The Hazy Daze of Summer, The Lazy Days  of Reading
July 18, 2010

Henry Ward Beecher said it very well: “There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.”

He’s right. It’s why certain types of books are marketed as “beach reads” while others, even if not given that appellation, just feel right for summertime reading. Do you find that your reading choices tend to get a bit looser? That you indulge the more relaxed side of your reading self? Generally, I do.  The books I choose are not be mindless, but they have a certain air—summer air?—about them that makes them ideal reading on a lazy, hazy summer afternoon. Like right now.

I finished one of those books yesterday, a book with large promise. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to its promise. But my dissatisfaction actually had a positive outcome because in searching out something to read that would help me to forget the previous book I came across one that caught my eye.

I am now happily ensconced in The Darkest Jungle, which after a somewhat slow start is picking up rapidly. Here it is, hot as all get out, and I am voluntarily plunging into a book about the unhappy Darién expedition that in 1854 was launched to find a definitive route for a canal across one of the most hellish places on earth—the isthmus of Panama—that would allow a connection between the two oceans (what eventually was achieved by the Panama Canal). The top half of the cover design is of a dark, wet, hot, humid jungle dripping with indescribable misery. This is not beauty, it is sheer wretchedness. Perfect!

And it is so well done! Seventy-five pages in and I am gripped so tightly by the story I can hardly tear myself away to write this. I. Must. Get. Back. To. It. And so I wish you all a good week reading. I hope your book is half as good as mine.

Upcoming Book Festivals:
Unfortunately, there are no book festivals coming up this week or next weekend.

The Pub House:
Two Dollar Radio is one of the least-sounding publisher names I think I have ever run across. Yet this family-run house is also one of the better small houses around whose mission  “is to reaffirm the literary, cultural, and artistic ambitions of the publishing industry.” Because of its emphasis on quality, it has gotten major attention from publications like the Los Angeles Times, O Magazine, the Boston Globe, Book Forum, and more. But the house itself is less known to the reading public who would likely be inclined to say, “Who?” So we’re out to tell you what they do for you, the reader. Well, they offer some damn good books like Life on the Edge, which even if you are not of or in New York City is an excellent book about a job and a life you probably know nothing about (until you read it). Vagabond Blues is for the sports fan who wants to peek behind the curtain that covered the drugs and alcohol and calculated violence in minor league football (and the post-game downtime) in the early 1980s, and how it affects one player with dreams of NFL stardom and hard choices. And fiction fans might find Beneath the Pines, the story of a Southern family with a twisted history that is brought, struggling and breathless, to the surface when an inheritance pushes together two members and the outsider who was the catalyst in that history, to be a tale they cannot put down.

Imaging Books & Reading:
In 1956, television was already a large part of many families’ lives, but not to an overwhelming extent. People read, and parents read to their children, and in this photograph, which originally ran with a book review column, a father is reading to his family while the mother looks on. The caption originally read: “Educators say that family reading often builds a foundation for good scholarship and lifelong interest in books. It's an even greater influence than TV when parents and children read together.” Certainly that’s my experience, and I suspect it is yours too.

Of Interest:
If you already know that one of the best ways to drive a bookseller insane is to ask for the book “with the purple cover” you probably will appreciate these: A hellva life, Miss Austen. Not the Dick! And more . . .. An equally amusing variation, the story of one bookseller’s husband who took over for her when she was felled with pneumonia and laryngitis, and found, to his surprise and dismay, that working in the ER was actually less stressful than working in the bookstore. Then finally, there’s the antiquarian bookseller, the Book Mine, who experiences the same frustrations. It really makes you feel sorry for them, doesn’t it? (Them = booksellers because you have to wonder how some of them survive their customers. Sample: “You have a book I want, but it’s $30. Would you take less? I just want to look at the pictures.”)

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren