Summer Reading

Summer reading seems identical to reading in other seasons, and my motives for selecting books to read certainly remain the same: pleasure, learning and the pleasure of learning. On the Fourth of July, the Philadelphia Inquirer published its feature on books for the summer, canvassing authors and independent booksellers in the Philadelphia region for their suggestions. Not surprisingly, Frank Wilson’s selections are the most interesting and worthy of attention: Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad; Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope; Travels with a Donkey, by Robert Louis Stevenson; and Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier. I’ve not read the Stevenson but I second the excellence of Frank’s other choices.

Of Nostromo, Frank says, “The very humidity of the jungle is turned into poetry.” It’s my favorite among Conrad’s works, and one of the supreme novels of the 20th century, published in 1904, the same year as Henry James’ The Golden Bowl. It’s compelling in a page-turning sense, beautifully written and politically prescient. Here’s an offhand passage to a minor character in Chapter 3 that illuminates this morning’s headlines:

“Then the tension of old Giorgio's attitude relaxed, and a smile of contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with a leonine face. These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves. Even to defend his life against them was a sort of degradation for a man who had been one of Garibaldi's immortal thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He had an immense scorn for this outbreak of scoundrels and leperos, who did not know the meaning of the word `liberty.’”

In the January 2005 issue of The New Criterion, Mark Falcoff published a thoughtful appreciation of Nostromo. Here’s a sample:

“Nostromo is `about’ imperialism and its impact upon a small, fictitious, but vividly rendered South American republic called Costaguana. In spite of the left-wing vaporings of the late Martin Seymour-Smith, which disfigure the introduction to my Penguin edition, it is by no means an anti-imperialist tract. If it has a point of view at all on the interaction between foreign capital and backward Third World countries, it is that in the end the latter are undeserving of the former and that the forces of modernization outside of the orbit of European civilization are ultimately bound to fail. Nostromo is therefore a deeply pessimistic--which is to say a thoroughly conservative--book.”

Don’t you love “vaporings?”

Frank Wilson, I notice, was the only contributor to exclusively suggest books from the distant past – say, before 2000. This is an excellent quality in a book editor, who should never be a slave to the up-to-the-minute and ephemeral. His most recent selection, Le Grand-Meaulnes, was published in 1913. Its author, at the age of 27, was killed a year later, in the first month of fighting during World War I. Among the fine choices, all fiction, by other contributors are At Freddie’s and Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler; So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell; Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson; The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope; The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton; and The Regeneration Trilogy, by Pat Barker.

Regardless of season, that’s a savory menu for readers with a healthy appetite.