Summer Reading

Summer drifts in with chestnut pollen on the streets and the electrics of occasional storms. The nights open themselves, and we sleep with the windows ajar, allowing the breeze to drift through our flat on the first floor. It brings the smell of smoke in on its back, occasional traffic noises, a blackbird’s evening call. A black cat pads across the balconies to visit us, pausing to look back wounded and wronged when we chase him back out the way he came. A clear night sky and the moon yellow and low over Camden. Routines lose their impetus, become languid and casual. I make my regular journey down to the south coast, never failing to be gripped by the changes in the landscape, the great silent movie of rape fields and birch forests, the isolated sycamores bursting against the horizon amongst silos and farmhouses. The teaching year ends. A day job turns to warm coals. My daughter prepares for the production her summer show, her final hurrah in the school she has attended for the last six years. We have a camping trip to anticipate, a music festival, some time back with my family; afterwards, I will spend some time with my partner in Marrakesh. The time comes to make plans for the books I’ll take with me. I always prepare my reading carefully. A crime novel for a long train journey, poetry for summer in the park. Sometimes, I like to match my reading to my destinations (Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, Michael Ondaatje in Sri Lanka, Jeet Thayil in Mumbai); other times, the choice is more impressionistic, associative. In part, this is a manic need to relive experiences, the kind of mindset Tom McCarthy depicted in Remainder. If I read Dave Smith’s poetry outside on the grass, I will return the younger version of myself reading Dave Smith, in a photo taken by an old girlfriend. If I read John Sladek on a camping trip, I will return to the summer I spent camping around France, reading old Pan science fiction books from the Fantasy Centre on Holloway Road. Each book is a portal to another universe, but also a portal to a previous self. Read in the summer, and, somehow, you become closer to the book. Sometimes, I feel my reading life has been one long summer of reading and recapturing that sense of what I read. And what do you do when summer has gone? You shuffle in the gaps, idle and anxious, waiting for the next book, to freeze the moment you were there.