One strategy for summer reading — and yes, there strategies — is to begin a project. Dabble in short punchy books, but devote the season to an epic. You get three months.
I read “The Lord of the Rings” this way, one installment a summer, for years. Now I’m picking through Robert Caro’s (still unfinished) Lyndon Johnson biography this way. Another strategy: Give yourself a quasi-degree in something very specific.
Read the complete short stories of the late Alice Munro. The novels of Stephen King. Or underrated Penguin Classics: This summer offers a couple of fresh contenders — Harry Crews’ (about a boxer with a talent for knocking himself out), and unclassifiable writing about being gay under a dictatorship, by Chilean legend Pedro Lemebel.
You’ll clip right along. Same goes for an excellent new edition of a monster: The Folio Society’s wonderful Susanna Clarke’s contemporary classic about magicians in 19th century England. As a single adventure, it was an 800-plus page cinderblock in 2004.
Folio divides all of that into a much brisker trilogy, as it should have been, ideal for devouring in adult-size chunks that you can pass along to a precocious child or spouse, while continuing yourself. As for the rest of you who just want a new mystery or history for the backyard, this summer is overstocked, even more so than the coming fall season. Yes, I read all of these; now get started.
One of the great American mystery series continues with Walter Mosley’s 16.
