Essay: SUMMER READING: Risks, Rules & Rewards

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Politicians, by contrast, generally read to protect themselves from the slings and arrows back home. New York's Mayor Wagner went off for a honeymoon in Florida with James Koran's The Seat of Power, a close-to-the-bone novel about organized crime and police corruption in New York City. Just about everyone in Washington has taken along Teddy White's The Making of the President, 1964. President de Gaulle's recent reading has included Josephine, a new biography of Napoleon's light o' love, and L'Histoire de Jésus-Christ by R. L. Bruckberger, a Dominican priest who writes like an angel. De Gaulle was so moved by the latter that he assured the author, "When I read your book, I really felt as if I had lived then"—as many of De Gaulle's subjects have long suspected.

Setting the Feast

The secret of vacation reading, as of most other activities, lies in striking a felicitous balance between mental pleasure and intellectual profit. A formula that works for many readers is to blend: 1) a favorite book of verse, such as the love poems of John Donne, that can be dipped into at easy intervals; 2) a novelist read long ago, say an early Evelyn Waugh or a Graham Greene "entertainment"; 3) a meaty current novel—perhaps John Cheever's The Wapshot Scandal; 4) a sprinkling of suspense and frivolity; 5) a serious but unformidable history or biography, such as Lady Longford's Queen Victoria or Is Paris Burning?; 6) one tome they have no intention of opening, such as A History of the Jewish People; and 7) a book related to summer pastimes, such as Bill Robinson's Book of Expert Sailing or, for the compleater-than-thou angler, Walbaum's classic Life History of the Striped Bass (Roccus saxatilis).

With effort, anyone at any age can recapture that first tingling realization that reading is not an exercise by rote, like learning the multiplication table or the battle lines at Gettysburg, but an act of liberation, a lifelong passport to Huck Finn's Mississippi and Jack London's Yukon, to the worlds of Long John Silver and Merlin and Leatherstocking. This—not the ability to dissect Nelson Algren or Aeschylus at a dinner table—is the peculiar, and private, pleasure of reading. In an age of hurry and specialization, books more than ever are a necessary nourishment for mind and spirit. Summer is the time to set the feast.