3 Fresh-as-a-Breeze Summer Reads
For long, hot days
It’s that exact moment of mid-summer where I start to need a certain kind of refreshing book—something lighter than air, without any added drama or stress. Here are three I’ve picked up in the last few weeks that might serve you well in the blistering days of late July and August.
1. The Summer House by Masashi Matsuie
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A young architect has just joined the firm of the venerable Sensei Murai, where every summer most of the office decamps to the titular house in the mountains; clean breezes sweep through the rooms and simple tasks like fixing dinner turn colleagues into comrades. There, as the junior employee among a sea of talent, he learns lessons as varied as how to sketch a chair and how to negotiate a love affair. But the plot, which revolves around a bid for a large public library commission, is largely beside the point. It’s Matsuie’s crisp prose—as direct but welcoming as the best modern buildings—that turns a relatively straightforward coming-of-age into a light-filled ode to the built and natural worlds. Read this for the dappled light and sharpened pencils and general air of glorious possibility.
2. Zorrie by Laird Hunt
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I admit Americana can turn me off sometimes—all that pomp about the fertility of the land. But Zorrie, a compact bildungsroman set in midcentury Indiana, has a love affair with the grains and greens that shoot out of the earth—and the industrious people who farm them—and Hunt’s love of fecundity is contagious. Zorrie Underwood grows up orphaned and unloved by a stern and forbidding aunt. But the rest of her days—painting clock faces at a radium plant in her youth, digging crops with her husband Harold in her twenties, reading Montaigne with neighbors in middle age—practically overflow with the gentle goodness of the people around her, the family and townsfolk who populate her small but rich world. Zorrie is slender, just under 200 pages, but as robust and complex as its titular character.
3. Confessions of an Art Addict by Peggy Guggenheim
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Besides the family name and fortune, Peggy Guggenheim had a Jackson Pollock mural in her apartment entryway, a bed and set of earrings made for her by Alexander Calder, a Kandinsky painting that was nearly splattered with blood during a fistfight, and the widest palace on the Grand Canal in Venice. And that’s just a random sampling from a few pages of this gossip’s delight of a memoir, written by Guggenheim at 62 after she’d dined, bedded, collected, conversed with, and wowed nearly the entire modern art scene across America and Europe. As a patron and collector, Guggenheim practically fashioned the art scene single-handedly, and as a creative spirit she infused those under her patronage with a sense of daring and whimsy. Plus, her writing—about her taste, her work, and her personal life—is a gas. Example: “But then I have always found husbands much more satisfactory after marriage than during.” If you can’t get yourself to Italy this summer to see her palazzo-turned-museum in all its glory, this is the next best thing.