The summer I turned into a bookworm

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Speaker 5 I've recently gotten super into reading this summer.

Speaker 12 To me, summer reads are meant to be fun and fast.

Speaker 5 I'm pretty big into sci-fi and general mysteries like that.

Speaker 13 I'm Jonklyn Hill. This is Explain It to Me and I think one of the best parts of summer is Love Island.

Speaker 4 I love to call myself a sensitive gangster, so me I'm crying again.

Speaker 13 But that's over now. So it's time for the second best part.
Grabbing a book and sitting outside by someone's pool.

Speaker 13 Usually I go for the it book of the summer, think you're Britt Bennett or Emma Klein, or a medium to spicy romance novel, something along the lines of Jasmine Gillery or Talya Hippert. It's fun.

Speaker 13 It's an escape from the doom scroll, and it just feels right.

Speaker 13 But how did summer reading become such a thing? Before we dive into that, we wanted to hear from some readers about why and what they read in the summer.

Speaker 13 So we sent our producer Avashai Artsy on a quest to find readers. Okay, Avashai, set the scene for us.
What did you find?

Speaker 14 Hey, JQ. Yeah, so I went to a meeting of a group called the Silver Lake Reading Club.

Speaker 15 Welcome, everyone.

Speaker 15 This is our 85th reading club. It's not in the scene.

Speaker 15 85.

Speaker 14 So this group meets every Tuesday evening at a cafe or restaurant here in Los Angeles and they read together.

Speaker 13 So like silently, but next to each other, they're just reading together?

Speaker 14 Right, yeah. Yeah, there's some breaks for socializing, but otherwise, they read for two 45-minute stretches.
And then at the end, they might have an author come and do a reading and sign books.

Speaker 14 But yeah, you could just imagine like a couple dozen people sitting at tables or in armchairs, sometimes in a group or just by themselves, and they're just engrossed in their books.

Speaker 14 There's soft music playing, it's very serene, very calm. And the reading club was founded by Helen Bowie, and she says she's really blown away by how successful it's been.

Speaker 15 In total, we've had 2,000 people come to Reading Club since we started, and they've read a total of 5,000 books at our evenings together, which is pretty amazing if you think people in LA don't read.

Speaker 14 The events sell out every week, and now Helen is forming a nonprofit and is going to even start a kids' reading club as well.

Speaker 13 All of this sounds really awesome, but why go to a silent book club instead of, you know, just taking your book and reading it on your own?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I wondered that too, especially because it does cost $20 to attend and that money does go towards the space. They usually rent out the cafe or the restaurant just for these events.

Speaker 14 But still, that's, you know, real money to show up somewhere and just read your book. So I asked some of the attendees, why do you come here? And we stepped outside of the reading club.

Speaker 14 So you'll hear traffic noise just because I didn't want to disrupt people while they were reading quietly.

Speaker 13 That's very polite of you.

Speaker 16 I grew up loving reading. I was an avid reader and fell out of the habit.
And so, just having a dedicated time to read and focus on just that has been really nice.

Speaker 17 I would just self-describe myself as an introverted person. And so, for me, I love this socialization.

Speaker 18 This sounds so crazy, but I sometimes almost feel like I'm doing myself a disservice by reading. Like, I should be out doing something else with other people or being more social or whatever.

Speaker 18 And this bridges that gap and that

Speaker 18 ridiculous anxiety in a nice way.

Speaker 13 You know, I really love this idea of reading as a social activity.

Speaker 13 You know, we're both in book clubs and I really just love reading a book and being able to dissect it afterwards with my friends.

Speaker 13 What did these readers have to say about what makes for a good summer read?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I asked them about that.

Speaker 14 And I should note that I'm in Los Angeles, which doesn't have as defined seasons as other parts of the United States, but we do still have summer and we do like to read in the summer.

Speaker 14 So some of the attendees shared their thoughts about what they look for in a good summer book.

Speaker 12 I approach summer reading like Love Island. I need to read the hottest books of the summer.
So, I just finished Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reed, and it was so incredible and amazing binge read.

Speaker 17 In the fall, I gravitate toward things like fantasy and mystery, and like that cozy kind of stuff.

Speaker 17 Whereas in the summer, I would say I'm a mix of a literary fiction reader and some romance thrown in there.

Speaker 16 I definitely definitely think about maybe like locational reading, like beach reading or vacation reading, which then I'll go for something easier or funny or like rom-com-y as opposed to like something a little bit more intense.

Speaker 16 And I guess that's the summer vibe is like easy, breezy, lesbian vampires. That's the vibe.

Speaker 13 Ooh, breezy lesbian vampires.

Speaker 14 That's amazing. And as to why we might like to read in the summer, here's what folks had to say.

Speaker 12 I think because it's ingrained in our childhood. You know, we always had summer reading lists, whether you were in sixth grade or a freshman in college.

Speaker 12 And I think it's always that time where you feel like you can kind of rest a little bit more if you're lucky and just pick up a few more books.

Speaker 12 So I think it's just something that's been ingrained in us since we were kids, very much like a summer vacation.

Speaker 20 You see what happening with Love Island where everybody's watching it every night, I feel like that's the same bond you get with reading.

Speaker 21 And especially if you're reading off the summer lists, you know you have other people that you know that you can talk to immediately about something crazy that happened in the book.

Speaker 18 I feel like reading more in the summer I think my body's like a little more conditioned to it

Speaker 18 and

Speaker 18 I'm more prone to like stay out later in the daylight with a book.

Speaker 15 And I think the last piece of summer reading is I think people are finding time to escape and literature is that outlet. And I think if you combine that actually right now with what's going on in

Speaker 15 just our atmosphere, then you'll find that people are looking to escape even more. And literature has always been there for us and it is more important than ever now.

Speaker 13 Okay, Avashai, thank you so much for taking us to the Silver Lake Reading Club. I loved hearing their theories on why we do summer reading.

Speaker 13 There is a little more to it though, and we've talked to the woman who wrote the book on how summer reading became a thing. That's after the break.

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Speaker 19 Books.

Speaker 13 We're talking summer reads, so it's only right to talk to the woman who wrote the book about them.

Speaker 22 I'm Donna Harrington-Luker, and I'm the author of a book on summer reading called Books for Idle Hours.

Speaker 13 How did this idea of summer reading even start? Were we always like, oh my gosh, it's hot out. Guess I gotta like grab a book.

Speaker 22 No, not really.

Speaker 22 My research focused on the 19th century, and I started kind of way back looking at newspaper articles, advertisements from book publishers and the like.

Speaker 22 And I kind of divided into two periods: before the Civil War and after the Civil War.

Speaker 22 Before the Civil War, it's definitely constructed as a masculine practice. The idea was that men would get away from the heat and the pressures of their lives and they should read something cool.

Speaker 22 So the essays of Charles Lamb, of all things, for summer reading.

Speaker 23 Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M was obliging obliging enough to read and explain to me for the first 70,000 ages, ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day.

Speaker 23 From Charles Lamb's A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig.

Speaker 22 Poetry was mentioned often as well. It all changes after the Civil War.

Speaker 22 After the Civil War, there's an increase in travel and tourism. The performance of summer leisure becomes an aspiration for a growing middle class.

Speaker 22 So you have many, many more people engaging in this tradition or in this practice. And you have an increase in railroads as well, and hotels begin to spring up.

Speaker 22 And as a result of that, publishers start really promoting. summer reading and it takes a very very specific form and increasingly it becomes something that women do.

Speaker 22 It becomes a rather gendered space.

Speaker 22 So it kind of has its beginnings in the 19th century and in a middle-class desire for learning how to perform summer leisure the way an elite class, a moneyed class, already did.

Speaker 13 Yeah, can you talk about that performance a little bit? I think that's really interesting.

Speaker 22 Yeah,

Speaker 22 publishers would advertise a variety of things as summer reading, but one of the kind of central things was what I was calling the summer novel.

Speaker 22 It would be a novel that would be set in Saratoga Springs or Newport or Cape May. It would be set at a summer resort.

Speaker 22 Regardless of how wealthy or not people were, they always seemed to stay there for an entire summer as opposed to a week or a weekend. And it would involve kind of a courtship novel.

Speaker 22 And over the course of the novel, over the narrative arc, two young people would meet, they would resolve their differences, they would visit various places, and at the end they would be married.

Speaker 22 I think one of the most popular novels of the period definitely kind of showcased this.

Speaker 22 It was called One Summer by an author by the name of Blanche Willis Howard, who was very prominent in the day in the 19th century.

Speaker 22 And it involves at the very, very start the young woman, the heroine of this novel.

Speaker 22 She doesn't have a summer novel to read, and so she goes out on a rainy night and she goes to the drugstore to buy a novel for entertainment.

Speaker 22 She accidentally bumps into a young man and nearly blinds him with her umbrella.

Speaker 5 Oh.

Speaker 24 She moved towards him with an expression of sincerest regret upon her lips.

Speaker 24 Her remark was, however, unspoken, for the stranger at the same moment advanced and in a gentlemanly voice said, my good woman.

Speaker 24 Good woman indeed, she thought indignantly, and with a sudden revulsion of feeling, her sympathies giving way to wounded pride of station. Does he take me for a milkmaid?

Speaker 22 And so from that start, needless to say, they have to get over a certain animosity. It's kind of Beatrice and Benedict from Shakespeare time.

Speaker 22 He is trying to woo her. She is resisting.
And over the course of the novel, they finally indeed do admit their love for each other.

Speaker 22 The other part of the arc was that it took you through the various things you could do at the different resorts.

Speaker 22 There'd be a plot development at the Toboggan Ride at Saratoga, or there would be the ending when the couple comes together would be celebrated by fireworks set off at Bar Harbor, Maine.

Speaker 22 So by reading these, you'd get an idea of what these resorts were about, and you'd get an idea of how you performed leisurely. There's also a good bit of fashion.

Speaker 22 So for the young woman, you'd get an idea of how you're supposed to dress. So they're really serving two functions here.

Speaker 13 That's so interesting. So it sounds like it's serving the purpose, kind of a mixture of like Hallmark movie with your romance, but like the drama and intrigue of like white lotus.

Speaker 25 That's what it seems like.

Speaker 22 Definitely the Hallmark characteristic of it. Absolutely, definitely on that.

Speaker 22 I think over the course of the reading, I only uncovered two novels that summer novels that were kind of aimed at men and then they moved very, very differently than for the young women.

Speaker 22 And one of them takes place in California at a resort there in kind of the wintertime rather than the summertime.

Speaker 22 And every chapter is based on a different animal or bird that needs to be shot at and eaten.

Speaker 5 Oh,

Speaker 22 so a very, very different perspective and different gendered perspective here.

Speaker 13 Very.

Speaker 13 Were these books purely escapists, or did they get at larger themes too?

Speaker 22 Yes, they are escapist

Speaker 22 in the sense of allowing you to experience another lifestyle. But they were very, very much kind of a liminal space, a space of betwixt and between.

Speaker 22 And for young women especially, it's doing the cultural work of what does it look like to have more freedoms as a young woman?

Speaker 22 Because there was markedly more freedom, or at least as these books constructed it, during the summer and at summer resorts.

Speaker 22 So that you have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned. And so opening up vistas of freedom.
Now, admittedly, at the end of all these,

Speaker 22 order is reasserted. People go back to their normal lives.
Marriage, as the ultimate institution of tradition gets reasserted. But for the space of the novel, there are more freedoms.

Speaker 22 And the novels weren't spaces that were necessarily completely out of touch. There's questions about American imperialism.
There's questions about treatment of Native Americans.

Speaker 22 And so when you take the book as a whole, it's nation-building in a way as well.

Speaker 13 What was the reaction to the rise of summer reading at the time?

Speaker 22 The publishing industry had a very serious marketing challenge on its hands.

Speaker 22 Early, say, post-Civil War, especially, you have rising literacy rates, especially among young women.

Speaker 22 But you have a very solid and profound discourse that says novel reading is evil, that it is dangerous, especially for young women.

Speaker 22 The fear was that it would be sexually arousing, that the morals would be questionable. One of the people that I talk about is the Reverend T.
DeWitt Talmadge.

Speaker 22 He was a major voice against summer reading, basically saying that summer reading is literary poison in August.

Speaker 26 Would it not be an awful thing for you to be struck with lightning someday when you had in your hand one of these paper-covered romances the hero a parisian rue

Speaker 26 the heroine an unprincipled flirt chapters in the book that you would not read to your children at the rate of a hundred dollars a line

Speaker 26 i really believe there is more pestiferous trash read amongst the intelligent classes in july and august than in all the other 10 months of the year so that kind of clerical concern about what novel reading does to young women, that had to be overcome.

Speaker 22 And so, they've got to kind of shift the focus that it has to become,

Speaker 22 light reading, has to become a pleasure reading. It has to become an escape from the dangers of or the pressures of modern life

Speaker 22 and even for young women. And they're very successful.

Speaker 13 Do we still have a lot of these summer reading conventions in book publishing now?

Speaker 22 I mean, the idea of summer reading as marketing, it's still with us today. It may have lost its

Speaker 22 idea of schooling a middle class in the performance of summer leisure, but as a marketing strategy, it is still here today.

Speaker 27 This week, each host is giving her summer reading lists in a series we like to call Ladies Get Let.

Speaker 28 Are you on the hunt for a good summer read? Well, look no further.

Speaker 22 Summer reading season is almost upon us which means it's time for a visit book talk is going to be an important influence here as well so it persists as a marketing effort absolutely the lists that i've seen all kind of include novels but then also important fiction we're living in difficult times and i think that the

Speaker 22 recommendations for non-fiction the ones that i've seen have been fairly substantial and i think they kind of reflect that it's just a different marketing world now And in the 19th century, you had probably four or five tastemaking publications, and they were the places that you went to get your recommendations for what to read next and to get your judgments.

Speaker 22 And that kind of centralization doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Speaker 5 All right.

Speaker 13 Thanks so much for explaining this to us.

Speaker 22 Okay. Thank you so much.

Speaker 13 That's Donna Harrington-Luker. She's the author of Books for Idle Hours, 19th Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading.
Coming up, the case for getting serious about summer reading.

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Speaker 13 We're back with Explain It to Me. And when you hear summer book, you might be thinking of something light.

Speaker 16 And I guess that's the summer vibe. It's like easy, breezy, lesbian vampires.
That's the vibe.

Speaker 5 But what about a big old classic?

Speaker 13 That's what one listener who called in is doing.

Speaker 30 My name is Heather. I'm a writer living in New York, and I host a live reading series and podcast, both of which are called Limousine, with my friend and co-host and fellow writer, whose name is Leah.

Speaker 30 And for our podcast, we usually interview writers about their career and stuff like that.

Speaker 30 But this summer, we actually decided to do an Anna-Coren in a book club.

Speaker 13 I called them up to hear why.

Speaker 25 I think it like it weirdly does suit itself to the summer because the summer feels like a time where things are a little bit slower and we have more free time.

Speaker 25 Even if we don't actually have more free time, there's like often like the illusion of free time because people go on vacation, like a vacation that you've been planning all year.

Speaker 25 So you have time off work or like the days are longer or like maybe you actually do do the kind of work that like slows down over the summer, stuff like that.

Speaker 25 And ironically, it feels like spending time with like a massive classic that takes all of your attention is almost more indulgent than, you know, reading something that's short and frothy and quick that you actually probably could read when you're busier.

Speaker 25 It feels almost like more leisurely and more

Speaker 25 indulgent to like take time on this like really huge, impractical thing to be reading, you know?

Speaker 13 Yeah. Okay.
With that in mind, you told us in your voicemail that you decided to do something different with your podcast this summer. What are y'all doing this summer?

Speaker 25 This summer, we're basically breaking down Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. And we're doing, every two weeks, we're reading a different part.
So if you're familiar, it's a massive book.

Speaker 25 It's an eight-part book. And yeah, just every other week, we're dissecting a part.
We're talking about it with everybody in our Discord. We're posting memes about all of the sections.

Speaker 25 And yeah, just like building a little community around reading Anna Karenina.

Speaker 5 What made you all pick Anna Karenina?

Speaker 31 I think we both had this feeling that, one, I mean, it's one of those books that like you have to read before you die.

Speaker 31 Like, we both had felt like, oh, we want to read this and it might be fun to do like a book club version since it's a doorstop.

Speaker 31 It's quite literally massive and it's easier if you break it down and have some like friends and accountability.

Speaker 31 And then as soon as we said it, we just started noticing people in the wild were reading it.

Speaker 31 And I do think like that's not you know necessarily a coincidence like people are looking for something longer something classic right now to challenge themselves to spend time away from their phones and it also is just such a fabulous like juicy book it's it's the perfect read so um there was something in the culture outside of us and we just wanted to be in conversation with it yeah how's the response been to big book summer from y'all's community of listeners it's been amazing it's been so much fun.

Speaker 25 Like, when you read something like Anna Karenina, you realize this was incredibly popular for a reason. Like, this was, it's just a fun, juicy, it's a romance.

Speaker 25 And I think having other people go on that journey with you, having other people read it alongside you, really helps you enjoy it a lot more.

Speaker 31 Someone in our Discord took a picture of a line that's like, Levin put on his big boots and put that in the Discord and tell me like, slay boots.

Speaker 5 And so I think like having a group of of people to like

Speaker 5 exactly like I was about to say, slay the boots a house down. Oh, my God.

Speaker 31 Boots a house down, Tolstoy. Slay mama.

Speaker 31 To have people who are like kind of engaging with it on every level. Yeah.
Not only does it make it more accessible, but I think it just genuinely enriches the conversation of the book.

Speaker 31 Like it allows you to bring like Love Island into the picture.

Speaker 13 Oh, so you're women of culture is what you're telling me.

Speaker 5 Exactly. Exactly.
Well, yes. We're high low.
And we can talk offline.

Speaker 13 You know, when I think of these big books, these classic books, I also think of required summer reading from high school or from college. And it's very easy for that to not scream summer fun.

Speaker 13 I find reading to be such a joy and returning to it has just been absolutely amazing. But also on the flip side, I recognize there are times where it can be so much work.

Speaker 13 How do you get over the feeling that reading classic literature feels like homework?

Speaker 25 I think for sure,

Speaker 25 speaking about it with other people and making connections with contemporary life, I think that's really helped to make it a lot more fun.

Speaker 25 But I also think just because something is a little bit difficult doesn't mean that it's not enjoyable. You know, like that kind of friction can also be enjoyable and really, really rewarding.

Speaker 25 But yeah, I truly open anacaranina doesn't feel like homework.

Speaker 25 It feels like, I don't know, it feels like watching like Desperate Housewives or something. It's It's like very

Speaker 25 yeah, it is. Yeah.

Speaker 31 And yeah, I do think what Heather said is so true. Like there's something satisfying or like rewarding about a task, like completing something that's like that momentous

Speaker 31 and that long. And I also think like they did summer reading pizza parties for a reason.
Like it worked on me at least.

Speaker 13 Oh my gosh. Like show me personal pan pizzas.

Speaker 13 The amount of personal pan pizzas I was throwing back.

Speaker 31 Exactly. Like it, it worked on me, and I think it worked on a lot of people.

Speaker 31 And so even if it does feel like homework, it was the type of homework that, like, yeah, of course I want to win the contest.

Speaker 31 Like, of course, I want my name on the like list of people who finished their summer reading goals. So maybe there's something satisfying in returning to that too.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I honestly, I was going to say, wait, what's wrong with summer reading?

Speaker 5 You have to win the summer reading homework.

Speaker 13 No, I mean, I liked it. That's how, I mean, but I was a very specific

Speaker 13 type of child where i was like you i mean you want me to read holes for assignment sure yeah i was gonna do that yeah i know exactly

Speaker 25 do y'all think reading for pleasure is having a resurgence like are we so back when it comes to reading we are so back we are so back yeah i think so 1000 the vibe shifted totally and shout out to the romantic girlies for getting that going i can't lie man they started that wow yeah they've done a lot of work work.

Speaker 5 They have. Yeah.

Speaker 31 Carrying literacy on their backs, really.

Speaker 5 Carrying Barnes and Noble on their backs, honestly.

Speaker 13 Before I let you go, if someone's like, it's summer, I want to get into reading something, what are some suggestions you have?

Speaker 25 I just finished reading Perfection by Vincenzo Letronico, which is like this book that I'm sure maybe listeners have heard of, but definitely when I finished Anna Karenina, I was like, how about something short?

Speaker 25 And it feels summary somehow, I think in part because it's like, i don't know it's about like young people who are living abroad and um it definitely has like more serious themes but i think that's a that's a good one and that's definitely if you just spent a bunch of time on a classic and you're like i want to see what it's like to finish a book quickly

Speaker 31 you should read that for sure well my number one book that i would recommend is bad witches by hviakumia I think that should be on everybody's summer reading list.

Speaker 31 But on top of that, I think like if you want more of the classics, I have never read Mrs. Dalloway.
I'll be brave and admit that. And I think that's probably next on my list.

Speaker 31 It's like, oh, I want to sit down with Mrs. Dalloway and hear what she's up to.

Speaker 13 Leah, Heather, thank you so much for explaining this to us.

Speaker 31 Thank you for having us.

Speaker 13 Thank you for having us. This was so fun.

Speaker 13 That was Heather Akumia and Leah Abrams. You can find a link to their podcast, Limousine, in our show notes, along with a link to Heather's book, Bad Witches.

Speaker 13 If you're looking for recommendations, my colleague Constance Grady has a great newsletter full of them. You can find a link to that in show notes, too.

Speaker 13 Before you go, we want your help with next week's show. Tipped wages are making a lot of noise right now.
People who get tips make a different minimum wage from those of us who don't.

Speaker 13 What are your questions about tipping and the minimum wage? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545.

Speaker 13 This episode was produced by Ava Shayartzi, who's reading You Didn't Hear This From Me. Amina Alsadi, who just started the Ministry of Time, edited the show.

Speaker 13 Fact-Checking by Melissa Hirsch, who's reading the aptly titled Problematic Summer Romance. And Engineering by Matthew Billy, who's reading Two Wheels Good, The History and Mystery of the Bicycle.

Speaker 13 Special thanks to Alex, Aaron, Allison, Bernie, Helen, and Alexis, and the rest of the Silver Lake Reading Club. I'm your host, Jonathan Hill, and I just finished The God of the Woods.

Speaker 13 Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 5 Bye!

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