Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures / Part eight

 

Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures – part eight

From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer

Sun 8 Jul 2018 09.00 BST

Hera Lindsay Bird

This summer I’m going to Krakow for a residency and I’m taking The Idiot (Vintage) by Elif Batuman, a brain-meltingly funny Bildungsroman about communication breakdowns in the dawn of the internet era. I’ve already read it twice, but can’t bear to be without it. I’ll also be taking See What Can Be Done (Faber) by Lorrie Moore, my favourite short-story writer’s collected nonfiction, and The New Animals (Victoria University Press) by Pip Adam, the breakthrough New Zealand novel of 2017, which is about the generational divide, the fashion industry – and I can’t say more or I’ll ruin the ending. It’s ambitious, compulsive and strange as all hell.

Liv Little

I’m going to New York and Lisbon this summer and I’m going to reread Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman (Virago). I like these simple stories of people’s lives and experiences. The book gives you an insight into the intelligent, passionate woman that Angelou undoubtedly is. I will also take Edith Jackson (Puffin) by Rosa Guy. I have a really old library copy. It’s a story documenting the life of one girl in America with more than her share of life’s challenges. Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (Oneworld) was the first Jamaica-set book I read. As a Jamaican woman, that was really exciting. It follows three women: two sisters and their mum. The older sister is navigating sexuality and being a queer woman, the younger is battling identity, being a darker-skinned girl, bleaching. It’s really addictive.

Sunny Singh

I’m heading to Savoie in the French Alps. I’m taking South Atlantic Requiem (Arcadia) by Edward Wilson, one of my favourite spy novelists, and I Hid My Voice (Abacus, translated by Sanam Kalantari) by Parinoush Saniee, an Iranian novelist, which is about a patriarchal family that is symbolic of the Iranian regime. I’m rereading George F Kennan’s Realities of American Foreign Policy (WW Norton). Written in 1954, it feels relevant again, given what’s happening now between the US and Russia. I’d also recommend Princess Bari (Periscope, translated by Sora Kim-Russell) by South Korean author Hwang Sok-yong and Thinner Than Skin (Jacaranda) by Uzma Aslam Khan, a Pakistani-American novelist. Both are wonderful in so many ways.

Alex Preston

I’m just back from the inspirational Worlds festival at the National Centre for Writing, Norwich. I came away laden with books and have already finished three of them. The Swan Book (Constable) by Alexis Wright is a devastating dystopian vision of a future Australia. I thought Behold, America (Bloomsbury) by Sarah Churchwell both brilliant and painfully timely, while Panashe Chigumadzi’s These Bones Will Rise Again (Indigo) is an extraordinary and thrilling history of Zimbabwe, culminating in the overthrow of Robert Mugabe. If you holiday anywhere near water, do take along the newly reissued edition of Charles Sprawson’s classic Haunts of the Black Masseur (Vintage). I’ll be rereading it between swims in Hydra in Greece.

Sharon Olds

Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home (Faber), Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon and Zadie Smith’s essays Feel Free (Hamish Hamilton) would all make perfect holiday reading. Meanwhile, my own stack of summer books include The Unaccompanied (Faber) by Simon Armitage, Untitled (Mainstream) by Carol Ann Duffy, The Bonniest Companie (Picador) by Kathleen Jamie, Jackself (Picador) by Jacob Polley and Don’t Call Us Dead (Chatto & Windus) by Danez Smith. I’ll be carrying these gorgeous volumes back and forth between my New York City apartment and my old farmhouse upstate.

James Graham

Anyone who has the slightest interest in politics has to read Tim Shipman’s Fallout (William Collins), the follow-up to his thrilling referendum account, All Out War. Holidays may be about escapism, but this fly-on-the-wall unravelling of the 2017 election is car-crash exhilarating. For a made-up thriller, though, I enjoyed returning to the world of George Smiley in John Le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Penguin) in an age when the global distrust of the cold war feels unnervingly prescient. I’ve also been deeply moved and inspired by Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims (Allen Lane, translated by Michael Lucey), having missed the stage adaptation at the Manchester international festival last year. It’s an autobiographical account of the young gay author’s journey back to his working-class, industrial French town.

Celeste Ng

The stories in Neel Patel’s If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi (Flatiron) are perfect bitesize morsels for the beach, travel legs or quiet moments. Mackenzi Lee’s Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (Harper Collins)is a giddy whirlwind romp of a love story; I can’t wait for the forthcoming sequel. Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark (Canongate) is an argument for continuing to take action, even when everything feels uncertain, and will send you back home from holiday ready to carry on. I’m going to London with my family, and bringing Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (Text), Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation (Balzer & Bray) – zombies plus the American civil war plus a fierce female fighter – and an advance copy of Edward Carey’s forthcoming Little (Aardvark Bureau), about the girl who grows up to become Madame Tussaud.

Jackie Kay

I’d recommend the recently republished Faces in the Water (Virago) by Janet Frame. She’s a true original, her work is a joy to return to, and it never ages. Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Oneworld) is a great, big, roaring Ugandan epic that follows the trials and tribulations of the Kintu clan from the 1750s to today. I’m taking poetry, too: it travels light and packs a punch. I’ll include Us (Faber) by Zaffar Kunial, a poet whose work thrills me, who makes you return to the origins of things, places, language and people again and again. He’s a poet who takes traditions seriously but makes of them something entirely new – a must. I’m taking Gerda Stevenson’s fabulous Quines (Luath) – the old Aberdonian word for women – which takes us through a vivid, moving history of outstanding Scottish women in poetry. It’s a groundbreaker of a book, rich and resonant, strong of voice. I’m going to go back to Eigg, an inspiring island run by its own people, and I’ll daytrip to Muck and Canna just cos I canny not.

Maria Balshaw

My first recommendation is The Wood: The Life and Times of Cockshutt Wood (Doubleday) by John Lewis Stempel. It is a glorious evocation of the rhythm and dynamism of an English woodland, connecting us to a much longer timeframe: a needed balance to the working, urban lives most of us have. My second is Audre Lorde’s Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Silver), the collected essays of this important poet, writer and intersectional feminist. It is a book of our times, not least because it reminds us that current issues of gender, race and power have been being contested, here in incandescent and penetrating prose and poetry, since the 1960s.

I will be spending my summer break being very quiet indeed in the Kent countryside. I shall take a pile of books including Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (Penguin), the posthumous memoir by this vital cultural theorist; Colm Tóibín’s The House of Names (Viking); Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (Canongate); and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (Fourth Estate). I’ll also be remembering Manchester, my home until last year, with Dave Haslam’s wonderful biography, Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor (Constable), and rereading Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Gollancz) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage), to feel again their potent, timely power.

Olivia Laing

The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain (Chatto & Windus) by Damian Le Bas is the perfect accompaniment to any holiday in the British Isles. It maps a secret world, and made me want to live outdoors, at least for a summer. I’m going to Folegandros in August, and I plan to take Lara Pawson’s jagged, stunning meditation on war, violence and love, This Is the Place to Be (CB Editions). I’ve read it once and it was like drinking lightning; I can’t wait to rip through it again.

Guy Gunaratne

This summer I’m staying home so I’ll be reading around current erratic obsessions, mostly translated fiction and Trump. The recently published Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi sounds mad and tricksy. Moroccan writer and film-maker Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital, a short hallucinatory novel is appearing for the first time in English translation by Lara Vergnaud. Also, Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider, which deals with class and race post-Trump, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting new translations of Brazilian writer Machado de Assis. A new complete collection will be published later this month translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson.

THE GUARDIAN

Sharon Olds / The Father and The Wellspring

Sharon Olds

BIOGRAPHY

The Father and The Wellspring 

by Sharon Olds

Today is the last Tuesday of the month, which means it’s time for Lu and Kelly’smonthly Read More/Blog More Poetry event. This month I decided to revisit one of my all-time favourite poetry collections, Sharon Olds’ The Father, and to accompany it with a new-to-me collection by the same author,The Wellspring. This turned out to be an excellent idea – the two collections complement each other so well they’re almost like two sides of the same coin.

The Father is a collection of poems about the speaker’s experience of watching her father die of cancer. As I said when I blogged about it briefly two years ago, it’s a harrowing book, but it’s also a beautiful one. Olds turns her attention to the physicality of dying, and uses raw and direct language to express her sense of connection to a body that is weakening day by day.

The Father reads like a diary of grief, and that alone is painful enough; but the book’s emotional landscape is further complicated by the speaker’s relationship with her father, which is far from straightforward. Poems like the amazing “Beyond Harm” (which still never fails to make me cry”, “I Wanted to be There When My Father Died” [.doc link] or “Last Words” capture all these conflicted feelings flawlessly.

I really appreciate the fact that Olds documents a kind of emotional experience that falls outside the fictional but nevertheless socially powerful and constrictive script of illness, death, grief, and mourning. We all have set expectations about how this sort of process is supposed to go, both for ourselves and for others, and this book bulldozers them all. Books like The Father expand the sort of narratives we tend to guide ourselves with: by voicing a very complicated emotional experience, they make it seem less lonely and more permissible, and that alone is a very valuable thing. The only two things I can think to compare this book to are a) the Mountain Goats album “The Sunset Tree”, which covers analogous emotional terrain and b) A Monster Calls, which also illuminates some of the complications of grief (though complications of a different sort).

Here’s a poem I particularly liked, “Death and Mortality”:

My father’s dying is not evil.
It is not good and it is not evil,
it is out of the moral world altogether.
When the nurses empty his catheter bag,
pouring the pale, amber fluid
into the hospital measuring cup, it is
neither good nor bad, it is only
the body. Even his pain, when his face
contracts, and his mouth makes a sucking snap
when his jaws draw back
is not wicked, no one is doing it to him,
there is no guilt, and no shame,
there is only pleasure and pain. This
is the world where sex lives, the world
of the nerves, the world without church,
we kiss him in it, we stroke back his gunned
hair, his wife and I, one
on either side, we wipe the flow of
saliva like ivory clay from the side of his mouth.
His body feels us attending him
Outside the world of the moral, as if
We are making love to him in the woods
And we hear, far away, in a field,
The distant hymns of a tent-meeting,
Smaller than the smallest drops of green-black
Woods dew on his body as we dip to touch him.

In the more recent collection The Wellspring, Sharon Olds turns her attention to life. When I say this collection complements The Father perfectly, I’m not saying it because I don’t want allow a book room to be unrelentingly sad; but rather because it was interesting to me to see the same poet turn her attention to other types of emotional experience. In The Wellspring, Olds focuses on the same kind of physical details as in The Father, but this time in relation to puberty, to sexuality, to motherhood, to a child’s illness. The unapologetic physicality of her poetry is one of the things I appreciate about it the most. Let me use an excerpt from “Her First Week” to show you what I mean:

It was in
my care, the creature of her spine, like the first
chordate, as if the history
of the vertebrate had been placed in my hands.
Every time I checked, she was still
with us – someday, there would be a human
race. I could not see it in her eyes,
but when I fed her, gathered her
like a loose bouquet to my side and offered
the breast, greyish-white, and struck with
miniscule scars like creeks in sunlight, I
felt she was serious, I believed she was willing to stay.

Or another one, from “Bathing the New Born”:

I love that time
when you croon and croon to them, you can see
the calm slowly entering them, you can
sense it in your clasping hand,
the little spine relaxing against
the muscle of your forearm, you feel the fear
leaving their bodies, he lay in the blue
oval plastic baby tub and
looked at me in wonder and began to
move his silky limbs at will in the water.

I’m not a mother and am not personally interested in becoming one, so a lot of what The Wellspring covers falls outside of my experience. But reading is about far more than merely finding echoes of yourself, after all: I loved this collection exactly because Olds focuses on female experiences that have been historically marginalised, and because she does such a wonderful job of conjuring them in vivid sensorial detail. You can find another one of my favourite poems, "High School Senior", online here. 

http://www.thingsmeanalot.com/2012/03/father-and-wellspring-by-sharon-olds.html