I was elated, if a little apprehensive when my book club in Paris tasked me with nominating our summer read. It’s no small challenge. After all, a book can be the ultimate holiday companion, transporting readers from their poolside loungers. Those battered paperbacks jammed into beach bags form indelible memories of trips.
The perfect summer book should be pacy, smart and fun but not too frivolous – there’s no need to be highbrow between June and September. As an everyday reader, I flip-flop between various genres and can often have two or three books on the go, picking my way through biographies, novels and histories at a near-studious pace.
Holidays are different. I don’t want to be challenged. The summer read should be a kind of guilt-free dessert that is so delicious that it fires up the dopamine and leaves a lingering feeling of contentment. It should be indulgent but not bloating. A book editor friend, who works at a major US publishing house, explained that what it looks for in a successful title is something with easy prose and an engaging plot with a little bit of drama. “Like an Aperol spritz: light and sweet with a gentle bite.”
Why does this frolicsome literary style coincide specifically with this point in the calendar? Of course, in summer we have the time for idle reading but media spin has also helped to prop up the idea. In 1897, The New York Times Book Review first published its annual summer reading guide – targeted, no doubt, at the growing middle classes in the US who took up the habit of a seasonal vacation, which was then a new phenomenon. It coincided, too, with growing literacy among women, which might explain the early formula – a resort setting and a story filled with intrigue and romance – that is still a mainstay of many bestsellers today.
This blueprint has evolved and opened up considerably since but I’m still firmly in the camp that believes that an ideal summer read should be a novel, the kind that you want to bury yourself in. I’m talking about the kind of book in which you feel invested, whose characters start to turn around in your head like real people. On this, we book clubbers all agree but there are nuances that set us apart. Some of us are happy with thrillers, as long as they are sexy. Others like political intrigue, though it needs to sidestep our current reality (Curtis Sittenfeld’s engaging alternative history Rodham is a good option). Sometimes they can complement a holiday location – our sole male member loves fantasy and once nominated Madeline Miller’s Circe, which would have been well suited for a jaunt in the Greek Isles.
Last summer I read Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny, a quirky, big-hearted comedy that had me hooting with laughter while sprawled on my towel beachside in Pyla-sur-Mer. (The book still has sand jammed between its pages and the distinctive markings of sun-cream-covered fingerprints.) That week still lingers in my mind and I can’t say for sure whether it’s because of the pleasure I derived from those pages or the overall holiday. The two became so intertwined that it’s impossible now to tell fiction from fact.