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Katy Kelly

My favorite summer reading memory involves a chair. One of those full-length 1950s chaises, it was covered in smooth, flowered chintz that stayed cool even in the airless summers of Western Pennsylvania. It saw me through Nancy Drew, witnessed my discovery of John Updike and Flannery O’Connor, and held up under an onslaught of Russian novels.

The chair eventually made its way to our Capitol Hill townhouse, where it aged like a tatty dowager until my husband finally convinced me it was beyond repair. As it sat beneath the back porch awaiting its date with the bulk trash truck, it provided one final service. Within a few days, we noticed that the squirrels’ nest in our pine tree began to sprout pieces of stuffing and flowery fabric. I hope they find it as comforting as I did.

Below, I’ve asked some of our local authors to share their memories of summertime reading. Their reminiscences range from the serene to the diabolical, and from pure escapism to awkward reality. Perhaps they’ll trigger some memories of your own. Enjoy your summer reading!

A Summer Love
I had a hard time leaving college behind, so I didn’t. The summer after my graduation, when all my fellow grads were driving cross country or going on European tours or taking prestigious internships, I stuck around. I walked the ghost-campus, I slept in a different place every week, I never called my parents … and I read Henry James.

Day after day, Henry James. I figured I would get sick of it, but I just became more and more James’ slave. The acuity of his characterization, the profundity of his psychology, the mesmerizing, perfectly controlled flow of each narrative … I ate it up like comic books.

My Henry James summer was nearly the ruin of me as a writer. For one thing, if you try to write like him, you will almost certainly write very, very badly. For another…well, hadn’t James done it all? Hadn’t he captured pretty much everything there was to discover in the human animal? What was left for me?

It took me several years to understand that Henry James had never lived my life and that if anyone was going to make sense of that particular experience, it would have to be me. So I put away all my James books, but I didn’t throw them out. And now and then, I catch myself staring at the spines with an ache of longing. He was my summer love. We were just wrong for each other.

Louis Bayard’s most recent book is “The Black Tower,” a historical adventure featuring Vidocq, the real-life French detective who inspired generations of mystery writers.

A Devil of a Time
Our family always went to Fenwick Island for a few weeks in the summer. It was the Kelly kids’ idea of paradise. Riding the waves in the ocean, crabbing in the bay, finding clams with our feet. For those few weeks my mother suspended her no soda policy and abandoned bedtimes. We read when it rained and late into the night.

One summer, when I was 13 or so, our three-week vacation was marked by, as I remember it, 18 days of rain. We read the old National Geographics that came with the house and a number of books about which I remember nothing, except that they smelled of mildew. Then I snagged an abandoned copy of “Rosemary's Baby” – it was THE beach read that summer – and I was riveted. My family left for the grocery store, happy with the idea of spending an hour in a place that was air conditioned and dry. I stayed in my attic bedroom unable to stop reading and scared out of my head, while the storm pounded the house. It was a great afternoon.

Katy Kelly is the creator of the Lucy Rose books about Capitol Hill kids and has just published “Melonhead,” the first in a new series featuring Adam Melon.

Darkness at Noon
In retrospect, the sunny beaches of Santa Barbara, Calif., were an unlikely setting for a close reading of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” But there I was, the summer after 11th grade, arm-wrestling phrases like “diaphanous folds” and “inscrutable as destiny” as I steamed with Marlow up the Congo into the deepest recesses of the human soul.

I was in Santa Barbara that summer for a college-prep program. We took classes at the city’s idyllic University of California campus and did homework in beach chairs on bluffs overlooking the water.

Conrad’s brooding mediation on evil was not part of the coursework. Though it baffles me a little in hindsight, I had brought it along for pleasure. I had struggled with Conrad’s rococo prose in high school, in Los Angeles, the year before. But I felt sure that beneath that cobweb of words were dark truths worth glimpsing. The trouble with beach reading, though, is all that blinding light. I was grateful to have packed sunglasses.
 
Ariel Sabar is author of “My Father’s Paradise,” winner of the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. The paperback version is due out this fall.

A New Angle
I started twice but just couldn’t get past page 50. Then one summer, I pushed through. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner, is now on my top-three list.

An epic, multi-generational, exquisitely written novel is made for summer. Winter days are too short for long books. So I took a piece of one long summer day to get past page 50.

I was enthralled by the story fictional historian Lyman Ward tells of his pioneer grandparents – a refined, educated Eastern woman who leaves a promising artistic future in New York to follow the adventurous mining engineer she has married to America’s western frontier. “Angle of Repose” is really two books – one about the American West, the other the story of a marriage.

I loved it so much, I read it again, and liked it even better the second time. This summer might be a good time for a third reading.

Bonny Wolf is author of “Talking with My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes and Other Kitchen Stories.” She is a regular contributor to NPR and The Washington Post.

Romance under the Trees
As a girl I’d sometimes spread a blanket under the tree canopy in our backyard to read, quiet except for a ripple of leaves in the breeze and the calls of birds. Back then I’d often tear through two or three books a week in a wildly eclectic selection. We were transplants from Minnesota to Connecticut, and reading provided a welcomed solace. Young teen years are confusing enough, but deciphering the new rules of prep and cool in junior high left me feeling like an outsider.

I remember my mother talked about how she’d sometimes take a bowl of apples outside, lie under the trees and read for an entire afternoon. The day I discovered “Nine Coaches Waiting” by Mary Stewart, I did the same, lost in the romantic world of a young English governess in a French chateaux, a murder and the darkly handsome Raoul.