It's funny how the bookish mind works. When I first learned that we'd be featuring an interview with William Friedkin in this issue, I thought immediately of The Exorcist, The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A. I also recalled The Night They Raided Minsky's, in which he directed my late father-in-law, Joseph Wiseman.
Then, because I'm a book person, I remembered a terrifying summer more than four decades ago when everybody was reading William Peter Blatty's novel. The Exorcist was my first official "beach read," and I was in very good company that summer; thousands of people, including more than a few self-proclaimed "nonreaders" I knew, were under its terrible/wonderful spell.
Soon dozens of "summer reading lists" will appear everywhere we look, online and off, but back then word-of-mouth was the key to momentum. "Everybody's reading it!" I used to hear those words a lot before I entered the book business. Every summer there was THE BOOK wherever you turned (a horror novel plot in itself, perhaps). I'm sure you recall your own first "everybody's reading it" title. Maybe it was Love Story or Jaws or Jonathan Livingston Seagull or The Godfather or Jurassic Park or Beach Music or The Bridges of Madison County or The Da Vinci Code.
After a couple of decades in the book trade, I confess I'm a little jaded. Working for years as a bookseller, and then an editor, has robbed me of my summer reading innocence. I learned to search for books almost nobody was reading yet. A worthy quest, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but something has probably been lost as well as gained in the transition. Remembering a moment in time when everybody was reading The Exorcist, I can't help wondering what everybody will read this summer. --Robert Gray, contributing editor, Shelf Awareness
