Overview
The days are long and drenched with sunlight, and you've got time on your hands to lie on the sand or in the grass and while it away with a book into the late summer hours. But you want the hours to be worthwhile, and sometimes it's really difficult to make a decision or to know where to start. Moreover, you want something enjoyable and easy to read that isn't going to turn your brain to marshmallow.
So to help you out, Concrete Playground has come up with some suggestions for the best books to read over your summer. We've got new stuff and old stuff. Books you've never heard of and books everybody's heard of. Romances, mysteries, high quality smut, and stories both sweet and weird and wonderful. Compiled lovingly by somebody who's found the first legitimate use for her English major, we hope that these books delight you and make summer all the more wonderful.
1. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Japanese author Haruki Murakami has a cult following and a legion of literary groupies so devoted that when the English translation of 1Q84 was published in October, bookstores stayed open late to cope with a demand not seen since the world was hit by the latest escapades of a certain Harry Potter. And upon publication, the word 'genius' was merrily tossed around by a legion of doe-eyed bookish types, as well as mutterings about Nobel Prizes. Quite deservedly too.
1Q84 is set in Tokyo in a fictionalised 1984 and follows the parallel story-lines of Tengo, a solitary maths teacher and ghost writer, and Aomame, a lady who works a sideline in ridding the world of abusive men. Over the course of a year their lives intertwine around religious cults, eccentric geniuses, reclusive dowagers and unexplained coincidences and mysteries. At roughly nine hundred pages long it isn't the slimmest book to carry around, but 1Q84, and everything by Murakami in general, is unlike anything else out there. It's beautiful and it's complex and you get completely lost inside the labyrinthine worlds he creates.
2. A Visit From The Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan
A Visit From The Goon Squad is a series of thirteen interlocking stories centered around aging music executive and a once-talented musician, Bennie Salazar. The book opens with Salazar's former assistant, Sasha, a kleptomaniac trying desperately not to steal her date's wallet, and shuttles back and forth in time to the 1970s San Francisco punk scene, a tortuous African safari and a New York of the not too distant future.
A Visit From The Goon Squad won the Pulitzer Prize this year, and it's insanely fun to read, moving so quickly you can easily eat up a day reading it. All the stories centre around the music industry and rock and roll, but ultimately it's more about what it means to grow up and how that often translates into a loss of innocence. According to Google, trusted research tool, HBO is turning the book into a television series next year, but I can pretty much guarantee the book will be better, because at the end of the day it's going to be hard to translate a chapter formatted like a Powerpoint presentation, amongst others, into entertaining television.
A Visit from the Goon Squad on Amazon
3. The White Album – Joan Didion
In the sixties Joan Didion was a journalist and writer who described herself as anxious, confused, rotten at interviewing people and only ever got decent stories out of people because she was so tiny and neurotically inarticulate in front of others that she tended to blend into the background. And as somebody who's anxious and neurotically inarticulate myself, Joan Didion has endeared herself to me ever since this book occupied me for the entire abominable flight between Sydney and London without me ever having to resort to watching a Judd Apatow movie.
The White Album is a collection of essays put together at the end of the seventies which, very broadly, cover the disintegration of the sixties and everything the sixties had hoped to achieve. If I was a proper literary critic I would say it wove together fragmented narratives of sixties cultural phenomena, like the Black Panthers and the Manson Family, with the author's own personal experiences and problems, lending the work a compelling quality of tenderness and loss which seems to express something integral to the contemporary human condition. But I'm not going to say that, cause that would ruin it, right? Seriously though, read this book. It is excellent.
4. The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall
The Raw Shark Texts is what I imagine would be produced if Michel Gondry and David Lynch got together one night, got plastered and decided they quite fancied writing a thriller. The Raw Shark Texts is Steven Hall's debut novel, published in 2007. The story opens with the narrator waking up in a room and having absolutely no idea who he is. Gradually he learns that he is the Second Eric Sanderson, the first having been destroyed by virtue of being the prime target of vicious conceptual creatures who linger in thought and text. After the death of his girlfriend several years earlier, Eric, working with the Un-Space committee, tried to preserve his memories of her inside a conceptual creature, which unintentionally lead to the release of a Ludovician, the most dangerous of conceptual fish, which feeds on human memories and the sense of self.
The novel follows the journey of the Second Eric Sanderson as he tries to track down the people who'll explain and help him eventually defeat the Ludovician. It sounds complex, but like anything by the likes of Michel Gondry or David Lynch, it's surprisingly lucid and massively engrossing, and makes for one of the most compelling books you could read about language, memory and the devastating power of love.
5. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Famously typed in three weeks on a continuous 120-foot roll of teletype paper, On The Road is the hallmark work of the beat generation, and the work that inspired generations of young people to take off, get out of the city and find themselves. The novel centers around jazz, drugs and poetry and follows the adventures of narrator Sal and the iconic maverick Dean Moriarty, based in real life on Neal Cassady, as they hitchhike across America.
Bob Dylan once described On The Road as having changed his life, and it taught a whole generation of people the world over that revelation is to be found in the streets, in the destitute, in the bums and the dark places. Incidentally, On The Road is being turned into a movie, probably to be released in the coming year, featuring Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart. Make of that what you will.
Either way, On The Road is iconic, and it's here because if you haven't read it, you probably should, particularly during the summer when it feels as though you could pack up any minute and re-claim your freedom. Plus it's published in the Popular Penguins series, so it'll save you monies and earn you a modicum of hipster cred when you read it on the bus.
6. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao reads like Childish Gambino and David Foster Wallace got together to narrate the life of a second-generation Dominican high school geek who's mastered writing in Elvish, knows more about the Marvel universe than Stan Lee and couldn't pass for normal even if he tried.
Oscar is a fat, Tolkien-loving kid with a bad case of self-hatred, and makes the mistake of using words like 'indefatigable' too many times, scaring off the ladies and inviting blows to the head. The book is narrated in turns by Lola, Oscar's tough-talking punk sister, and Yunior, his one-time room mate. The language is one of the best things about the book, an easy to follow Spanglish giving the words body-language, or 'swag'. Weaving in Dominican history, family tragedy and and curses passed down through the generations, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao essentially proves that if you want to know what it feels like to be an X-Man, you just need to be a smart, bookish, ethnically marginalised kid living in a contemporary U.S. ghetto.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on Amazon
7. Ask The Dust – John Fante
Ask The Dust almost missed becoming a classic, and if it weren't for Charles Bukowski hailing him as a genius the book might not have been in print today. But it is, making Bukowski a blessed legend (more on that below).
Arturo Bandini is twenty. He's moved alone to Los Angeles in the '30s to try and be a writer. But he's failing at the writing, he's hungry as hell and he's a miserable virgin tortured by beautiful women and the Californian sun. Moreover, he's obsessed with a Mexican waitress wearing broken shoes who he can't stop treating like shit. I read Ask The Dust two summers ago, and spent a whole day at Maroubra beach obsessively quoting dog-eared passages of it to my long-suffering and ever indulgent friend. In that instance, I'm pretty sure my fierce enthusiasm scared her off, so I'll try and tone down just how awesome I believe this book to be, but I encourage you to imagine me shaking you furiously by the lapels if you decide not to read it.
8. You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead – Marieke Hardy
Marieke Hardy is wildly entertaining, even though I know she can occasionally rub people the wrong way (although, given that Google suggests 'Marieke Hardy + breasts' as one of the most popular search options you've got to think more than a couple of people are keen).
The former Triple J Breakfast host and writer of ABC TV series Laid is opinionated, acerbic and sometimes a little controversial. You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead is her first book, a collection of personal essays which are hilarious but also heart wrenching in their honesty and attention to detail. She details her penchant for drinking to excess, childhood ambitions of growing up to be a prostitute, how football broke her heart, and having her first kiss with a Young Talent Time 'idol'. Grandiose, passionate and often hilarious, this series of mini-memoirs is engrossing and oddly relatable, particularly when you finish an unflinching story about an ex-boyfriend or Bob Ellis and then get to read their frank opinion about what she had to say.
You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead on Allen & Unwin
9. Women – Charles Bukowski
Bukowski is the poet laureate of seedy bars, gamblers, drunks, womanisers and dirty old men. He was a man who had no time for adjectives, who was bored with most literature because it had no guts or dance or moxy and believed the writer had no responsibility "except to jack off in bed alone and to type a good page." If that quote puts you off, read something else, but remember there's a reason why Bukowski is beloved by so many.
All of Bukowski's novels (barring one) follow the trials and tribulations of his fictional alter-ego Henry Chinaski. Ugly, misanthropic and an appalling drunk, Bukowski wrote like a madman for decades, but didn't start getting much recognition until the 1970s. Women is Bukowski at his drunken, raw essence, written in his fifties, when he was making up for lost time with all the women who wouldn't notice him when he was young and poor and hideous.
10. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
So Jeffrey Eugenides has a new book out at the moment, The Marriage Plot. But I've read it, and, um...Middlesex is better. Moreover, Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.
Middlesex could in many ways be construed as your average inter-generational family drama with a hint of multiculturalism thrown into the mix. But it's much more than that. Middlesex is the history of a single gene through a century of tumultuous history, lyrical and strange and incredibly hard to put down.
The narrator was born twice, first as a girl and then again as a teenager on an operating table, emerging as a young man, an eventuality which can be attributed to the revelation that his grandparents were actually brother and sister who escaped the stigma they would have received in Greece by immigrating to Detroit in the U.S. There's history and political drama, heartbreaking stories of first love and medical incompetence. But it's not a tragedy - it's heartfelt and terribly funny.