The summer has provided me a lot of time to read, and I worry that I’m reading too quickly as a result. Or maybe I should be glad that, between semesters & with increasingly independent self-sufficient teenage kids, I can devote large swaths of time during the week to what I love. I kicked off the month with two short novels & a novella.

In Desperate Characters Paula Fox depicts the kinds of characters that I would probably really enjoy in a Woody Allen movie. Educated, status-savvy without being materialistic, child free, articulate, emotionally vulnerable … as I heard somewhere, these are the kinds of people who grow up using “summer” as a verb. It begins, as any reader would note, with a biting-the-hand-that-feeds episode, Sophie Bentwood & a stray cat outside the apartment she shares with her attorney husband Otto. Social engagements (a dinner party, late night drinks, a leisurely weekend brunch) delay a trip to the doctor, and political / economic realities (crime, work struggles, a city that never sleeps at its shabbiest & dirtiest) make the daily troubles of this upper-class couple feel downright existential.

In The Country Girls, Edna O’Brien brings two teenage girls to age & to the city (Dublin). Caithleen “Cait/Kate” Brady and Bridget “Baba” Brennan are school friends and, due to the size of their village, their paths & families cross often. Cait loses her mother early in the novel and, thanks to a scholarship to a convent school, she doesn’t have to live with her often-boozing widowed father; Baba’s family is much more well off, much more secure, but is not without tensions & dysfunction. Both leave their villages for the same convent school & then leave that school for the city. This is the first novel of a trilogy, and it feels like it. Baba’s sometimes friendly teasing / bullying of Cait shifts in satisfying but not complete ways; Cait’s growth into her own sexual & personal independence (so taboo in 1960 that the novel was banned) is not without its stumbles & disappointments. The closing of this novel reminded me of the resolution of Joyce’s The Dead — but Cait has two more acts in her narrative that Joyce never gave Gabriel Conroy.

Benedict Kiely’s novella / story “Proxopera” tells the story of a proxy bomb attempt, that is, of a group of terrorists forcing innocent citizens to carry out a bombing (in this case, a car bombing) on their behalf. It’s a story that opens with an idyllic look at the land & comfortable home of a retired teacher, returning with his son & family from a day outing. The idyllic home takes a horrifying turn with three masked men taking them hostage, two of whom the older Mr. Binchey recognizes despite their masks. The suspense is interrupted throughout by Binchey’s reflections of the village where he lives, of the troubles currently plaguing the country, of the life he has lived along the route he drives with the bomb in his passengers seat. Even though I am very ignorant of Irish history, Kiely narrows the troubles & the hopes of the time to this one family, this one fateful day in a way that will stay with me for a while.

I wanted to love Jonathan Gould’s Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock. The subtitle notwithstanding, Gould does a better job at providing artistic context to the band’s output & processes. (If you like that kinda thing, check out the 500 Songs podcast.) After the band’s second album–and after several of the bandmates move from the city–the subtitle makes less and less sense. Another off-target choice: Gould describes each album song by song without providing much depth either lyrically (as even anonymous Genius contributors do) or musically (as loads of podcast & YouTube hosts do). Another tiny but telling off-target bit: In one of many not-very-convincing comparisons to the Beatles, Gould pushes a long refuted narrative about how tense & unpleasant the Get Back sessions were. Most apparent is the lack of new material to draw upon — this is an unauthorized book that none of the band interviewed for. It shows.

I went on vacation in the middle of the month. Beautiful drive, beautiful time with family, at a beautiful place. I spent hours each day with my feet in the sand, looking out into the water, letting waves hit me. Hours. I didn’t read a thing for five or six days. Probably the longest I’ve gone without opening a book. No regrets : )

Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet opens with a lengthy walk up a steep street toward the richest part of a village of vine-sellers & merchants. The neighborhood has fallen on tough times: various things sprout from cracked centuries-old stones; the narrator turns our attention to vacant worm-eaten benches, to decades-unopened doors; the sun doesn’t reach this part of the village. We pity it before we meet the cooper-turned-vinter-turned-stock-market-speculator Maitre Grandet, a man adept at business & money-making but so consumed with avarice that his family lives a dark, constrained, meager life. Including his beautiful, pure daughter Eugenie. The story is downright archetypal — the tension between beauty & power, between youth & experience, between private passions & public expectations. It’s a really mature novel about practicality, about temptation, and about the freedoms that we can find even in the direst of situations. It’s part of Balzac’s Scenes from Provincial Life, which is one part of his larger lifelong project La Comédie humaine, a kind of sociological project to document & meditate on France in a thorough & realistic way, focusing on the shifting norms & challenges of nobility, femininity, rights, & capitalism. There are forty-eight volumes in the project — I’d be eager to hunt down a couple more.

I read a lot less professional development books than I should. Luckily, I have friends that write great books. Brett Vogelsinger, author of a great book about how to incorporate poetry into your teaching, just published Artful AI in Writing Instruction: A Human-Centered Approach to Using Artificial Intelligence in Grades 6–12. My favorite part of the book is the stance Brett takes — as a learner & collaborator rather than as a researcher or expert. Brett leans on student voice early & often, drawing upon candid admissions & practical applications that his students reveal. I also appreciate how Brett opens the book by telling you that you can skip to Chapter 7 if you’re the kind of person that wants the main takeaways of the book, including being open to change, being careful about what media you consume, etc. Highly recommend for classroom teachers.

Joanna Miller’s The Eights takes its inspiration from the first class of women that matriculated at Oxford in 1921. Before then, women could attend lectures, but they could not earn degrees. Miller follows four women who come to be known as The Eights because they live on hall 8 of the same college. Having watched a fair bit of Sex & The City & Girls, I really enjoyed how Miller’s collection of protagonists allows the reader to entrance to several historical, sociological, & psychological realities of the time & the place — both broad open issues like shell shock and suffrage, as well as more intimate indignities / struggles like gendered or class expectations. It doesn’t go into enough detail for this teacher-reader about the academic life of The Eights, which is a shame, given that the characters study subjects as varied as politics & logic, mathematics & literature. A pleasing but not really probing read.

My last two books of July were read in a kind of flurry — one in a single day, the other in two or three. The first one is Salt the Water, a YA novel in verse (an increasingly popular form) by Candice Iloh. I loved how it reminded me that, for teenagers, friends and family can at times feel like they are enough to fill a life. But then there’s school, which somehow feels separate from your friends, all of whom you know from school. Iloh focuses on high school senior Cerulean Gene (they/them), living through a dispiriting cycle of test prep with an uninspired teacher. Cerulean sees this last academic “means to an end” as downright poisonous. Even with ample support and smarts, Cerulean feels like they are treading water when they really want to swim freely. They make one big choice about three-quarters of the way through that is underexplained, at least in their own words. We are left with their friends & brother to make sense of Cerulean and to consider the variety of ways we plant the seeds of meaning in our lives.

The last book that I powered through is a funny & unique pirate story, sorta. Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica is published by NYRB, so you know it’s good. Hughes centers the story on a British family running a plantation in Jamaica, a plantation that is wrecked within the opening hundred pages by a huge tropical storm, rendered in dramatic detail. The children are sent over the ocean to family in England, where they’ve never been — but not before their ship is overtaken by pirates, who bring the children on board and eventually take to them in ways that only pirates can. There are surprisingly touching moments, surprisingly fatal accidents, and a resolution that satisfies, not just because of the turn of events but because of the knowing, wry voice of the narrator.