Summer Reading

Yesterday, I re-read in one sitting Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. Her book reminded me of some of the titles I'd like to read this summer, including two or three by Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader, The Second Common Reader, and Mrs. Dalloway). Time permitting, I'll also attend to a few other glaring omissions in my education, including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. (Such a cheery gathering of plots!) And I'll revisit my favorite Sinclair—Sinclair Lewis—via his Arrowsmith, which got frequent mention at the History of Medicine conference that I attended earlier this month.

For more recently published works, my hope-to-read list includes Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (and maybe, too, The Blind Assassin) and George Howe Colt's The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home. I clipped a review for the latter from an August 2003 New Yorker, but never had a clue until today that the author was Anne Fadiman's husband. My in-laws' family reunion will this summer take place in Cape Cod, where I've never been. Reading Colt's book seems a good way to get to know the area. The New Yorker described it as a family memoir plus "a brief history of the Cape, an investigation of nostalgia, a catalog of local fauna, a study of class, and a mediation on the privileges and burdens of the past."

Sounds delicious. Now, if only we had forty-four hours in every day...