Some books for summer
I’m not sure I believe in the ‘summer read’ idea, though I get the concept - you lower your brow because you’re on the beach (or at the park). But that suggests your reading for the rest of the year is less pleasurable, or more dutiful, than your summer reading, and I don’t believe in that, either. Read what you love! There are good books across all the brows, and the demarcations people make are silly. You can either write a sentence and tell a story, or not. The end.
So with that in mind, here are a list of books across various genres that I would take on holiday this year if I hadn’t read them already. All of them are brilliant and engrossing reads. Some are new, some are recent-ish, and a couple in part 2 (upcoming) are published in July and August but worth waiting for. I wonder if I should do a part 3 of old books that you can easily buy cheaply second hand - like, all-time summer reads? Let me know in the comments.
They’re not in any particular order, and there are more books under ‘Books’ at the top of my home page - they’re not solo book posts, but if the post is listed then it has at least one book recommendation in it, e.g. David Nicholls, Andrew O’Hagan and loads more.
Just out in paperback. I started it on Friday and basically haven’t done anything else but read it since, including over dinner last night. It is crazily good, hugely clever, erudite, monstrously opinionated, full of epic tangents, often mean (my God, so mean), completely gossipy, wildly, hilariously funny - like, put it down while you catch your breath funny - and brilliantly written. I can’t really explain it better than that because Roger Lewis has (again) invented a whole new kind of biography. Like its subjects, the whole book is on fire, in the best way imaginable. He is great on Burton’s (Welsh, Puritan) melancholy and says Taylor, the great survivor, ‘split him like an atom’. There’s all the roiling drama, the sex and alcohol and drugs and vicious rows, the grotesque excess and vulgarity, but it’s also genius about a particular period in history. The cover quotes say ‘masterpiece’ twice, and I agree. Also it’s very fat and the type is small, meaning it should last you a good week.
From the prologue, to give you the gist: ‘I am perhaps less interested in Burton and Taylor historically and biographically, than in isolating them culturally, as carnal and fantasy figures who floated about in a world of child stars, faded grandeur, alcoholism, promiscuity and Lassie […] Taylor is supple and soft, with her perfumes and furs - yet there is also something demonic and lethal about her. Burton, in his turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looks as if he is lit by silver moonlight, when perhaps he'd turn into a wolf’.