But what I didn't expect was that reading would become harder the longer I stayed in school. Instead of finding myself more absorbed in literature, I became worn out with it. Being forced to read for days on end turned my reading time into work, especially since so many of my required texts were dull or esoteric or just plain useless. I constantly missed my teenage years when I read voraciously and carelessly, free to pursue any book cover or review or recommendation that caught my attention.
So, for me, this summer has been about finding a way to read with pleasure again. I whipped through the Twilight series and ravaged Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse books (all nine of them!) with fiendish joy. I read hundreds of pages a week, and it wasn't edifying in the slightest—how wonderful! My choices were whimsical, frequently pulpy, and always completely personal: I picked books based on what plot lines I wanted to experience, not based on whether or not the book would make me a better writer.
However, as the summer wore on, I found myself reading books that were both personally pleasing and brilliantly written. These books all came to me through personal connections. I tracked down Laura Moriarty's The Center of Everything after attending one of her readings in Lawrence; at the reading, I realized that she wasn't just writing about places I knew well, but also about the kind of personalities and life stories I had grown up with in eastern Kansas. I took a chance on Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage because Charlie's mom recommended it. And I took on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping not because its reputation was almost biblical in my MFA program (it was), but because my wonderful thesis adviser Julia Kasdorf had spoken so highly of it.
This summer has made me fall back in love with books and has made me newly grateful for the reading recommendations of friends. So I thought I'd pass the reading joy along: here are three brief reviews of some of my favorite books this summer.
The Center of Everything follows Evelyn, a girl growing up in Kerrville, Kansas with a mother on welfare, a developmentally disabled younger brother, and three kittens rescued from their apartment complex parking lot. When the novel begins, Ronald Reagan is president and Evelyn is nine, just old enough to notice when her mother's life transforms into a series of misfortunes: the car breaks down, then she loses her job, then she becomes entangled with a married man, etc. Things go downhill fast for the Bucknow family, but meanwhile, Evelyn finds herself increasingly singled out as a gifted student, as someone “special” enough to distance herself from her mother's bad choices.
The novel is about how Evelyn deals with her unwanted poverty and the social stigma that comes with it. As Evelyn progresses through her various rebellions and her mother struggles to find happiness, Moriarty creates something very special: she writes a pair of characters who are flawed yet likable and believably tragic without being gratuitously gritty. As I read, I recognized my high school classmates, my grocery store check-out clerk, even my best friends in the novel's movingly realistic characters.
There are many flaws in this novel, Moriarty's first—the book starts pages before the plot does, Evelyn's voice doesn't always suit her age, etc.—but Moriarty manages to write about Reagan, welfare, and small town life with such panache that she easily avoids melodrama, cheap feel-goodery, or political warfare.
I almost didn't read Alice Munro's Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage because I don't like short stories. I've always thought that short stories suffer from action-less mooning or strained and overwrought plotlines, and I hated that a reader could never get really involved with the protagonist of a story the way one can become absorbed in a character from a novel.
But Munro is the first to convince me that there's more to short stories than foreshortened relationships and one-night-stand plots. The individual stories in her collection combine to comment on the difficulties of real life relationships. Unwanted and strained connections abound in these pages, mostly between wives and husbands (though relationships between female relatives frequently appear and falter, too).
In Munro's world, there is little loving but plenty of repressed urges, unreachable temptations, and death to go around. Yet the stories do not feel sad, just flat. Munro shows us characters who could explode into action and drama at any second—in fact, as readers, we often expect them to—but in Munro's stories, they simply don't.
And that, I think, is the point. The stories in Hateship, Friendship are not “slice of life” pieces, but they are very much like life: no matter how rich and riotous our inner lives feel to us, our outside lives often remain as plain and practical and faded as old linoleum.
And that, I think, is the point. The stories in Hateship, Friendship are not “slice of life” pieces, but they are very much like life: no matter how rich and riotous our inner lives feel to us, our outside lives often remain as plain and practical and faded as old linoleum.
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Housekeeping is narrated by Ruthie, a teenage girl who, after a series of unfortunate family deaths, is raised by her aunt Sylvie. Sylvie, a former transient, is an unconventional parental figure: she takes catnaps on the town park benches, fills her family home with tin cans and stacks of magazines, and serves dinner every night with the lights out. As Ruthie's sister Lucille increasingly rejects Sylvie's ways, Ruthie finds herself willingly dissolving into the rhythms of Sylvie's strange, unfettered lifestyle.
Housekeeping is a novel that asks its readers to slow down. After a summer of Charlaine Harris, I had to focus on reading Housekeeping patiently, on respecting the ebb and flow of Robinson's style. But this brief novel amply rewards a reader who is willing to be still: Robinson's prose is supple and winding and rich with sensuous imagery, and each page is lush with contemplative eddies as Ruthie mulls over memory, death, and the liquidity of time.
While Munro and Moriarty are compelling because of their realism, Robinson's writing entrances with its literary unreality: her novel is very much a reflection of Ruthie's perceptions and interior thoughts. Robinson's writing ruthlessly mirrors Ruthie's loneliness and increasing difference from the outside world, but Robinson writes so beautifully, so sadly, and so sensually that I was content to wander within the watery tide of Ruthie's thoughts.
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