Literature to lounge by

>> Subvert your reading list with books
on the brain and global extinction, graphic
novels and Walt Whitman

by JULIET WATERS

The trick to summer reading is to totally wipe the guilty out of guilty pleasure. Go ahead, read that new David Hasselhoff autobiography if you really want to. Who cares about all the negative reviews? Who cares about the recent online video of him on a bender, which undercuts his self-congratulatory tale of addiction recovery? Reading is meant to be subversive. Really good books are a rebellion against a soulless culture. Really bad books are a rebellion against arbiters of taste, intellect and cool, such as myself. Here’s a list of books that I’ve already read, or think might be worth looking at. If you don’t like them, then go figure out your own summer reading!

Last summer, I was sent a review copy of Walt Whitman’s Laws for Creations,
selected works with an introduction by Michael Cunningham. I’ve been reading and re-reading it all year. I know this sounds like one of those books you “should” read, but no one captures the deep transgressive glee of summer quite like Whitman, not even the Beach Boys.

If poetry’s not your thing, but you’re looking for something to dip into throughout the season, there are always short stories. Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons is hard hitting and compulsive. Montrealer Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch is as quirky and grounded as a kick-ass game of curling. If you’re missing Kurt Vonnegut already, this might be the summer to discover anything by George Saunders.

And don’t forget graphic novels. I enjoyed the realistic but colourful presentation of Africa in Aya by Marguerite Abouet. Jeff Parker and William Powhida’s The Back of the Line may inspire you to make your own brilliant slacker-chapbook. Unless you have a really big beach bag, save some room on your bed stand or coffee table for John Porcellino’s King-Cat Classix. This massive collection of genius minimalism could last you a couple of summers.

Fiction lovers have a fair amount to choose from this summer. Taste arbiters seem to be pretty happy with Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which envisions an alternate universe where Israel has moved itself to Alaska. Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End is perfect for anyone who has, or has ever lost, one of those “safe” corporate jobs. Not as funny, but impressive nonetheless, Phil LaMarche’s American Youth is a road trip into American rural culture gone wrong. Speaking of which, if you’ve never read Chuck Palahniuk, Rant is not the place to start. This homage to rabid road trips is probably only going to please his hardcore fans. Start, instead, with an earlier work like Choke, or wait for the movie, out any week now.

Summer non-fiction is, as always, plentiful. Last summer, people looking to improve their knowledge of global warming were happy with the companion book to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Depending on the weather, this might be the summer to take it a step further with Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. The respected science writer imagines what the world would look like weeks, years and centuries after, let’s say, a super virus wiped us out. For the flip side of the coin, there’s The Living End: The New Sciences of Death, Ageing and Immortality by Guy Brown, which should be cheery reading for those who still believe we’re going to be around for long.

For brainiacs, there have been strong reviews for The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science. I find myself increasingly drawn to those quirky books that celebrate neurodiversity. This explains my excitement at the prospect of reading The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal. Jonathan Mooney narrowly missed becoming an actual ABC After School Special when he overcame severe learning disabilities and ended up graduating from Brown University. Mooney sets out across America in a short school bus, not unlike the one he had to ride as a disabled kid, to find like-minded autistic, disabled and ADHD people with attitude.

Like I say, when it comes to summer reading, everyone has his or her own special needs.