time to put down those summer reads...

yes, it's true. the days are getting shorter, the nights are getting colder and today rebekah let me know that the time has come to wrap up the summer reading groupies. despite my best intentions, i only managed to post about one of the 3 1/2 books i read this summer (i'm still chipping away at the 4th). i feel like a kid who hasn't tackled my required summer reading book reports yet! not that i ever actually did that.

so, with labor day weekend almost here, i can no longer procrastinate. i can no longer tell myself i'll post summaries once i've found the time to shoot meaningful photos that relate to each book, or to redesign the book covers just for fun. but i did manage to photograph this humble end-of-summer pile, which is embarrassingly shorter than my optimistic july 2nd stack. oh well. there's still the long winter ahead.

after finishing cormac mccarthy's bleak, post-apocolyptic novel the road i decided to jump right into even more lighthearted reading with robert goolrich's heart-wrenching memoir, the end of the world as we know it: scenes from a life. from the flap copy,

"beautifully written, often humorous, sometimes sweet, ultimately shocking, this is a son's story of looking back with both love and anger at the parents who gave him life and then robbed him of it, who created his world and then destroyed it."

i can't help but compare the underlying message of this bravely written book to what i gleaned from the road...that humans have a tenacious desire to go on despite the sometimes horrific circumstances, and that, as goolrich writes,

"there is a loveliness to life that does not fade. even in the terrors of the night, there is a tendency towards grace that does not fail us. there is a persistence of song, as one poet said.

it is the tenderness that breaks our hearts. it is the loveliness that leaves us stranded on the shore, watching the boats sail away. it is the sweetness that makes us want to reach out and touch the soft skin of another person. and it is the grace that comes to us, undeserving though we may be."

despite the daunting title, my next choice truly was much lighter, an arsonist's guide to writers' homes in new england. because i work in book marketing myself, the first thing i want to tell you about this book is that the publisher's publicity campaign attracted the attention of the police. it didn't cause quite as much stir as the aqua teen hunger force campaign that shut down the city of boston last year, but it certainly put the book on my radar. reading it was particularly entertaining for me since most of the action takes place in nearby amherst, ma.

"amherst was exactly as i'd remembered it: the leafy, prosperous streets, which were filled with so many volvo station wagons it was like mushrooms in a cave; the two hundred-year-old houses with their genteelly overgrown lawns, their tiger lilies and blue mums and birch trees and historical markers; the white college boys with dreadlocks playing their complicated frisbee games on the sweeping town green; the white clapboard congregational churches and the granite episcopal churches and the soaring spires of the college everywhere visible over the high tree line; the well-scrubbed college girls barely dressed in workout clothes; and the boat-shoed and loafered professors drinking their coffee on the sort of wrought iron outdoor patio furniture that looks too delicate to sit on even if you were as wafer thin as most of the college girls were."

too true. this is a laugh-out-loud funny story of a man trying (rather unsuccessfully) to escape his past (as the man who burned down the emily dickenson house), only to have it boomerang back at him when, one by one, the homes of other famous new england writers are torched.

since i'm only half-way through my last book i will save a full description for a future post, but it is the spontaneous fulfillment of desire by deepak chopra (and couldn't we all use a little spontaneous fulfillment now and then?) i've been interested in reading this book since hearing chopra speak about coincidence on npr years ago. coincidentally, a copy suddenly appeared on the free table at work last spring. it' melding of quantum physics and spirituality is inspiring, but i must admit that at the end of th day even the most stimulating non-fiction makes for slow reading. perhaps by the time the snow flies...