The perfect summer book

Preferably read in bed, for maximum opulence

Jul 30, 2023

*Focused Reader,* Sally Michel Avery, 1987

I’ve always felt that there is something luxurious about reading in bed in summer. Whether you’re sneaking away for half an hour, or spending a gloriously languorous afternoon shifting from elbow to elbow, there is an undeniable opulence to it.

“We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming,” Anna Quindlen writes in How Reading Changed My Life—“our own consciousness in someone else’s mind.”

Sun flares through the oak branches, casting shadows on the sheets. Clouds fill the sky and rain sizzles against the window. In bed, you’re safe from the storms, the wet heat of July and August, immersed in other worlds. Perhaps the bed you’re lying in is not your own: you’re visiting family and have retreated upstairs for a breather, a few stolen pages. Or you’re in a hotel, the sheets crisp and white, your body sprawled, the air conditioning raging. The bed becomes a vehicle, a portal promising voyage with a safe return.

I recall certain summers by what I loved reading most. Ask me what happened in summer 2016 and I’ll have to think on it. Tell me that was the summer I read a specific book and it will all come flooding back. My “summer book” will inevitably chart the happenings of that season, encapsulating both memory and mood. I don’t remember in years, but in books. It’s become a question, a murmuring that arrives early as late June—which book will it be this year?, though it’s not something I can plan. The perfect summer book arrives serendipitously, and I’m not sure which is more accurate: that I find it, or it finds me.

Last July I was spending time at the cottage and read They by Kay Dick. It’s a short book, and I took my time with it. Hours ceased to exist. Ahead of me the ocean was a field of gold static. I read beneath the patio umbrella and the sun was so strong that if an elbow or toe strayed from the shade, they would immediately burn. By my side, a bowl of yogurt and raspberries. A small plate of gruyère and cashews. A languid morning ritual of snacking and reading. Perhaps a reader feels safest reading disturbing books in the summer. Something about the sun, the chatter of birdsong. A sweet illusion.

Later that summer, I was visiting family and a week long visit unexpectedly turned into a two week stay. I had a trio of books in my backpack—one of them was Sula by Toni Morrison. It was the point in August, the apex of summer, when dates stop mattering and everything blurs together. I spent long, glorious afternoons in the spare bedroom with Toni, shaking my head at her perfect sentences, needing to set the book down to digest what I had read, bewitched by the power and beauty of her words. Sometimes you get lucky: there’s not just one book that defines your summer. There’s two.

I recently asked Girls on the Page readers a question—

What is the quintessential summer book?

Here are the books that you said capture the essence of summer. The sun and a sense of disorientation weaves through almost all of the recommendations. Read them in the settings where they take place: by a body of water, in a field, riding shotgun in a speeding car, in a guest bedroom, or best of all, in bed.

Outline by Rachel Cusk

Sula by Toni Morrison

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Girls and The Guest by Emma Cline

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Another Country by James Baldwin

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

Speedboat by Renata Adler

A Shower of Summer Days by May Sarton