What I’m reading this summer

This is not a beach-read list, rather the “required” reading I’ve set forth for myself as a tip of the hat to the summers of my youth, when I had assigned summer reading lists. From all those summers, I only remember Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court assigned during two separate summers. I struggled through them — probably why they’re the ones I remember — confused by and uninterested in the plots. I should reread them as an adult because they may simply be classics that were wasted on my youth, but not this summer. I have three classics I want to read before Labor Day arrives, tucked in among the new books that are always ongoing.

Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara
Penguin Classics began re-issuing John O’Hara’s books last year to coincide with the new film adaptation of The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio, reminding us that writer Fran Lebowitz famously called O’Hara “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (She said it in an interview with The Paris Review.) O’Hara chronicled the world of the upper class and its wealth, ambitions and discontent. He’s best known for his first novel Appointment in Samarra, but also BUtterfield 8, which was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor. Ten North Frederick won the National Book Award in 1956. It focuses on the public and private life of the politically ambitious Joe Chapin in the fictional Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. From the Penguin description: “… as his daughter looks back on his life, a different man emerges: one in conflict with his ambitious and shrewish wife, terrified that the misdeeds of his children will dash his political dreams, and in love with a model half his age.” John O’Hara is thought to be one of the most prominent American writers in the 20th century.

A New Life by Bernard Malamud
This is Bernard Malamud’s third novel after The Natural and The Assistant. It tells the story of Sy Levin, “formerly a drunkard,” relocating to the Pacific Northwest to teach English at Cascadia College and start the eponymous new life. He doesn’t fully realize Cascadia is not a liberal arts institution, rather an agricultural college. Further, the positive change he anticipates for his life doesn’t exactly materialize. What draws me to spend time reading this book is not only having loved Malamud’s The Magic Barrel and Dubin’s Lives, but also Jonathan Lethem’s claim that A New Life is Malamud’s “funniest and most embracing, an underrated masterpiece.” You can read more of Lethem’s comments in the book’s introduction via a preview. A New Life was a finalist for the 1962 National Book Award in fiction along with Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. The award, in a surprising upset, went to Percy Walker’s The Moviegoer.

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford
There’s a common saying among addicted readers that we keep buying more and more books, with less and less time to read them, because it fuels the hope that the time one day will be there. And so here’s my self-reveal: I purchased my copy of The Mountain Lion at Three Lives & Co. in New York in December 2009. It is the story of a young sister and brother, Molly and Ralph, who leave Los Angeles to summer on an uncle’s ranch in Colorado. From the book’s back cover: “There the children encounter an enchanting new world — savage, direct, beautiful, untamed — to which, over the next few years, they will return regularly, enjoying a delicious double life. And yet at the same time this other sphere, about which they are both so passionate, threatens to come between their passionate attachment to each other.” This is Jean Stafford’s most highly acclaimed novel, published in 1947. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1970 for her Collected Stories. “Jean Stafford: Diamond in a Rough Life” by Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post (2007) showcases her forgotten talent and work.