From Junot Díaz to Kathryn Stockett to Anne Enright, great writers remember the book that made their summer.
For most of us, “summer reading” is a casual shorthand for light fare, pure entertainment, even frivolity. It could be translated to mean “books that don’t make you think,” or “books that are just for fun.” Of course, there are those for whom summer is a time—an endless, dreamy time with one sunny day stretching into the next with no clear division—when you finally get through that impossibly long novel, Proust or Thackeray, that you’ve been meaning to get to for years. Or that you’ve been trying to get through for years. Surely the funniest line on the subject comes in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, when the narrator identifies his aunt Doris to a third party by explaining that his aunt is the one by the pool reading Tolstoy. “That’s how I know it’s the summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace.” Which raises the question, what do authors read in the summer? We decided to ask a few. Here’s what they said.