Yesterday I met a man in a café who was reading Moby Dick. He makes a point every summer of reading one of the classics. Good for him. Me? I was holding a copy of the latest Daniel Silva. Don't get me wrong, I like the classics--I have a little ongoing Proust affair--but when summer comes, I want fun and frivolity. I want to be 11 years old in Mrs. Highfield's yard again, with a glass of sweet tea, a bottle of coconut oil, and a book that takes me far away from my real life.
Daniel Silva is perfect. First, his books come out every July just at the right time to sneak in a few days of vacation. Second, they are clever, fast-paced thrillers with a protagonist, Gabriel Alon, who is both an art restorer and an Israeli spy. Plus, they all happen in cool cafes in Paris or art galleries in London. For booksellers, there are gobs of backstock, and once someone gets hooked, they will want to read them all. Moscow Rules is a good one for anyone interested in Russia this year. The Rembrandt Affair is pitched perfectly for folks who like a good art heist. Any of the now 24 books in the series will make somebody's summer a whole lot more fun.
There are also books that are especially good if you are in the place they happen. Remember Phillip Craig? He wrote a pile of mysteries set on Martha's Vineyard. One might not expect Martha's Vineyard to be rife with unsolved murders, but in Craig's hands the reader never doubts it. The island is one of the main characters. We learn about gathering oysters and clamming. The fishing derby and the locals versus the mainlanders are both old stories well told. Readers can feel the salt in their hair and taste the lobster from Larson's. The setting is beautifully rendered.
Linda Greenlaw writes about a tiny island off the coast of Maine in riveting detail. Her book The Lobster Chronicles introduces readers to the 70 locals who live on this tiny island. There is quiet drama in this small-town life. They fight and love and make up, and one will cheer for even the most curmudgeonly among them. Greenlaw has a talent for fascinating seafaring description. The storms will make a reader's heart race and the recalcitrant lobsters will cause laughter and worry in equal measure. She wrote this and another nonfiction title about sword-fishing called The Hungry Ocean before launching a career as a novelist with three mysteries also set in Maine. Greenlaw is a perfect summer friend.
The American South is a good place to visit in the summer. That hot sun seems to conjure up complicated love affairs and languid conversation, and nobody does it better than Ellen Gilchrist. Gilchrist has won just about every writing award up to and including the National Book Award, so there is literary heft but also all kinds of fun. She likes her women skinny and smart and her men bullish and sexy. Gilchrist has revisited the Hand family dozens of times and Rhoda is her icon. She is a hard charger who pisses everyone off and makes them love her fiercely, often in the same sentence. We meet her when she is about 10 years old in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. Her male cousins won't let her play the really fun games, so she dreams up painful deaths for them. She shows up in Net of Jewels as a 19-year-old who drinks too much and reads Freud and Dickinson. In Net of Jewels, she struggles to understand why she keeps falling in love with her father. "About my father and the con job he did to get me to quit Vanderbilt," Rhoda recalls. "Well, we owed him a lot that year, although we didn't know it. He had given up his true love for us. So we owed him our lives, didn't we?... A short, large-hipped, slightly tacky lady who had done his books the year he made a million dollars.... Doesn't it always come down to a woman?"
In I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy, Gilchrist offers, "Actually, it's revolutionary. If you can work and be in love at the same time." And "Maybe you ought to get a job for the Ladies Home Journal. They like simplistic shit like that." She's wickedly funny. How I love these books. Make sure to put them in the hands of some lucky young women this summer. Rhoda: A Life in Stories is a terrific collection. --Ellen Stimson