{"id":126534,"date":"2018-06-15T14:39:20","date_gmt":"2018-06-15T18:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126534"},"modified":"2018-06-15T14:39:20","modified_gmt":"2018-06-15T18:39:20","slug":"staff-picks-anti-beach-reads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/15\/staff-picks-anti-beach-reads\/","title":{"rendered":"The Paris Review<\/em> Recommends Anti-Beach Reads"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This summer, we\u2019re going long and hard. In anticipation of the solstice, the staff of <\/em>The Paris Review has pulled together a list of anti-beach reads: doorstopper books, dense books, books that will tear a hole in your flimsy beach tote, flip over your canoe, and ground your propeller plane. You can\u2019t hold them up to block the sun\u2014you can barely hold them up at all. These are books that will empty the pool if they fall in.\u00a0Books to swat a mosquito with and accidentally break a limb. Books worth the forty-euro heavy-baggage surcharge. Below is the final list, presented in order of page count, from fairly slim to downright menacing. Happy reading!<\/em><\/p>\n

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This week, I\u2019ve been thinking about Anthony Wallace\u2019s \u201cThe Old Priest,\u201d which first appeared in\u00a0The Republic of Letters<\/em>, then in the 2013 Pushcart Prize\u00a0anthology, then in an eponymous story collection<\/a>, which won the 2013 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. One could argue that the story shouldn\u2019t work: Twelve thousand words (which, while not of Tolstoyan proportions, is mighty long for a story). A cheeky and fairly unreliable second-person narrator. A forgetful clergyman (the old priest of the title) who tells the same stories to anyone who will listen (and several do repeat across the forty-some pages). Five decades of compression (many a story editor has told me that kind of breadth should be saved for novels). Significant use of email. In short, Tony broke all the rules, and to great effect: \u201cThe Old Priest\u201d is a strange and beautiful gem of a story. The extended narrative zooms and loops, each pass around the sun (some of those passes spiraling backward) adding nuance and dimension to a double portrait. I\u2019m trying to dodge the spoilers, but I\u2019ll say the story\u2019s \u201cyou\u201d is less a POV and more a complicated character\u2019s evasive self-identification; with that realization, that little three-letter word suddenly becomes a very astute character sketch. The old priest\u2019s habit of repetition is cut by amazing moments of dialogue: The old priest sniffs at you\u2019s efficiency apartment, \u201cThis is a house of failure.\u201d You replies,\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s experience.\u201d The priest says,\u00a0\u201dSo is being bitten by a shark.\u201d If you\u2019re not convinced yet, there are\u00a0psychedelics\u00a0and a gorgeous sunrise swim (okay, perhaps it is <\/em>a bit of a beach read). And, as the title suggests, there is the inevitable death. But what I\u2019d forgotten until I reread Tony\u2019s story last night was how you learns the news: \u201cYou go to check your email and there is death.\u201d I stopped there, because I got that same email Tuesday morning, informing me Tony had died on May 16. I\u2019d been lucky enough to publish his story \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction<\/a>\u201d at The Southern Review<\/em><\/a> and counted him as one of those far-flung friends that a far-flung journal editor makes: I always looked forward to his generous emails, the new stories submitted a few times a year, pithy updates on life from Boston. In April, my move to New York City imminent, we hatched plans for summer lobster rolls in Maine. I\u2019m sorry to never have had that meal, but I\u2019m glad to always have his stories. \u2014Emily Nemens<\/strong> (44 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

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When I imagine how C. S. Lewis passed his pre\u2013Joy Davidman years, I picture bright summer afternoons spent holed up indoors, reading, thinking and writing. Whether this picture is accurate or not, one feels this sort of bookish separation was necessary for him to write the following in The Problem of Pain<\/a>: <\/em>\u201cwhen pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.\u201d Twenty years later, his tone had shifted and this reverence for the sustaining power of God\u2019s love had faded: \u201cTalk to me about the truth of religion and I\u2019ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I\u2019ll listen submissively. But don\u2019t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don\u2019t understand.\u201d The reason for this change was life experience: the above, from A Grief Observed, <\/em>was written during the weeks that followed Davidman\u2019s death, at forty-five, from cancer. Their love and brief marriage arrived late in life and caught the emotionally reserved Lewis by surprise: \u201cOh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back\u2014to be sucked back\u2014into it?\u201d But God, Lewis was horrified to discover, does not answer such questions, asked at such times. In A Grief Observed<\/em>,\u00a0we have his violent, visceral response to the silence. Send the kids off to the pool and close the curtains to the sun. Let\u2019s wait it out \u2019til winter. \u2014Robin Jones<\/strong> (160 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Sometimes, when I head out into the summer sunshine to enjoy a read in the park, I feel sticky, smell garbage, and get seven mosquito bites on each calf. When I long to go back inside, I remember another book waiting for me at home: William Wordsworth\u2019s\u00a0The Prelude<\/em><\/a>. In Wordsworth\u2019s thirteen-book autobiographical poem, the speaker recalls beautiful landscapes and sublime scenery. In memory, these natural objects \u201celevate the mind\u201d in a way they did not during the initial sensory encounter. Nature is precious to the Romantic poet, but so is the act of picturing nature in one\u2019s mind from a comfortable, mosquito-free, indoor location\u2014arguably more so. So sometimes, I go home, revel in\u00a0The Prelude<\/em>, recall\u00a0other\u00a0<\/em>moments when I have loved the outdoors, try to picture a big fog-tipped mountain, and willingly heed Wordsworth\u2019s message:<\/p>\n

what we have loved
\nOthers will love; and we may teach them how,
\nInstruct them how the mind of Man becomes
\nA thousand times more beautiful than the earth
\nOn which he dwells, above this Frame of things
\n(Which \u2019mid all revolutions in the hopes
\nAnd fears of Men doth still remain unchanged)
\nIn beauty exalted, as it is itself
\nOf substance and of fabric more divine.<\/p>\n

\u2014Claire Benoit <\/strong>(272 pages, 8,000 lines)<\/em><\/p>\n

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There are books I love, and then there are books that have transformed me\u2014gone through me like a blood transfusion and left me altered and renewed. I haven\u2019t had a reading experience like The Transit of Venus<\/em> by the Australian author\u00a0Shirley Hazzard<\/a>\u00a0in years. It\u2019s not a book you get lost in\u2014it\u2019s a book you encounter. It holds you at arms length and demands your full attention. And yet, for all that, it\u2019s neither a long nor a particularly difficult read. First published in 1980, the first half reads more like a novel from the turn of the century\u2014two young Australian sisters, one fair and one dark, are received in the upstairs rooms of an English estate. They encounter a serious young astronomer and a playboy playwright, none of these four go on to marry each other. Hazzard\u2019s central preoccupation is love, or rather Love, but the novel spans decades, taking wars and politics and feminism in its sweep. \u201cThe tragedy is not that love doesn\u2019t last. The tragedy is the love that lasts,\u201d one character tells another, and by the time you get there, it breaks your heart. As the years pass, the characters remember small scenes from their youth\u2014a glance, an aside, a porcelain plate\u2014which were so briefly noted in the novel\u2019s first half that it feels to the reader as if the character\u2019s memories mingle with your own. In a Nabokovian sweep of mastery, the ending alters the entire story, revealing the \u201cplay within a play,\u201d and\u00a0chapter 3 and chapter 36 function as perfect parentheses<\/a>\u00a0to each other. And yet, as my mother likes to tell babies she encounters, You didn\u2019t need to be so beautiful, I would have loved you anyway. That\u2019s what I wanted to tell this book upon closing it. I loved it already for each sentence.\u00a0Hazzard\u2019s observations cut to the quick: \u201cTertia offered fingertips in a gesture not so much exhausted as reserving strength for something far more worthwhile.\u201d Or, \u201cShe was one of those persons who will squeeze themselves into the same partition of a revolving door with you, on the pretext of causing less trouble.\u201d Like Henry James but funnier (a high bar, I know), like Muriel Spark but with far more heart, Hazard is unlike anyone else I\u2019ve read. Immediately upon finishing, I bought a second copy online. I couldn\u2019t bear to part with mine and yet needed to press it into other people\u2019s hands. Dear world, please reissue this book\u2014the\u00a0current cover doesn\u2019t do it justice<\/a>, and it needs to be in everyone\u2019s fancy vacation photos.\u00a0\u2014Nadja Spiegelman <\/strong>(337 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

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James Baldwin\u2019s\u00a0Just Above My Head<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is an incredible read. It\u2019s an epic that tells the story of the Harlem-born gospel singer Arthur Montana. Told after his death by his brother Hall, it chronicles the emotional lives of everyone who touched Arthur during his lifetime, filtered through Baldwin\u2019s own feelings on the matter. Reading Just Above My Head<\/em> is like watching a character in a film do an impression of another character; the imperfections of the act are a reminder of the hidden skill of the actor. Baldwin is one of the most skilled writers we\u2019ve ever had, in part because he prioritizes the writing of the work over the perfection of the fiction he creates. This not a novel to read anywhere you can\u2019t sit down:\u00a0Just Above My Head <\/em>has required the most emotional work from me out of all the books I\u2019ve read. But if you have the time (and the space in your backpack), it will reward you with the unshakeable feeling that you really have lived in the world of its characters and have come to understand something about yourself. \u2014Eleanor Pritchett<\/strong> (592 pages)\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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The other day, a book arrived to my home address called\u00a0The Stranger Beside Me:<\/em>\u00a0The Shocking Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy<\/em><\/a>. I had not ordered this book, and there was no name on the jarringly chipper Amazon gift receipt. I wondered who would send me such a thoughtful, threatening gift. My first guess was my friend Sarah, since I had just ordered her\u00a0The Adversary\u00a0<\/em>by Emmanuel Carr\u00e8re. I texted Sarah, thanking her for the book, and didn\u2019t think much else about it until later that day, when she texted back, \u201cWhat book?\u201d Okay, I thought. No big deal. So it wasn\u2019t Sarah. I took a deep breath and tried my generous but also macabre and boundary-pushing friend Jake. Luckily, I guess, he texted me back, confirming that he was the sender: \u201cI\u2019ve had my eyes on you,\u201d he wrote \u201cdo the Doodle.\u201d The Doodle turned out to be a URL on the gift receipt that linked to a calendar. As I clicked the link, I discovered that this was not a totally free, no-strings-attached gift. In accepting it, I was consenting to join something called \u201cThe Serial Killer Book Club.\u201d These types of books aren\u2019t anti-beach reads\u2014The Stranger Beside Me\u00a0<\/em>is a best seller\u2014but the barrier of entry is as high, in its way, as a dense philosophical treatise or an obscure legal tome. In an already scary world, I\u2019m not sure I need to spend 625 pages of my summer-reading time with Ted Bundy. But I\u2019m also afraid of what will happen if I don\u2019t play along with Jake\u2019s sick game. In a way, this is just like every book club I\u2019ve ever been in. It sounds like fun, but also, good God.\u00a0Help! \u2014<\/strong><\/em>Brent Katz<\/strong> (625 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

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I like big books\u2014I cannot lie:\u00a0War and Peace<\/em>,\u00a0Les Mis\u00e9rables<\/em>,\u00a0The Greenlanders<\/em>,\u00a0Infinite Jest<\/em>,\u00a0Europe Central, Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>,\u00a0Black Lamb and Grey Falcon<\/em>. One I explicitly recall reading during the summer months is Astolphe de Custine\u2019s\u00a0Letters from Russia<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0Custine was a nineteenth-century travel writer (as well as a minor poet and novelist);\u00a0Letters<\/em>, his best-known book,\u00a0was written over four years and was inspired by Tocqueville\u2019s account of his American sojourn, which was published eight years before Custine\u2019s Russian one. Composed in thirty-six letters, it reports on the Grand Duke, Russian courtiers, the marriage of Peter the Great, the Greek Orthodox religion, Napoleon, national dances, a steamboat accident, polar nights, the Russian character (natch), rural life,\u00a0prisons, terrible roads, zakuska, Yaroslavl, peasants, the Academy of Painting,\u00a0his own family history\u2014in short, everything. Alexander Herzen was a fan, and so was George Kennan, who called\u00a0Letters<\/em>\u00a0\u201cthe best guide to Russia ever published.\u201d I was a Russia fanatic when I read it and soaked up Custine\u2019s thorough study: it\u2019s a record, not without prejudices, of a society and culture that preceded, and were largely effaced by, the Soviet Union (though despotism prevailed in both eras). In fact, the book was banned in Russia when it first appeared, and then again under Lenin. It\u2019s fun to read because\u00a0Letters<\/em>\u00a0is based on personal observations rather than facts and figures, on \u201cimpressions and emotions,\u201d Anka Muhlstein writes in her introduction. If summer is typically about getting away from it all, then\u00a0Letters<\/em>\u00a0is a good portal. \u201cTo travel,\u201d Custine writes, \u201cis to procure for my curiosity an inexhaustible aliment, to supply my thoughts with an eternal impulse of activity: to prevent my surveying the world would be like robbing a literary man of the key of his library.\u201d \u2014Nicole Rudick <\/strong>(672 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

Middlemarch<\/em> is roughly seven hundred pages, approximately the size of a brick, but actually pretty lightweight, and remarkably lighthearted. Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, confides in her reader many small gems of characterization as she sets her stage in a small provincial town. My own comparably provincial upbringing has perhaps allowed me a greater enjoyment of these nineteenth century portraits. It is almost impossible to imagine Dorothea Brooke\u2019s foolishness going unchallenged today, her feeling of pious duty as a young daughter, that she might agreeably have no qualms with devoting her life to reading aloud to some poor-sighted husband. Her sister\u2019s charm is dependent on the lost (or rejected) art that is nonconfrontation, \u201cIt had been her nature when a child never to quarrel with anyone\u2014only to observe with wonder that they quarreled with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon she was ready to play at cat\u2019s cradle with them whenever they recovered themselves.\u201d There is something lovely and relieving about a world in which reservation of personal opinion is agreeable, if perhaps not effective or profitable to anyone involved. Of another character, Caleb Garth, Eliot writes: \u201cHe had a certain shame about his neighbors\u2019 errors, and never spoke of them willingly … and he would rather do other men\u2019s work than find fault with their doing.\u201d I have not even touched on Will Ladislaw, and his willingness to approach the world without aim, for \u201camong all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.\u201d Having not yet reached the end of this delightful masterpiece, I take his chiding to heart, and sheepishly make no predictions. I will only say that sitting outside and slowly penetrating this book has given me more satisfaction than the sum of all my attempts at quick beach reads, forthwith abandoned like a beer unfinished and warmed by the sun.\u00a0\u2014Molly Livingston\u00a0<\/strong>(736 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

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Countless works of great literature are bleak, but\u00a0Kolyma Stories<\/em><\/a>\u00a0belongs in its own category. Based on Varlam Shalamov\u2019s fifteen years in the Soviet Gulags\u2014including the period during which he was enslaved in the harsh gold mines of Kolyma\u2014the tales collected here largely tell variations on the same story: someone in a camp suffers, waxes on the nature of humanity, and scrabbles for tiny pieces of bread and dried fruit. Something happens, or nothing happens. I feel weird even calling this a book. Each story works on its own as a smooth little stone of beauty, but\u00a0Kolyma Stories<\/em>\u00a0is more of a project, a commitment on Shalamov\u2019s part to paint the same square of canvas over and over (as the narrator of \u201cRain\u201d says,\u00a0\u201cEverything had a monochrome harmony, a satanic harmony\u201d),\u00a0to document these horrors so as to ensure they never happen again. As such, the arcs of many of the stories are strange, inconclusive, and cruel. Characters introduced on the first page might have little to do with the events on the second. Everything feels stripped down and unpolished, as though Shalamov dumped the details directly from his brain and left them exactly as he remembered. Therein lies the appeal of\u00a0Kolyma Stories<\/em>: this brick of stories, many of them only a couple of pages long, is purer than any other fiction, and it never flinches from exhibiting the depths of evil.\u00a0Death is unceremonious: in \u201cAt Night,\u201d prisoners exhume a corpse to pilfer its clothing. (As they remove rocks from the grave, they see a big toe, \u201cperfectly visible in the moonlight,\u201d\u00a0sticking out from the rubble.) But it\u2019s not all gloom. We\u2019re reminded time and again that a magic vibrates through the universe, a hum of wonder that stretches even to the farthest reaches of Russia. The intoxicating juice of frozen berries. The mysterious resilience of the dwarf pine. The warm presence of a stray dog. A woman waving to the prisoners in the rain, pointing to the sky, telling them it will all be over soon. And if you need a break from the swirl of misery and beauty,\u00a0Kolyma Stories<\/em>\u00a0makes a great beach pillow. \u2014Brian Ransom <\/strong>(741 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

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When people tell me that they\u2019re not \u201cbeach people,\u201d they often cite sand as one of the main deterrents, and even as a firmly indoctrinated \u201cbeach person,\u201d I get it\u2014sand gets everywhere and stays there for days, weeks, months, possibly years depending on how often you shake out your brightly patterned sun umbrella and beach towel, only to find them crusty with geological build up. If you are such a person, I suggest to you an alternative: intergalactic (and fictional) sand.\u00a0Dune<\/em><\/a>, Frank Herbert\u2019s 1965 science-fiction masterwork, is set on the desert planet Arrakis, which is home to an invaluable spice called melange; the central character, Paul, and his family have accepted stewardship of this planet, and with it, the dangers and complications of controlling the harvesting and distribution of melange.\u00a0Dune\u00a0<\/em>clocks in at just under eight hundred pages and\u00a0packs heft in breadth as well as depth, with interwoven themes of technology, ecology, politics, and religion, while also populating its universe with entirely new races and languages (there are two appendices and a glossary tucked in the back).\u00a0What I find the most interesting in this amalgam is how Herbert uses his tome to treat concerns of environmental distress (it was published on the wave of attention paid to the fraught ecological practices of the sixties). Like most good science fiction, the fantastic and imaginative are used as tools for examining reality\u2014and in this case, it became reality: names of planets in Herbert\u2019s\u00a0Dune<\/em>\u00a0universe are now nomenclature for geographic features on Saturn\u2019s moon Titan. Also, if you\u00a0want to continue blowing off your coastal-dwelling, beach-bum friends in favor of indoor activities, might I suggest David Lynch\u2019s 1984 movie adaptation. I\u2019ve personally never seen it, but most reviews concur that although it has its problems and failures, if you commit to being along for the ride, you\u2019ll enjoy it thoroughly. The same could be said for the book, which has its drawbacks, but is so action-packed that it barely gives you a moment to stop and catch your breath, let alone think about how much fun everyone is having playing beach volleyball without you. \u2014Lauren Kane <\/strong>(794 pages<\/em>)<\/p>\n

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Infidelity is my favorite genre of literature, which is why it\u2019s surprising that I hadn\u2019t, until now, read Anna Karenina<\/em><\/a>, the heftiest illicit love story of them all. I don\u2019t enjoy reading in public, but in an effort to finish the novel at a clip, I brought it with me everywhere: subway, laundromat, doctor\u2019s office. New York City, I soon learned, is full of awful people who know the ending to Anna Karenina <\/em>and would enjoy nothing more than to spoil it for me. Friends, acquaintances, and strangers alike greeted me with oblique references to trains, or to train tracks, and I began to avoid them all. I ripped the cover off my paperback and finished the book in private, so that my encounters with Anna, like those of Vronsky, could remain an open secret. \u2014Maya Binyam<\/strong> (976 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

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I don\u2019t remember how old I was when I read A Suitable Boy<\/em><\/a>, but I remember everything else about it: the hot density of an English-literature department meeting going nowhere, the thrilling relief of old friends and lovers alone with their hands on each other for the first time in months. The enormity of Vikram Seth\u2019s novel throws people off, but I\u2019m not sure why. The story, primarily about two families in post-partition India, moves quickly with a variety of intrigues. My heart has still not recovered from when Lata first falls for Kabir: \u201cSuddenly Kabir leaned his head back and burst out laughing. He looked so handsome in the more sunlight and his laughter was so open-hearted and free from tension that Lata, who had been about to turn towards the library, found herself continuing to follow him.\u201d Looking for that quote yesterday I worried for a moment that I had conjured it myself. But there it was, simple and evocative. I have read much shorter books about which I remember nothing. When I first read this one I was young enough that I was living at my parent\u2019s old house, and no one I loved had yet died. My grandmother was still alive, and when she called several minutes after I had finished the last of the novel\u2019s 1349 pages, I was still crying over the suitableness of the boy. \u2014Julia Berick<\/strong> (1,349 pages)<\/em><\/p>\n

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  This summer, we\u2019re going long and hard. In anticipation of the solstice, the staff of The Paris Review has pulled together a list of anti-beach reads: doorstopper books, dense books, books that will tear a hole in your flimsy beach tote, flip over your canoe, and ground your propeller plane. You can\u2019t hold them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[438],"tags":[34393,34390,4639,34384,34391,3710,9173,9174,6432,881,34387,34359,4861,34392,5636,2364,34389,34385,4247,34386,34388,7107,17492,34394,7880],"class_list":["post-126534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-reading","tag-a-suitable-boy","tag-ann-rule","tag-anna-karenina","tag-anthony-wallace","tag-astolphe-de-custine","tag-c-s-lewis","tag-dune","tag-frank-herbert","tag-george-eliot","tag-james-baldwin","tag-just-above-my-head","tag-kolyma-stories","tag-leo-tolstoy","tag-letters-from-russia","tag-middlemarch","tag-shirley-hazzard","tag-ted-bundy","tag-the-old-priest","tag-the-prelude","tag-the-problem-of-pain","tag-the-stranger-beside-me","tag-the-transit-of-venus","tag-varlam-shalamov","tag-vikram-seth","tag-william-wordsworth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Paris Review Recommends Anti-Beach Reads by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In anticipation of summer, the staff of 'The Paris Review' has pulled together a list of anti-beach-reads: doorstopper books, dense books, books that will tear a whole in your flimsy beach tote, flip over your canoe, and ground your propeller plane.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/15\/staff-picks-anti-beach-reads\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Paris Review Recommends Anti-Beach Reads by The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 15, 2018 \u2013   This summer, we\u2019re going long and hard. 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