The Art of Summer Reading

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Did you have a summer reading contest when you were in grade school? We sure did, and competitive me (surprise!) went nuts over it. I was so enthusiastic. To get rewarded for reading? What a great idea. (I would have read anyway.)

But I remember—seriously, I was ten—being outraged that they wouldn’t count those little blue biographies (Dorothea Dix, Girl of the Tenements. Or something like that. Booker T. Washington, Boy Genius) OR the Nancy Drews in the count of how many books each of us had read.

(UN-FAIR, I whined to my mom. She was not sympathetic.)

Steam is still coming out of my ears, remembering that. I have some of those now, and hey. They should have counted. But that’s when I read Black Beauty, so, okay. All good.

Today the amazing Sarah Stewart Taylor has a different—and better—kind of summer reading memory.


Summer Reading Magic

By Sarah Stewart Taylor



It’s that time of year when the brains and hearts of bookish people everywhere turn to summer reading. Summer Reading. Just the words bring to mind (my mind anyway) lazy days of flipping pages in the hammock or sitting by a lake with nowhere to go and nothing to do but lose myself in the fictional world of the novel in my lap. Never mind that I rarely find as much downtime as I’d like in the summer months or that the moment I settle down with a book in the hammock always seems to be the moment that one of my kids needs to be driven somewhere or when I notice that the vegetable garden is overrun with weeds.



But I do have a few perfect, golden memories that will always be connected to the literature I read and loved when, for a moment, everything was working — the book, the weather, the comfort of my chosen spot, and the quiet — and I experienced the sublime perfection of ideal summer reading.



One of my earliest summer reading memories is of participating in the summer reading program at my local library. I can still smell and feel the stiff paper of the cards where we recorded all the books we’d read in the past week, the bright colors of the stickers and the satisfaction of filling up the rows of boxes where you put one of the little decals when you’d finished another book. A voracious reader, I quickly filled up the boxes and always felt like I was getting away with something when I got the prizes they gave out. I have a very specific memory of being about ten and lying on a blanket in the backyard, reading Judy Blume novels, listening to the birds and the breeze, and drinking lemonade. Ahhh. Pure bliss.



My love of mystery novels started in the summer. The year I was thirteen, my family took a trip to England, Scotland, and Wales, driving all over the island and staying in bed and breakfasts. At a farm in the Cotswolds, I took Agatha Christie’s Sparkling Cyanide off the shelf in our room and started reading. I was hooked. When we checked out the next day, my mom told me I could ask the owner of the B & B if I could finish the book and mail it back to her. She said I was welcome to keep it and I finished it in the back of the rental car, driving along the winding back roads of Gloucestershire. When I got home, I made my way through all of the Agatha Christies my town’s public library had in its collection.



During my high school and college years, summer reading had to vie with the demands of summer jobs and, eventually, a social life, and I don’t have a lot of memories of relaxing in the hammock with a good book, though I do remember discovering P.D. James on the bookshelf of a friend’s lake house and mainlining Adam Dalgiesh and Cordelia Gray the rest of that summer.



When my husband and I went to Venice and Croatia on our honeymoon, someone mentioned that I should read Donna Leon’s Venice-set mysteries. I will always remember reading the first few Guido Brunetti books while looking at the canals and palazzos that inspired them and drinking espresso and wine at cafés while we celebrated the new era of our lives we were about to begin.


Some of my favorite books are inextricably linked in my mind with the places where I read them: A.S. Byatt’s Possession will always bring up Monhegan Island, Maine, where I took myself on a solo four-day trip when I landed my first serious journalism job. I discovered Robert Harris’s gripping speculative detective novel Fatherland while staying on an island in a Maine lake. I wasn’t much good for swimming or participating in any other activities until I finished it.



I fell in love with Chimamanda Ngozi Aditchie’s novel Americanah while visiting a friend in San Francisco in the summer. I lost myself in Attica Locke’s wonderful Bluebird, Bluebird while in the Adirondacks a few years ago, feeling the humidity of East Texas instead of the crisp mountain air of upstate New York.



During the summer of 2020, when my family couldn’t go anywhere because of the pandemic, I actually found that I spent more time reading in our hammock at home than I had in years; I think a silver lining of the otherwise awful past year is that I didn’t wait for vacation to go into summer reading mode. On the one trip we did take — a few days on a lake within our own state — I fell in love with Elly Griffiths and read through her Ruth Galloway mysteries, as well as The Postscript Murders, which captivated me as the loons called out on the water.



By now, I think I’ve perfected the art of creating a summer reading stack. I like a combination of non-fiction, lighter and heavier novels, a classic or two I’ve been meaning to read or re-read, and of course a lot of good crime fiction.

As a writer whose books come out in June, I hope that readers will consider my own mysteries for summer reading. As I write them, I try to think about all the elements that summer readers are looking for: Complex characters with whom you’re happy to spend a few days. Atmospheric, interesting settings and some local history so you feel like you’ve traveled. A suspenseful plot that keeps your attention, even when the water is warm and the sun is hot.


What about you? What are your favorite summer reading memories and the books that go with them? And where is your favorite place to lounge with a great story?



HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, what a great question! (And ed. note: I adored Sarah’s A DISTANT GRAVE—do not miss it! And it’s perfect for your summer list.) Last summer is when I fall in love with Elly Griffiths, too. (Can you believe it was LAST SUMMER? How different our lives were?)



So, Reds and readers…any summer books linked with summertime adventures?

Sarah Stewart Taylor is the author of the Maggie D’arcy novels, about an American homicide detective in Ireland, and the Sweeney St. George novels, about an art historian who specializes in funerary art. The first Maggie D’arcy mystery, The Mountains Wild, was on numerous best of 2020 lists and was called “perfect summer reading” by BookPage. It’s out now in paperback. The second Maggie D’arcy novel, A Distant Grave, will be out June 22. Library Journal calls it “as intricately plotted at The Mountains Wild . . . a tense thriller” and Kirkus says that, “Taylor pulls out all the stops―subplots, threats, red herrings, warning bells―to keep the pot boiling till the end." You can find her on the web at www.SarahStewartTaylor.com.