There's a certain pressure that goes along with summer reading.
It starts when you're a kid in school. You're assigned a list of ten to fifteen potential books and told you have to read at least five of them.
Then when you're adult, you're assigned a list of twenty to thirty books by various magazines and websites, and told that if you don't get through all of them by September you're going to be missing out when you're well-read friends discuss their favorites at the Fall Book Club meeting.
It might be enough to make you avoid a book like Justin Cronin's The Passage. A big, bold, genre-busting book that might end up soaking up most of your summer--in a very good way.
Actually, I find that I can't put the book down, and after I finished it, I googled the author and found that his other books are all acclaimed and all vastly different from The Passage.
I thought to myself--what if I just spent the whole summer taking in a particular author's body of work?
Cronin hasn't written that many books, and it might be fun to trace him back to his literary roots.
Then I felt that old summer reading kid kick in and remind me that spending an entire summer with only one author would mean missing all the new and edgy books spread out in magazines.
Luckily, I haven't listened to that kid in awhile, and now I'm going to have myself a one author summer.
It's not exactly a new idea.
A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey picked three of William Faulkner's best books for her Book Club and spread them out over a summer. After The Jane Austen Book Club came out, reading groups everywhere found a new excuse to delaying their Austen gratification by only reading her once a year, and instead devoured her entire canon like a pint of rocky road ice cream.
And why not?
In a way, it's like giving yourself a seminar on a particular writer. In colleges across the country they have courses that study specific authors and their works.
Why not apply that to more contemporary authors?
When I'm finished with Justin Cronin, I may just take on Colum McCann--the author of my favorite book last summer, Let the Great World Spin.
After all, sometimes authors can be like people. It's fun to party with lots of them, but every once in awhile, you just want a nice one-on-one.
It starts when you're a kid in school. You're assigned a list of ten to fifteen potential books and told you have to read at least five of them.
Then when you're adult, you're assigned a list of twenty to thirty books by various magazines and websites, and told that if you don't get through all of them by September you're going to be missing out when you're well-read friends discuss their favorites at the Fall Book Club meeting.
It might be enough to make you avoid a book like Justin Cronin's The Passage. A big, bold, genre-busting book that might end up soaking up most of your summer--in a very good way.
Actually, I find that I can't put the book down, and after I finished it, I googled the author and found that his other books are all acclaimed and all vastly different from The Passage.
I thought to myself--what if I just spent the whole summer taking in a particular author's body of work?
Cronin hasn't written that many books, and it might be fun to trace him back to his literary roots.
Then I felt that old summer reading kid kick in and remind me that spending an entire summer with only one author would mean missing all the new and edgy books spread out in magazines.
Luckily, I haven't listened to that kid in awhile, and now I'm going to have myself a one author summer.
It's not exactly a new idea.
A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey picked three of William Faulkner's best books for her Book Club and spread them out over a summer. After The Jane Austen Book Club came out, reading groups everywhere found a new excuse to delaying their Austen gratification by only reading her once a year, and instead devoured her entire canon like a pint of rocky road ice cream.
And why not?
In a way, it's like giving yourself a seminar on a particular writer. In colleges across the country they have courses that study specific authors and their works.
Why not apply that to more contemporary authors?
When I'm finished with Justin Cronin, I may just take on Colum McCann--the author of my favorite book last summer, Let the Great World Spin.
After all, sometimes authors can be like people. It's fun to party with lots of them, but every once in awhile, you just want a nice one-on-one.
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