If there’s one thing I have learned about summer reading, it’s that it should have no boundaries. Everything can be a beach read: Leo Tolstoy, John Grisham, Roland Barthes, Karl Ove Knausgaard, even massive presidential biographies if you are a grandpa or my 26-year-old brother. If you’re like me, every book that you have missed out on during the rest of the year becomes fodder for an ambitious—and somewhat behind-the-times—summer reading list.
And speaking of behind-the-times, it is perhaps unsurprising that my favorite book so far this summer was Ali Smith’s Winter. Released in January 2018, Winter is the second novel in Smith’s seasonal quartet, following Autumn. Both Autumn and Winter are lyrical and political, something akin to a modernist experiment: a pastiche of texts, news, fiction. I devoured Autumn in one sitting, sprawled in morning light on my parents’ porch (with my laptop nearby to look up pictures of Pauline Boty’s work). Winter, on the other hand, took me several lazy days of beach vacation to finish.
There was something especially delightful about a book that was so cognitively dissonant with my surroundings, an unseasonal reading: to read about a dysfunctional family Christmas in frozen Cornwall while sweaty and sunscreen-y on a beach, floating around a pool on a doughnut-shaped raft, or indoors waiting for aloe to soak into sunburns. This is of course apropos of Winter and its concern for global warming, its ending grimace at Donald Trump’s summer speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia: “In the middle of summer, it’s winter. White Christmas. God help us, every one.” Winter—and Autumn—remind the reader of the reality of climate change, the way the seasons slide into each other with less variegation than years past. From Autumn, “The days are unexpectedly mild. It doesn’t feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren’t for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves away, the beads of the condensation on the webstrings hung between things.” Unseasonal reading has some of this awareness, that soon summer will bleed into all seasons, that heat is building, melting.
But along with the weather, what’s been unseasonal about my reading this summer is my lack of focus. Usually I read about a book a day in the summer, but this year I’ve been lucky to make it through one a week. Although I have read more than last year already (at 43 books at the time of writing and certainly slated to defend my title of reading the most books/pages this year in my annual contest with my dad), there’s something different about my reading lately. I put books down to nap, or to research some coastal town’s wild horse population, or to see friends. All good things, of course, but I find myself perplexed by my slowness. Has my attention span shortened from using a phone too often? Am I overcommitted? Do I have more plans than years before? Should I visit Assateague?
But when I’m not berating my lack of focus, my unseasonal summer reading reminds me of a favorite phrase from Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text: He writes that “what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose on the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again.” This “dipping in again” reminds me of reading Winter: a passage or two at a time, looking up, getting a drink, putting the book down to dip in the water, picking it up again. I was interrupted and unfocused. But Winter demanded to be read slowly, with frequent breaks for swimming and naps—and perhaps, if I can liken myself to Barthes, these abrasions on such a fine surface are what I enjoyed most about it.
My favorite lines in Winter remind, “That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.” If that is winter, it looks an awful lot like my summer—an exercise in adaptation, in stillness that will spring to action, hopefully before too long.
Image: Flickr/Thomas Sturm
