Essay: SUMMER READING: Risks, Rules & Rewards

"DORIS?" says a character in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. "She's the one who's always reading War and Peace. That's how I know it's summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace." Whether or not Doris ever suffers through all 365 chapters of Tolstoy's masterpiece, she is plainly a member in good standing of the summer self-improvement league, that earnest, ever growing army of readers who would sooner put a cherry in a martini than leave for vacation without at least one Great Book.

As a result, the Unread Classic has become as much a part of vacation nostalgia as the unvisited museum or the unclaimed laundry. The catchall bookshelf in a rented summer cottage, once the hallowed repository of mildewed National Geographies and Mary Roberts Rinehart, now often runs to Pasternak and Proust, to Galbraith and Gideon's Trumpet. Even in the remotest fishing village, the drugstore often offers a conscience-pricking range of paperback titles. Inevitably, as he scoops up Louis Fischer's Life of Lenin, Camus' The Plague, George Orwell's Essays, and four Ian Flemings for insurance, the vacationer is torn between dreams of intellectual grandeur and the gnawing suspicion that he will only finish the Flemings. Once again, the seasonal Shakespeare skimmer might observe, vaulting ambition hath o'erleaped itself.

If summer has become the time for tomes, the first rule of the season, as vacationing Playwright Jerome Kilty pointed out in Rome last week, is that "you don't have to read the books you take with you." One of his own favorite unopened authors is Toynbee. Rule No. 2 is that you don't have to finish anything. Indeed, half the charm of vacation bookmanship is in returning to the same unconquered magnum opus as if to Everest. A Madison Avenue executive back from Martha's Vineyard this month confessed that he had attacked Dante's Divine Comedy for the fifth straight year, only to bog down once again in the first canto. "But," he added bravely, "I'm getting sort of fond of Inferno." His secret hope, and that of many another frustrated bibliophile, is that next year it will rain during his entire vacation.

Time was, of course, when summer fare was strictly "hammock reading": Agatha Christie, Erie Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Thurber, Smith (H. Allen, Logan Pearsall or Thome), Bob Benchley, Eric Ambler, Erskine Caldwell —authors who could be read by firefly or by fishing stream, and required no expenditure of thought. Few weighty books were published in summer, and few were bought.

The Annual Oasis