Interlude: Beach Reading (My Way)
Books I'm taking on holiday, and other behind-the-scenes reading adventures.
Greetings, Friends,
As a reminder, I am away for the first two weeks of June. I’m writing this before my departure, but by the time it reaches you, I’ll have left the California coast to enjoy the slightly moodier but still sandy beaches of Oregon. In lieu of another post about Jack, I wanted to share a bit about what I’m excited to read on vacation. Nothing by the venerable C. S. Lewis until I return home!
This may be of absolutely no interest to anyone but me. But I enjoy perusing other people’s reading lists, so perhaps some of you will as well.
Babel, R. F. Kuang - This book has been in my to-be-read pile for two years. I saw someone online liken it to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and bought it immediately, but I’ve been waiting for the right moment to dive in. I read Yellowface by the same author this spring, and while I immediately knew that the book would depress me, I could not put it down—which I take as a pure testament to Kuang’s skill as a storyteller. I’m excited to read something of hers that is, in terms of genre, much more up my alley.
Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Piper - I’ve seen this book praised and quoted from innumerable times, and I’ve long meant to finally sit down with it. This summer is the time! I read a lot of novels on vacation, but I always throw in some nonfiction, preferably something contemplative, to counterbalance all the narrative. And what could be better to read at the start of summer than a book on leisure?
The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens - I like to have at least one nineteenth-century novel mixed in with my vacation reading—preferably one I’ve never read before. In Anne of the Island, Anne Shirley reads Pickwick to celebrate the end of university examinations, and I have, for years, meant to emulate her.
On Beauty, Zadie Smith - I read The Fraud this spring and was really disappointed (incredible historical detail, relentlessly unhappy characters), but I loved White Teeth when I read it for candidacy exams. On Beauty is inspired by E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End, which I adore, so I’m hoping my bad experience with The Fraud was a one-off.
A whole stack of Georgette Heyer novels - No, seriously, I’m bringing so many of them. Frederica, The Grand Sophy, Venetia, Bath Tangle… I devour these like potato chips. I’d never read Heyer before this spring, and her work is my new obsession. If you happen to like Regency historical fiction—well, then you’ve probably already read her. But if you haven’t… In the words of Kenneth Grahame’s Water Rat, ‘What have you been doing, then?’ Yes, Heyer wrote romance, but she was also a true scholar of the Regency period and a scintillating storyteller. She somehow takes tropes that I ordinarily despise and makes them delightful.
I’ll also be bringing Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Charlotte Mason’s A Philosophy of Education, because I’ll be leading reading groups on those two books for the Catherine Project this summer. The Catherine Project is a wonderful organisation that “builds communities of learning based on conversation and hospitality,” working outside the university system to promote engagement with the humanities. If you’re looking for people to discuss great books with, I encourage you to check them out.
That’s all for now. By the time this reaches you, I’ll probably have snuck a few more volumes onto the pile, but that’s between me and my over-full book bag. If you feel like sharing your own summer reading plans in the comments, I would love to hear about them!
I hope you all read something singularly delightful this week,
Sarah