comeau’s latest is not for all tastes (to put it mildly), but if the thought of a busload of children being butchered by a psychopathic priest in the best splatterhouse tradition thrills you, this dark and conflicted little book will be worth packing in your camp gear. AG

Emily Donaldson is a freelance critic and editor; Alex Good is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries

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