SUMMER READING 2024
1. CALIFORNIA — Writing Los Angeles. edited by David Ulin — This wonderful Library of America anthology covers the wild and weird history of Los Angeles through the eyes of the writers who either loved or loathed it. From Bertolt Brecht to Raymond Chandler, from Charles Bukowski to Joan Didion, L.A. comes out of the movies and onto the page.
The day begins, usually, with thick fog — blowing up against the cliff face or standing out to sea in a dark wall. There are times when the ocean is clear, but grey and empty and unspeakably lonely, with a single great gull flying across it — like the Spirit moving on the facer of the waters — Christopher Isherwood
2. THE SOUTHWEST — Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli — This shape-shifting, hypnotic novel follows a family driving from New York to Arizona. Along the way, the narrative blends tales of Geronimo with stories of migrants crossing into the U.S. Mixing poetry with prose, photos with magic, the book won all kinds of awards.
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness.
3. TEXAS — God Save Texas, by Lawrence Wright. The New Yorker writer takes a hard look at his native state, everything from politics to the panhandle to Roy Orbison.
One can drive across Texas and be in two different states at the same time: AM Texas and FM Texas. . .
4. NORTH DAKOTA — The Good Hand: Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown, by Michael Patrick F. Smith — A remarkably frank, gritty, and eloquent memoir about working the oil fields in North Dakota during the 2013 boom.
The usual length of a workday on a rig move is between twelve and fourteen hours. On this day, my first week in the patch, we put in seventeen and a half hours of work. At the end of it, we leave location and Bobby Lee drives us to the closest truck stop. . . . It feels good swaggering into the truck stop with this group of rough and ready men, a truck pusher and his crew of hands, guys who put their shoulder to the wheel of the world, push it, and make it turn.
5. THE SOUTH — All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles. An unusual history that sees the South through a single object passed down for generations by a black family in South Carolina. Winner of the National Book Award and all sorts of other honors.
The history of Africans in America is brutal, but we have made art out of pain, sustaining our spirits with sunbursts of beauty, teaching ourselves how to rise the next day.
6. NEW JERSEY — Born to Run, by Bruce Springsteen — Okay, you know the story, the songs, but unless you read the memoir — or better still hear Springsteen narrate it — you won’t know what a keen sociologist he proves to be in dissecting the myriad cultures of his native state. You can skip the last part where he’s a namedropping star, but the first half is brilliant.
History was a subject that bored me in middle and high school, but I devoured it now. It seemed to hold some of the essential pieces to the identity questions I was asking. How could I know who I was if I didn't have a clue as to where I'd personally and collectively come from?
7. MASSACHUSETTS — Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton — Easily the most readable of Frome’s many novels, this very brief, very Yankee story tells of a young man torn between small town morals and his own urges.
He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.
8. THE NORTHWEST — The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven — Sherman Alexie’s breakthrough book of stories about his own Spokane nation and its colorful characters. Funny, tragic, and heartfelt, the book broke every stereotype, won the National Book Award, and became a movie, “Smoke Signals.”
It is warm, soon to be cold, but that's in the future, maybe tomorrow, probably the next day and all the days after that. Today, now, I drink what I have, will eat what is left in the cupboard, while my mother finishes her quilt, piece by piece. Believe me, there is just barely enough goodness in all of this.