Last Call: The Books of Summer
Rocca, Francis X.
| W• n~i~'~_J U q by Francis X. Rocca The Books of Summer "SUMMER BOOKS" AREN'T SIMPLY BOOKS you read in summer. They are special products, designed and marketed for lolling by the pool,...
...My enthusiasm was not quite strong enough for me to start praying or going to church...
...but, since they will be consumed in two-or-three page snatches, between dips in the water and interruptions by howling kids, they should be heavy only in the literal sense--door-stopping page-turners...
...Frederick Forsythe is a thrilling storyteller, and Stephen King has the imagination of twenty ordinary writers, but not even those pop masters can create worlds true enough for me to inhabit--which is the point of reading novels, as far as I'm concerned...
...Merton was a poet of some note in the fifties and sixties, but is best known for this autobiography, which recounts his conversion to Catholicism and ends with his joining a Trappist monastery in Kentucky...
...I DON'T LIKE SUN OR SAND...
...ROMANCE...
...I will never forget the evening when I started it...
...I have never felt more sure of being precisely where I wanted to be--inside a summer book...
...Which was my good fortune...
...They come in a wide range of categories, including biography, popular history, and politics (especially of the Bob Woodward kind...
...And after a few pages into Thomas ~ Kempis's less sensational The Imitation of Christ, I abandoned my study of devotional literature...
...The end of work or school, a change of scene, the luxury of time not just to read but to pause and let thoughts wander are prime conditions for taking literature to heart...
...SELF-HELP...
...TRAVEL...
...A seed may have been sown...
...AND THE BOOKS I read between Memorial Day and Labor Day don't fit the description of "beach reading...
...To keep the pilot light of passion lit, we sent frequent letters (these being the days before cheap long distance) and gave each other reading lists...
...For the rest of the summer, all I could think about was whether I was as much in love as Levin...
...FOUR YEARS LATER I WAS IN summer school, earning the last credits I needed to graduate, and trying desperately not to think about what would come next...
...Then somebody told me to read Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain...
...Then I spent two months filling in cultural lacunae in seven countries between London and Budapest...
...98 July~August 2000 _9 The American Spectator...
...That year the dollar went far only in the recently post-Communist east, so, being on a graduate student's budget, I spent more of my time there than I might have otherwise...
...Hers to me was Anna Karenina...
...Still shaken hours later, I sat in bed and read: "But Levin was in love and therefore Kitty seemed to him to be perfect in every respect, a being incomparably above all other human beings, while he himself was so earthly and low a creature that there could be no possibility of anyone, including herself, considering him to be worthy of her...
...Of the books that have most affected me, a big share are those I've read in the warmest months...
...But who knows...
...One hot afternoon, on a hill overlooking the Czech city of Brno, I sat down and took out the paperback of War and Peace that I'd been carrying with me since the States, and read: "It was quite dark when Prince Andrei reached Briinn and found hilnself surrounded by lofty buildings, the lighted windows of shops and houses, by street lamps, by fine carriages rumbling over the cobbled streets and all that atmosphere of a large and lively city which is always so fascinating to a soldier after camp life...
...And novels, preferably, "genre fiction": mystery, science fiction, occult, etc...
...They are special products, designed and marketed for lolling by the pool, lake, or ocean with...
...My first assignment to her was--I am not kidding--Hans Kting's Does God Exist...
...Yet I have my own summer books...
...That afternoon, in one of my first and last attempts at sailing, I had been knocked into the Severn River by an unseen boom...
...t had never heard of Brno until a few days before, when a travel agent in Bratislava suggested I go there...
...I had been moved by Augustine's Confessions when I'd read them a few years earlier, but this was something else: the eloquent testimony of a modern, sophisticated AngloAmerican who embraced a supposedly medieval religiosity...
...Now it was a living illustration for my personal edition of a great novel...
...It took me a moment, because of the use of the German name, to realize that the chapter was set in the city stretched out before me...
...Which was too bad, since it might have consoled me to discover that Tolstoy's is a more nuanced view of love, and everything else, than t had assumed...
...The question so obsessed me that I stopped reading the book...
...DID NOT MAKE IT TO EUROPE FOR the first time until the summer of my twenty-ninth year...
...I looked up and thought: "Hey, that isn't how I feel...
...I SPENT THE SUMMER AFTER freshman year of college hundreds of miles from my first girlfriend...
...At least it was better for me than reading something like Carlos Castafieda's The Teachings of Don luan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge...
...Demoralized by the anomie of college life, I yearned to follow Merton into the realm of absolutes...
...I button-holed people at parties, proselytizing for the book, and fantasized about becoming a monk myself...
...They must be long enough to last at least a two-week vacation...
Vol. 33 • July 2000 • No. 6
