Essay: SUMMER READING: Risks, Rules & Rewards

(2 of 6)

In recent years, however, year-round reading habits have changed. "People don't read many light books any more," says a Beverly Hills bookdealer. "These are not light times." Seasonal froth still abounds, but more vacationers nowadays tend to ballast their bags with classics or important current books. Main reason for the shift is that the heightened pressures of business, community and social life leave less and less opportunity for serious reading during the workaday year. Reading has become a game of guilt. Wrote Walter Kerr in The Decline of Pleasure: "We are all of us compelled to read for profit, party for contacts, lunch for contracts, bowl for unity, drive for mileage, gamble for charity, go out for the evening for the greater glory of the municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house." Who has time to read for pleasure?

If the reasonably successful and conscientious American family is left with any time for literature, it tends to read in winter what used to be regarded as summer fare. The holiday reading list increasingly represents an escape not from serious literature but toward it; vacations loom as the annual oasis where people can soak up the topical or timeless, talked-about or dreamed-about books.

The task has been made easier by air conditioning (hammocks were hardly an aid to concentration), by the proliferation of paperbacks, and by the hard-cover publishers, many of whom nowadays bring out serious books in the months when the public has time to tackle them.

Naturally, there are still many constant readers who follow the same schedule all year round, and they seem somehow surprised to discover that everybody's habits are not the same. Says Novelist Peter De Vries, who is on many a vacation book list himself: "I'm always amazed at lists of summer reading. Mine is the same as fall, winter, spring—it doesn't shift gears, throttle down, rev up, or anything." Although he has taken only a week off so far this summer, De Vries has already zoomed through Bruce J. Friedman's Stern and Italo Svevo's The Confessions of Zeno, is currently reading or rereading Coriolanus, Anthony Powell, Stendhal, Hart Crane and T. S. Eliot. His schedule is modest compared with the ten-foot shelf that French Critic Claude Roy claims to have taken on his vacation: all of Henry James, Proust, Chekhov and Henri Michaux; three volumes of Sartre's Situations; Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky, in three volumes; four F. Scott Fitzgerald novels and two by Hemingway; six art books; Nan Hoa Tchen King by Tchouang Tzeu; Leopardi's Zibaldone; and Alice in Wonderland.

Such grandiose lists prompted the Saturday Review several years ago to discontinue polling writers on their reading. Many authors reacted as if they were being given an intelligence test. As Saturday Review Editor Norman Cousins remarked: "A man knows even less about his reading habits than he does about his sex habits."

The Ever Rising Wall