A Summer Reading List for Misfits
The sun is out, the shoes are off, the legs are sprawled upon the color-blocked terry cloth, and your vacation book is open. It’s not my intention to be the black spider crawling across your beach towel.
Every summer, seasonal reading lists hail the “fun” page-turner and use their ease to jeer at the “challenging” read—how dare a book do something freaky with language, structure, or content in the midst of so much natural light? Listen, I know the stakes: to denounce a plot-driven summertime read is to announce oneself too loudly as a serious person. In my case, a serious Slavic, lesbian, now-French woman with—way to ruin the vibe—short hair.
All right, I partake in recreational seriousness in the warm climate (my favorite melon is melancholia), but I will not apologize. I crave untraditional texts for my leisure, and I have a feeling (despite my existential leanings) that I am not alone.
A pleasure read is there to help us take pleasure, and the pleasures of summertime include: the lushness of loneliness, the daze of our flesh, the ease of nature, the horniness of an afternoon, the carefree blur of warming temperatures, the rhythm that slows and flirts with the long hours. I understand that some prefer their seasonal delights within the undemanding pages of a well-cued story line, where love is closer than you think, journeys are life lessons, the murderer is one you should have guessed, and good defeats
