Summer Reading

I have often heard the phrase summer reading tossed about, and although I understand what is meant by it, I don’t understand its popularity or its polarization of reading material into light and heavy reading. The New Yorker played on this idea with their summer reading cartoon featuring a guy reading Crime and Punishment while sitting on the beach. The caption is uttered by a police officer approaching the guy.  He says, "I'm sorry, sir, but Dostoyevsky is not considered summer reading. I'll have to ask you to come with me.”

What is strange about this, is that this guy could very easily be me. I sat this June morning on my back porch and read many pages of Moby Dick (a book that does not qualified as summer reading). But why have we developed this idea that we can only read fluffy books when the sun is shimmering and literature in the deep dark days of early January? Of course this means that if you live in Florida you should only read fluffy books and if you live in Saskatchewan you are condemned to reading only Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Morrison. By this line of reasoning, it should also be true that writers from warm climates should only write fluffy books (unless, of course, they are vacationing in Siberia) and writers from those cold spots on the globe should only be writing serious literature except when they vacation in Greece where they can write some fluff.

If you are a true literary nerd, you have a favorite literary critic. Mine is Harold Bloom.

He is criticized at times for being too traditional and canonical, but I tend to agree with Bloom that there are some works of literature that rise above other works regardless of the gender, ethnicity, and/or religion of the author. How to qualify this statement with concrete evidence that The Great Gatsby is better than any of the seven Harry Potter books or that War and Peace is far superior to The Help is sometime difficult. It’s like the idea that it is hard to define exactly what pornography is, but you know it when you see it. Like that, I know literature when I see it, and literature is what I want to read, regardless of the weather or location. 

The classics, for lack of a better term, are often surprisingly readable, fun, lively, suspenseful, and relevant; yet they are also surprising avoided as too heavy or too serious or too old. I too sometimes don’t think I’m in the mood for Moby Dick when the sun is rising 

on my back porch, but when I crack open the book, I see that it does not only offer the great story that is featured in fluffy books, but it also offers wonderful language, fascinating characters and resonating ideas. 

Here are two quotes by Mark Twain about literature. 

I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester
says, and it meets his definition of a classic --something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.