Running for Your Life: Summer Reading List

The publication of the moment has got to be Mark Twain’s autobiography. I confess that I missed the reviews when the first volume came out last fall, but recently both Harper’s and the London Review of Books http://bit.ly/i1YEja have done due diligence: in Harper’s the ever-readable Lewis Lapham weighs in. Check them out. Or if you are to buy one book this summer make it Twain: no one says it better and Lapham nails his quotes like a champion skeet shooter, especially the bit about the writer and the Mississippi River boat captain and his take on patriotism, as apt as any comments I’ve ever read on the American life – and what it means to be an American. (And not, primarily, because we persevered in the execution of an arch-enemy of the American way.) Ponder what Twain would say. On patriotism:
“If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket [in an unrighteous war] I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that – but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”
Lapham concludes his plea for a true blue American democracy because, as an old timer, he crafts his stuff in the old-fashioned way, saving the best for last:
“Taught to believe that democracy is something quiet, orderly and safe .¤.¤. [our contemporary brigade of satirists] prefer the safer forms of satire fit for privileged and frightened children. Twain was an adult.”

It’s summer. Today (May 11) makes the end of M’s classroom responsibilities as a writing teacher (student evaluations, to be sure, are another matter . . . homework, in other words, has just begun). From now until Labor Day, three and a half months when reading is not a coerced affair, when she can read what she wants to: me, that’s a year-round condition, the one truly great thing about not being graced with an academic schedule, when in the next days and weeks our many teacher-friends will be off to literary retreats, summer houses and various travel (that is, once the evaluations are done).

This summer I’ll be at home, writing and reading. Here’s my summer list. Not a long one, but realistic. Why? In R4YrL: Discovery of Stillness (early April), and earlier still R4YrL: Getting Started: Part One (July 2010) I wrote about the Discovery of Slowness. Summer in New York. Gotta work overtime to take it slow, but if I’m going to keep within myself, to run long distances this summer as my hamstring tear heals, I have to rediscover slowness. To not race, even in reading:

1/ Caribou Island. David Vann’s most recent novel. In spring, I read “The Legend of a Suicide,” amazed at its spare prose that seems to effortlessly find the right word, the beat falling just so, in service of a plot as old as the hills, but in Vann’s hands as new as a winter morning. In summer, I like cold in my reading. And Vann, man, he can do cold.

2/ Moby-Dick. Full disclosure: the last English lit class I took was in ninth grade, books on the curriculum: “The Eagle of the Ninth” by Rosemary Sutcliff, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” neither of which I read (cramming plot summaries for tests), I have, of course, since read “Gatsby,” but “TEOTN,” fuhgeddaboudit, didn’t take a book with me onto our sideyard rink, the baseball field, or the rustic woodland trails of my boyhood home, a hoot and a holler from the Bruce Trail, which runs from the tip of the elephant tail http://bit.ly/kowV5E in one direction, the thundering falls of Niagara in the other, didn’t settle into a chair or a couch (there was Strat-O-Matic Baseball, the pre-Internet fantasy game that literally occupied me and my pals for hours, weekends at a time, our hopes and dreams rising and fading on the dice-determined destinies of flamethrowers Sonny Siebert and Jerry Koosman, the glove of John Boccabella, speed of Maury Wills, and homerun prowess of Washington Senator slugger, running 1-to-8, needs a two-bagger, even a triple to get to first base if it’s hit anywhere near the place where Rusty Staub can get a handle on the ball, Frank Howard) until I earned my first paycheck in my chosen profession: reporter. And thankfully but not inevitably I took to it, reading, that is, my first books the Russians, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, everything by D.H. Lawrence, “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen, “Wuthering Heights,” but not the big American classics (a hangover from “Gatsby” guilt?) and truly if there is a big-book antecedent to the rawbone masculinity of Vann it is “Moby-Dick,” loving the Penguins Lives bio http://bit.ly/lUFTCX by Elizabeth Hardwick, and through reading about a writer, the bulk of whose books were never appreciated in his lifetime, so much of it great stuff inside and outside, unflinching, and yes, this is my summer of Getting to Know Water – Rat We – and I’ve acquainted myself with big-book Conrad but not “Moby-Dick,” call me Ishmael, the name of the Abraham child, leader of the Bedouin tribes, Herman Melville, an American writer, as American as Twain, whose autobio will have to wait. This summer I devote to Ishmael, Queequeg and the incomparable Ahab, in search of the great white whale across the bounding main

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