A few of my favourite OLD summer reads
nothing new
I have you tell you, compiling this list has felled me. I wanted to be reasonably authoritative and say ‘here are the greatest summer reads of all time, according to me,’ but it’s an impossible task. I have an incredibly un-retentive memory when it comes to fiction. I read a lot, very fast, and I think that’s why - I’m completely immersed, and then within a few months all that’s left is an impression of the book, like a shape, and a feeling. I can tell you what the author’s sentences are like and what the book is loosely ‘about,’ but I have zero recollection of plot points.
Then somebody will say, ‘I love that book. Remember when it turns out the mum is actually the dad?’ and I will look blank for a long time before a very dim and distant bell s-l-o-w-l-y starts chiming. If it chimes at all. Sometimes I can quote chunks from a book I read millions of years ago, but I can’t actually remember any narrative details from it at all.
Weird, isn’t it? I hope I’m not going gaga - I’m inclined to think not, because the issue dates back to my teens. Also it is true that I am much more interested in style than in plot - I could perfectly happily read books with no plot at all provided I loved the author’s writing. I don’t particularly care what happens if I am fully inside somebody’s life, walking around in their head and their world, loving my time.
Anyway - none of this helps when trying to dangle the appetising details of books that I read a good old while ago. But I’ve tried, and below are some that I’ve enjoyed reading in various holiday situations. I’ve also been quite literal-minded, in that a lot of these books are actually set in the summer. This seems a touchingly simplistic criterion, but I just don’t want to be reading about howling winds and warming cups of cocoa when it’s the middle of July.
Please add your own summer favourites in the comments - there’s nothing I love more than book recommendations, plus you are almost guaranteed to jog my memory!
These aren’t in any kind of order and all of them are available second-hand. There are many, many more book recs under Books at the top of the homepage.
A traumatised WW1 soldier spends the summer of 1920 in an Oxfordshire village. An absolutely beautiful, elegiac novella. One to read under a big tree in the English countryside, quietly weeping.