The summer reading list! The stress of work is giving way, at last, to the stress of leisureILLUSTRATION: TATSURO KIUCHI
I’m sitting in the bedroom of a rented cottage in Maine as my wife and our two young children eat breakfast downstairs. Outside, a pearl-gray fog unfurls gently over the water. Foghorns blare. Seagulls shriek. Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” calls out to me. G.F. Young’s “The Medici” sings its siren song. Van Wyck Brooks’s “New England: Indian summer” purrs.
Ah, the summer reading list! The stress of work is giving way, at last, to the stress of leisure.
Another summer, another vacation, another vow to myself to finish three classic works of literature and history that I began reading, let me see, about 14 years ago. Or was it 18 years ago? Could it really be 35?
I’ve lost track, no doubt because somewhere in that span of time, there were other literary obligations to dispatch during the precious weeks of summer reading—from Proust’s massive novel “Remembrance of Things Past” to Charles and Mary Beard’s “The Rise of American Civilization.” Not to mention the classic volume by Brooks on the New England literary tradition, that romantic “Indian summer” which I have tried to get through, summer after summer.
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I may be one of the last people to be burdened by the self-imposed obligation to read certain books during the golden months of vacation. These days, the summer-reading list seems to have gone the way of the perfect tan. (In fact, our relatively recent awareness of the health hazards caused by exposure to the sun probably has kept more books off the chaise-lounge, and thus off the best-seller list, than anything else.) Schools and colleges still make available reading lists for students who are devoted, or anxious, enough to pack Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians” (summer of 1982, status: unfinished) in with their kayak paddles, but few people seem any longer to identify summer with catching up on the great books of the past or even on the must-reads of the present.
This might seem like an infinitesimal social development, but it is, as the historians like to say, a “paradigm shift” (Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” summers of 1979-85, status: unfinished) in the history of American consciousness. For well over a century, Americans have looked to the summer not just as a time of travel and recreation but as a semi-sacred space in which books served as vehicles of enlightenment, enrichment and spiritual replenishment.
A few years ago, in the Boston Globe, Craig Fehrman wrote an amusing piece about the origins of the summer reading list in the late 19th century. He connected it to the rise of the American vacation. A growing middle class meant the advent of leisure time, and these developments coincided with the desire of working Americans to escape the increasingly routinized nature of their jobs.
These days, the summer-reading list seems to have gone the way of the perfect tan PHOTO:GETTY IMAGES
The emphasis at that time was on light reading, on diversionary texts that would relieve the harried mind. Mr. Fehrman quotes from an article that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1872 that recommended summer books which “the idler can take with him into solitude, and read with delightful pauses, when with indolent finger upon the page, his eye wanders up some green vista, or catches some view of the distant sea, and his ear is soothed with the distant murmur of the winds and waves.” In other words, if you’re too distracted to read, bring along a book that will not make you feel guilty if you never finish it.
Given the pendular nature of cultural evolution, the emphasis on light reading during the summer was soon discredited as dangerously frivolous. Mr. Fehrman quotes a critic writing in the Boston Globe in 1890 who characterized the fluffy summer reading list as “books that paralyze, sap the intellect and, in time, drain the brain as empty as themselves.” It is encouraging to learn that, at the turn of the last century, some people considered summer reading to be as perilous as some people regard TV or the Internet today. There is hope for us, too.
The pendulum soon arrived at a stable center. In Mr. Fehrman’s thumbnail history, by 1915, the consensus was that people could read whatever they wanted during the summer respite, so long as they used the summer to read something. The custom of summer reading had both arrived at a happy ending and reached the apex of its development.
Well, not quite. With the end of World War II, the nature of summer reading underwent a dramatic change. Taking up a book during summer vacation became not just a necessary diversion but a moral obligation. The GI Bill, by making higher education free for veterans, many of whom were the first in their families to go to college, created an atmosphere in which culture acquired an elevated status. The war, with all its horrors, had made the ultimate subjects taken up by literature an urgent matter; a war that spanned Europe and Asia had also opened up still-parochial American culture to other literary and artistic traditions as never before.
The overflow of all these trends was an ironic reversal of the American summer. Long associated not just with summer reading but with a release from school curricula, with Tom and Huck whiling away the hot afternoons with fishing rods, the summer now offered a return to school but without the enforced curriculum. Thirst for knowledge became a cultural style. Reading became another mode of summer travel.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt (“The Origins of Totalitarianism,” summers of 1980-83, status: unfinished) once wrote about the singular pleasure of journeying to another country: “Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.” You could say the same thing about the transcendent autonomy of getting lost in a book, with the added benefit of someone’s alien language—Homer’s Greek, for example—becoming simultaneously translated into your own as you read.
The postwar period was the age of summer book-travel to faraway epochs and places. It was the time of Reader’s Digest condensed books, compendiums of several abridged best-selling fiction and nonfiction books that were published four times a year. Popular histories thrived. Between 1935 and 1975, the husband-and-wife team of Will and Ariel Durant educated tens of millions of readers about the distant past with their multivolume work, “The Story of Civilization.”
Perhaps the most representative instance of the dissemination of high culture to the average intelligent reader occurred in 1960, when the editor and critic Clifton Fadiman published his “Lifetime Reading Plan.” The monumental list began with the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and proceeded up through the novels of William Faulkner (it was updated in 1978 and 1986 and once more in 1998), each of its dozens of sections devoted to a single author and his or her work or works. It was the Platonic ideal (Frederick Copleston’s nine-volume “History of Philosophy,” summers of 1975-99, status: unfinished) of the summer reading list.
Fiction itself reflected the merging of high and popular culture. If the summer reading list had gone to sleep and dreamed that it was a novel, it would have been the serious middlebrow novel of that time. The idea behind the summer reading list was that a work of literary art that had been too demanding to read during the bustle of the workaday routine would be accessible to you in the warm months of leisure—sort of like steaming open clams.
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SUMMER READING LIST
In between golf games and beach time on Martha’s Vineyard, President Barack Obama is reading a handful of books, according to the White House.
The list, revealed Thursday, includes:
- “All That Is,” by James Salter
- “All The Light We Cannot See,” by Anthony Doerr
- “The Sixth Extinction,” by Elizabeth Kolbert
- “The Lowland,” by Jhumpa Lahiri
- “Between The World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- “Washington: A Life,” By Ron Chernow
I remember going with my parents, as a child, to a bungalow in the Catskills, near the great Borscht-Belt hotels of Grossinger’s, the Concord and the Raleigh—resorts that mostly catered to the Jewish lower-middle class—and seeing dog-eared paperbacks of “War and Peace” (summer of 1979, status: finished!) lying on beds and in the grass, as ubiquitous as the tuna-fish sandwiches that seemed to fuel those places. For my parents and other children of Russian immigrants, summertime brought out Tolstoy’s storytelling ability and softened his difficult themes.
The great middlebrow novels of that heyday of summer reading were often “War and Peace”-lite. My father, his fortunes fluctuating in New Jersey’s volatile postwar real-estate market, lost himself in historical epics of combat like Herman Wouk’s “The Winds of War.” My mother, her modest social ambitions tied to my father’s career, wept over Pearl S. Buck’s moving “The Good Earth,” the saga of a wealthy Chinese family’s slow plummet into penury and strife in the years just before World War I.
James Michener’s historical epic “Hawaii” and especially his novel about the history of the Jews, “The Source”—along with Leon Uris’s “Exodus,” the twin pillars of many a summer for my parents’ social and religious group—embodied the very spirit of summer reading, with their weighty historical events and colorful characters and incidents. Such works may have been dismissed by the literati as “middlebrow,” but they were superb feats of storytelling.
As the rite of summer reading slowly declined, the serious middlebrow novel just about vanished from the scene. The recent decision to publish Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” her first version of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” at the beginning of this summer is a nod to an old ritual and to a genre that is all but defunct.
But the postwar rite of summer reading was not only about escaping into literary entertainments dressed up with the themes of great literary art. It was also about achieving the inner fulfillment, even a kind of spiritual perfection, that the cost and triumph of war seemed to promise as its legacy and that the GI Bill sought to make a reality. Summer reading held the allure of a way out of the “rat race” that you had to run the other nine months of the year.
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The expansion of leisure time meant more time to think about the nature of leisure. Mass society had created a whole new array of problems for the individual, an entire stratum of commentators who illuminated them, and the summer reading list in which to ponder and solve them.
Sigmund Freud paid a visit to America in 1909, and by the 1920s, his ideas had been taken up by the cognoscenti throughout the Western world. But it wasn’t until after World War II that Freudian theory seized the popular American imagination. Scholars have their explanations. For me, it comes down to one word: beach. Without the space of summer in which to explore the postwar emphasis on the “self,” there might never have been enough mental time for Freud to nestle into the average consciousness.
Even more than Hitchcock’s Freudian-inspired thrillers, best sellers like “The Art of Loving” by the psychologist Erich Fromm and “Childhood and Society” by the psychologist Erik Erikson, both of which were published in 1950, made terms such as “repression” and “neurosis” part of the common vocabulary. Sitting on the beach in August, you could finally understand why you had been depressed in December.
The summer wind not only wafted Freud your way, but it brought you popular works of sociology that deepened your understanding of the pressures and forces that obstructed your happiness the rest of the year. In that fecund year of 1950, the sociologist David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” made the startling distinction between “outer-directed” people—i.e. conformists—and “inner-directed” people who followed their own lights.
Nine years later, you could breathe a sigh of relief while stretching out on the picnic blanket and reading the sociologist Erving Goffman’s “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” which demonstrates that it is the very nature of social life to be outer-directed, since so much of how we interact with other people is a form of acting and stagecraft. Meanwhile, you could settle into your seat on plane, train or bus and dip into Will Herberg’s popular 1955 book “Protestant, Catholic, Jew” to learn that conformity, at least to a religious tradition, was not so bad, after all.
Like so much else in that so-called golden age of culture, summer reading was part of the postwar national image, which projected the idea that any problem could be solved, just as we had defeated Hitler and Hirohito. Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking,” published in 1952, was to the summer reading list what the inflatable float was to the summer vacation.
Television itself, the book’s most threatening rival in those postwar years, seemed briefly to bow to the ritual of summer reading. The period from June to the first days of September was the time of the “summer rerun.” Even for people who rarely picked one up, books suddenly became the premier sedentary adventure.
And what did it matter if you never finished any of these books, if a lot of people picked up Tolstoy’s classic summer after summer and never got through the peace part to the war part? The idea of perfecting your inner life by reading the right books over the summer was as much a chimera as the idea of the perfect summer.
Still, looking forward to that spell of leisure and self-edification got you through the winter, and it consoled you with the illusion of a replenishing pause, outside the frame of mortal space and time. The Summer Book will always be with me. Even now, as my indolent finger falls upon a page of Gibbon’s masterwork on the Roman empire (summers of 1975-76, 1978-80, 2014-15, status: pending), winter’s workaday grind and piles of snow seem far, far away.
Mr. Siegel’s fifth book, “Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence,” will be published by Yale University Press in January.
