Summer Reading Project 2023

It's that time again! Every summer for many years, I have chosen a stack of books to tackle over the warmer and in theory, less busy, months. I choose books around a theme. I have spent summers reading books about trees, books related to France, books featuring notable houses, and last year, I read several Faulkner novels. That was one of my favorite projects so far, because Faulkner certainly is a project AND a mood, and it was an experience to be immersed in his world for that extended period. 

This year, I'm not feeling as ambitious. Lately, I read a lot for my jobs and sometimes have trouble finishing books in a timely manner. I wanted to choose novels with a decidedly summer vibe, books I might pick up while traveling. Books that really piqued my immediate interest. So I thought, why can't my theme be summer itself? I perused some lists and a couple novels came immediately to mind, and here you are, my choices for this summer's reading project, the Summer of Summer, which I'll read in this order and hopefully, share my thoughts with you. Click on each for a description:

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead

The Natural by Bernard Malamud

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk

Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

If any of these pique YOUR interest, join me. And I'll be sure to update you on my progress and my impressions of these stories. Happy summer!

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Summer of Faulkner: As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary

I often think there’s no better place to read a book than on an airplane. Suspended between places with few distractions (especially if you have earplugs), it’s a prime opportunity for a fictional world to take over. And maybe another fantastic place to read a book is on vacation, when perhaps you’ve put the concerns of work and everyday life on the back burner. It follows that maybe reading a novel on a plane before or after a vacation is the best of all. After experiencing three Faulkner novels (so far) this summer, I can tell you that it’s particularly suited for reading him. Faulkner is a big mood. His stories are immersive, each with its own language and method. Particularly the method. Reading his novels in a single sitting increases accessibility; there’s no reorientation period as there might be if you read in segments during breaks from your normal, busy life. And so, I give you my thoughts on As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary.

When I chose the novels for my summer project, I selected five books in chronological order during a particularly productive writing period of Faulkner’s life. The historical notes on the first three novels I've read are interesting. Of the first, the author stated, “I had just written my guts into The Sound and the Fury though I was not aware until the book was published that I had done so, because I had done it for pleasure.” Faulkner bounced between writing what he wanted and writing to make money over the course of his entire career, and it’s not surprising that what is probably his most critically lauded novel was an act of creative passion. 

Of Sanctuary, however, he wrote:

“To me it is a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money. I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought…I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought was the right answer and invested the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks.”

The editor who received Sanctuary told Faulkner he couldn’t publish it, or they’d both end up in jail. In need of money, Faulkner took a job in a power plant, shoveling coal during the night shift. Between midnight and 4 a.m., when there was less to do because everyone was sleeping, he wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, “without changing a word.” He told the publisher, “by it I would stand or fail.” Another novel, it would seem, inspired by pure, creative passion.

By then, he had forgotten about Sanctuary but undertook a comprehensive rewriting when asked. He claimed to make a “fair job of it” and hoped not to “shame” the other two novels. He seemed to know that it was in another category altogether, and I certainly found it so.

As I Lay Dying is the story of the Bundren family. It opens with the point of view of Darl, who observes his older brother, Cash, building a coffin for their mother, who lies in the house nearing death. There’s some discussion about whether he should be doing this right outside the window where Addie, their ailing mother, can see. Everyone seems agitated by the sound of the sawing and hammering. And with these first images and sounds, Faulkner sets a mood and tone that masterfully prevails throughout the novel.

The Bundrens are a hardscrabble, farming family who can never seem to make out right. Bad luck, the patriarch of the family would claim. Throughout the novel, Anse Bundren bemoans his fortune: “I have heard men cuss their luck, and right, for they were sinful men. But I do not say it’s a curse on me, because I have done no wrong to be cussed by.” This is up for debate throughout, not only in relation to Anse but for each character. Cash and his brooding brother, Darl, the sole daughter of the family, Dewey Dell, whose personal problem weighs more heavily on her than her mother’s impending death, Jewel, the mother’s favorite, and the youngest, Vardaman, who possibly has mental disabilities and associates his mother’s death with a fish he caught earlier the same day.

Like The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying rotates points of view but each chapter is short and immersive, and the effect of the blending of these scenes is quite mesmerizing, like a collage around Addie. The family’s matriarch was tough and bitter; she has requested that her body be delivered to Jefferson to be laid with her ancestors—although she knew this would cause complications and expense her family couldn’t really afford. Faulkner gives Addie a voice, post-mortem, in a chapter when she recounts the birth of each child and the frustrations of her life.

The novel maintains a tragic tone laced with dark humor, as the family carts Addie’s body while vultures circle above. You wouldn’t think you would laugh about a scene when they attempt traversing a river and the body lurches into the water, but you do. It’s no farce, though; the novel speaks volumes about the South and the struggles of farmers, about roles for women and sexuality, and a new generation shackled by the demands of family and tradition and the past.

If I had one thing to say about Sanctuary, it would be that the content is unpleasant from start to finish, really. No character is truly likable or, more importantly, particularly sympathetic. As Faulkner claimed, it was “the most horrific tale” he could imagine. In the story, a young debutante named Temple Drake arrives at the home of a bootlegger after a car crash. It’s a house of horrors, as she is attacked several times throughout the night, becomes semi-intelligible due to trauma, and is kidnapped by an impotent criminal named Popeye and eventually, after suffering more abuse, ends up in a Memphis brothel.

Although the book seems to be an attempt at a potboiler (those “trends” Faulkner talked about), the author can’t help but draw commentary about women’s sexuality through the characterization of Temple herself, a young woman who seems to flirt with danger until it comes to her in severe fashion. The novel has something to say about the South during prohibition, a time that encouraged lawlessness, and about alcoholism—the car is crashed by Gowan Stevens, an alcoholic and Temple’s companion on that fateful day. But again, most of the content is just…well, unpleasant. Much has been said about the famous scene (or lack of scene) with the famous object—but I’ll leave that for you to find out.

Sanctuary is written without shifting point of views and much of the literary flair of Faulkner’s other novels. But again, the author was writing with a certain thing in mind, for the broader audience he imagined. And, dear readers, it worked. The success of Faulkner’s potboiler in 1931 freed him from financial worries, for the most part.

Next up: a reread of Light in August, the book I remembered as a favorite, to be followed by the last book of my summer project, Absalom, Absalom! Fortunately, I still have some summer plane rides left.

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Summer of Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

I just finished watching the third season of My Brilliant Friend, the HBO series adapted from the Elena Ferrante novels. In this season, the main character—also an author named Elena—has written about how women are fashioned by men (her "book" is only 70 pages and she’s not sure what it is but of course her publisher will take it!). It’s a feminism manifesto of sorts, about how women were formed to be like men and yet, are required to live by men’s definitions and requirements (this is a simplification).

But wait. You’re thinking: I thought you were reading Faulkner. I am! I’ve finished the first novel on my list, The Sound and the Fury, the story of an aristocratic, Southern family’s attempts to retain their (supposedly) unvarnished legacy, steeped in the moral and cultural ideals of the time. But Faulkner was no optimist, and so they fail, and the story is one of loss; over time, the family falls from grace. And in writing terms, the “inciting incident” for this widespread tragedy is a localized one—the downfall of the family’s only daughter, Caddy.  

When people think of Faulkner, they think of alternating points of view and jumps in time that have no signal and often seem to make no sense. This book has all of that! The novel employs three, first-person perspectives, those of the three Compson brothers: Benjy, Quentin, and Jason, and a third-person POV which focuses on the perspective of Dilsey, the household cook and stand-in mother for the brothers and Caddy. And it occurs to me that the restraints and expectations felt by Caddy in the South during the first quarter of the twentieth century were probably not unlike the gender expectations at the half-mark of the same century and beyond in Naples, Italy.

Much is often made of Faulkner’s characterization of Benjy, the “idiot” of the family, a thirty-three-year-old man who must be supervised around-the-clock because of the severity of his condition. Endless scholarship has examined possible diagnoses for Benjy (modern consensus is probably severe autism), but everyone believes him to be entirely unable to process information (he is not), and some even think he’s deaf—in terms of a writing device, it makes for an interesting POV that is almost omniscient in the sense that no one takes him as a witness of any sort.

And the way Faulkner has expressed Benjy’s voice is, of course, provocative, but each point of view is uniquely drawn and remarkable in its own way, and the sun holding these planetary points of view in its gravity is Caddy, always Caddy. Each brother takes a particular interest in her, according to the image of her he has constructed (and this is where Elena's writings come in)—whether it be nurturer, idealized womanhood, protected charge, or something else. The Compson parents are mostly absent—the father’s an alcoholic, the mother is selfish and often takes to her bed, leaving the children to Dilsey’s supervision. As the oldest, Quentin assumes responsibility for the family, especially for upholding honor where his sister is concerned, Jason is not well-liked and is simmering pot of bitterness, and Benjy, as mentioned, has the capacity of a toddler and imprints like a duckling after his sister. And when Caddy begins to behave promiscuously and eventually becomes pregnant, the cogs are set in motion for each to meet his demise in one way or another.

The novel’s about the southern states, of course, and what some saw as the deterioration of the upper class after the Civil War. The choices available to the brothers were perhaps those Faulkner felt were his: go away to an eastern school, stay on the land enmeshed in the noble tradition of farming, or retreat into an idiotic ignorance of the situation. Having read the Faulkner biography before this novel, I couldn’t help but draw lines from Faulkner’s parents to the elder Compsons, and from Faulkner himself to the frustrations and convoluted messaging about morals embedded in the behavior of the Compson siblings. Like Caddy, Faulkner suffered a series of thwarted relationships and engaged in sexual misconduct. And in the repetition of process that occurs when Caddy’s daughter grows up to be rebellious, discontent, and primed to repeat the tragic, downward trajectory of her ancestors, one can sense the general dissatisfaction and expected doom that started Faulkner on the road to severe alcoholism at the tender age of fourteen.

Does the book sound depressing? I suppose in some ways, it is. But where the tragedy of the Compson family grows heavy, The Sound and the Fury is lifted, almost a century after its first printing, by the genius of William Faulkner’s vision and execution. I didn’t find it difficult to follow what was happening—at least, not nearly as much as when first read it. The changes in point of view are inspired, each in its own way, and the whole thing engages you along the ride, even if it’s downhill. It’s an amazing work of fiction, and a great start to my summer reading.

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The Summer of Faulkner

 

For many years, I’d look forward to summer as a time to catch up with some reading I wasn’t able to tackle during the cooler, busier months. I’d choose a series—such as Hilary Mantel’s first two books in the Wolf Hall trilogy (still haven’t read the third), or I’d tackle a classic I thought might be laborious—a collection of Chekhov stories or Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (very laborious!). And in 2018, I made this habit a formal endeavor when I christened “The Summer of Chabon” and read four novels by Michael Chabon. And so, each summer I choose a reading project based on a theme. 2019 was The Summer of Trees, 2020 was dedicated to books related to France, and last year, The Summer of Houses books all featured a house as an integral part of character, plot or theme.

In recent years, my leisure reading has slowed down overall, as I began to read more for my day jobs of teaching and editing. Where I used to read 50+ books a year, I’m lucky to get into the mid-20s these days. This year I’m sitting at thirteen novels read. With so much going on, I often find myself lacking the mental stamina to sit and read for long periods. What better time to pick up several novels by an American master who’s also considered one of the most difficult to comprehend?

For 2022, I’ll be reading and re-reading several books by and about William Faulkner. When I was in college, I took a course on Southern Literature with Professor Margaret Whitt. That class, and that teacher, was one of the seminal experiences of my life (maybe I took 2 or 3 courses with her?), and it ignited a love of gothic lit and introduced me to so many authors—Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter (everyone should read more KAP!), Carson McCullers (!!!), Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, etc., etc.—the combined influence of which I believe has had the most seismic and lasting effect on my own writing. 

For The Summer of Faulkner, I have five novels and one biography on my list. I realize this is probably unrealistic, but here we are. The good news is, I’ve already finished the biography, William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist. It’s excellent, written in a novelistic style, taking the reader from 1902, when “Billy” Faulkner’s family relocated to Oxford, Mississippi, to his death in a Byhalia sanatorium in 1962. Faulkner was, of course, famous for his writing but also for his prodigious drinking, and his life was struck by tragedy and a series of troubled, complicated romantic attachments and relationships. The emotional frustrations and drinking coexisted and interrelated, like linked, winding strands of his psychological DNA. He told an early paramour “Between grief and nothing I’ll always take grief,” and his biographer returns to this sentiment several times. Faulkner certainly weathered his share of grief, and physical ailments as well—he suffered a terrible burn after a drinking bout, and he had recurring back problems—more reason for him to turn to liquor.

I learned much about Faulkner, including his love of fox hunts (the “thrill of danger,” he said) and his time in Hollywood writing screenplays—primarily for the paychecks—and his travels back and forth. Later in life, he wrote about “the Negro problem” and his complicated sentiments about the South and Civil Rights that appear in these essays and, of course, throughout his entire oeuvre of fiction. Writers may want to reacquaint themselves with the wonderful speech he gave in 1950 when he won the Nobel Prize. You can read it here or listen to Faulkner himself here.

William Faulkner published 19 novels, 125 short stories (I didn’t mention the stories! So many stories, including “The Bear,” which some consider one of the best of all time), 20 screenplays, one play, six collections of poetry, and various essays. It seemed to me there were several approaches to choosing which novels to read but in the end, I went with a fairly simple strategy. I chose five novels in chronological order, during a particularly productive era of the writer’s life. Two of them I have read before, but it’s been many years. These five novels are:

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Sanctuary (1931)

Light in August (1932)

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

There was a book in 1935 called Pylon, but I skipped that one. And to be honest, if anything doesn’t make the cut this summer, it’ll be the last one, Absalom, Absalom! I have read two of the more famous novels on the list, The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and considered leaving the former off the list. But I didn’t, and I’ll be starting with The Sound and the Fury (if you recall, a title taken from Macbeth). Looking to confound and frustrate yourself over the calm, summer months? Join me! I’ll be reporting back on my progress as I take this adventure, and I’d love to hear your impressions as well.

Note: in 2005, Oprah did a Summer of Faulkner as part of her reading club, and you can buy three of these novels in a boxed set, if that's of interest. 

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Summer of Houses: The Yellow House

 

“To be remembered is next to being loved” –Emily Dickinson

Often, we'll call books in a range of genres “love letters” to a place. Whether it’s memoir, poetry, fiction, or even travel writing, this term is used to describe writing that pays homage, fondly, to a specific point on the globe. 

And what is the best expression of love, if not being remembered, as so aptly expressed by perhaps one of our most sentimental poets, Ms. Dickinson. Places from our past can leave indelible impressions, especially when they were shared with the people and events that have shaped us. I wrote about my grandmother’s house once, and how—if I close my eyes—I can picture every detail of her house as if I was there last week. The proportions of the rooms, many of the details of things like carpet and cupboards and lamps, the quiet and fragrant stillness.

If remembering was a sport, perhaps Sarah M. Broom would be an Olympian. The Yellow House is her detailed, comprehensive love letter to the home where she spent her childhood. She remembers and remembers and remembers—every hiding place in the house, the “medium-size hole in the floorboard (of a bathroom) that will eventually become a large hole letting in more sound and outside creatures,” the smells, the holiday decorations: “gold garland around the door trim; shiny red paper on the front door, which served the dual purpose of keeping the draft out and hiding its ugly tan color.” We see the house through Broom’s eyes as she grows from childhood to adulthood, the magic along with the state of disrepair stemming from Hurricane Betsy, which made landfall forty years before Katrina.

“The plumbing was never right. We had buckets underneath the kitchen sink catching dishwater. The kitchen cabinets had big holes that led to the outside. Mom plugged those holes with foil after hearing somewhere that rates couldn’t chew through. And still they did.”

So the house is the thing, and in the introduction, she lets the reader know the significance of those four walls.

“Before it was the Yellow House, the only house I knew, it was a green house, the house my eleven siblings knew. The facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life. The Yellow House was witness to our lives. When it fell down, something in me burst.”

But Broom’s remembering isn’t confined to this building and its details. She remembers all who lived in it. She describes each of her siblings and their manner of speaking and dress. Throughout the memoir, she reaches for understanding and recollections of her father, who died when she was a baby. Often, she shares family photographs and describes what they are reflecting—things we can see, and things we can’t. She remembers events outside the walls of the Yellow House; this family history spans back one hundred years and takes into account the changes afoot in New Orleans, America, the world. As I said, it’s very comprehensive and at times, this avalanche of details feels heavy for the reader. But there's a lulling reverence to it as well, a power. In an interview for The Atlantic, Broom talked about the difficulties she had with publishers, because of this inclusiveness of topics and the breadth of memories:

“’The main complaint was that I needed to choose,’ … ‘that I was either going to write a book about New Orleans or a book about my family, but not both—which was so confounding to me that I couldn’t even process it.’" 

Broom’s memories start with the house, and everything is tied to it. How do we order memory, or separate, cleanly, one thing from another? For the author, place and people and events intertwine and stay that way. 

“I thought then and still think now: when a person dies in a place they become the place and nothing is ever the same again.”

Of course, Hurricane Katrina was for Broom’s family—as it was for many—a seismic, devastating event. The Yellow House is destroyed, and the family spreads out. Just as Broom’s mother, Ivory Mae, scraped and fought to keep “the only house I ever knew,” the author returns after Katrina and tries to get some reimbursement for the house, the ruins of which were hauled away without notice by the city.

My Summer of Houses reading project concludes with this gorgeous and accomplished memoir, which deserves every bit of the National Book Award it received. It’s a book that certainly presents a memorable and notable house, one that looms at the center of this author's story. The Yellow House is a a touching expression of love, an examination of the ways places can reach our very depths, clinging like vines on a wall, and surrounding everything.

 

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