Blame it on Frederick Douglass. Douglass is the slavery-born abolitionist orator and statesmen whose life story is so expansive that it took nearly 1,000 pages to capture it. Faced with the reality of carting around this brick of a book, I reluctantly crossed over to the dark side. I am now one of the estimated 90 million Americans who’ll be doing their summer reading on an e-reader. Big books don’t intimidate me, but I just couldn’t bear another summer of dragging around a heavy book-filled beach bag.
Whoever says reading is dead is simply wrong — especially in the summer, when reader enthusiasm is at an all-time high. I am reading-focused during the warm weather months, a time when I can indulge my favorite hobby while porch sitting — swing benches preferred — or beach lolling on the lovely ocean fronts of the Vineyard. And because I eagerly look forward to this special reading time, I spend weeks curating my stack of books. I’m a fast reader, so I pull together a longer list than most knowing that when the sun is toasting my toes, I’m likely to read more. Researching the books has been more fun than ever this year as summer reading is now really "a thing," as the kids say.
Starting as early as late April, the official summer reading lists begin to pop up in newspapers and online. Soon there are lists and lists and lists of suggested books from the usual experts like The New York Times book editors and Greater Boston’s local librarians, three of whom recently shared their picks with me on my Under The Radar radio show. For avid readers like me, there is nothing more satisfying and fun than obsessively perusing all the curated suggestions. For example, I’m always interested (though I don’t necessarily read) the books on lists culled by bold-facers like Microsoft’s Bill Gates. One of his five suggestions is titled “The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties.” I assume the billionaire appreciates the irony of that choice. The editors of the Literary Hub website claim what they describe as "The Ultimate Summer Books Preview of 2019." Their list is made up of 30 other summer reading lists and a tally of the number of times a book showed up on multiple lists — 21 times for Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Nickel Boys,” and 17 for the memoir “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” by Ocean Vuong, Massachusetts professor and poet. I do tend to rank bestseller and popular word of mouth lists last. I prefer the quirky, narrowly defined lists, which lead me to books I might not otherwise discover. And since I love to judge a book by its cover, I’m taken with JP Morgan’s annual summer book list — its 20th — which the investment bank presents in a lush, highly produced video. And as always, I round out my list with books highlighted from my year-round sources, the website Buzzfeed and the newsletter from the African American Literature Book Club.
Summer officially arrives this Friday, but I’ve already read four of the books from my big list, courtesy of a little time off and my e-reader. But I’ll be back to turning actual pages on the next one as I settle into author/historian David Blight’s aforementioned biographic tome, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.” I’ve got a brand new beach bag just for this purpose, and I can’t wait to dive in.
