Books For Lazy Summer Days
Ideas for reading through a heatwave
Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, a weekly publication exploring the lives and literature of women.
If you enjoy reading essays on literature, as well as reviews of great books and recommended reading, please consider a free or paid subscription.
Last summer at around this time, I shared my recommendations for books that make great travel companions for various types of getaway.
It was a lot of fun to write! So this week, as it has been far too hot here in the UK to attempt an in depth, lengthy literature study, I thought I would share my top reads to slip into a bag for some nice days out over the summer 😀
A day trip to the beach…
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
As well as taking place largely by the beach, in the sweltering heat of summer on Grand Isle, Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico, this feminist classic also has the added advantage of being very short- novella length, in fact. It slips easily into the pocket of a small bag, and my old and weathered copy even has a pleasing bendability about it (something I love in a book!).
The novel tells the story of Edna Pontellier, an American woman at the fin de siècle, holidaying with her husband and two young sons amongst the wealthy Creole families. I wrote about the character of Edna last week in my essay about The Freedom of the Female Artist, but what I didn’t really delve into are the close connections to nature in the book. It also contains some pretty evocative beach scenes.
One of these comes when Edna wanders with a group of her friends and family under “the mystic moon”, following a late-night party.
Edna continually finds the beach an ideal place for solitude; something that can take her away from her unhappiness and give her back some control- over both her own body and her mind:
‘The night sat lightly upon the sea and the land. There was no weight of darkness; there were no shadows. The white light of the moon had fallen upon the world like the mystery and the softness of sleep … [The sea] swelled lazily in broad billows that melted into one another and did not break except upon the beach in little foamy crests that coiled back like slow, white serpents.’
Edna finds her true self in the water when, in a moment of impulsive abandon, she separates from her friends to wade alone into the waves:
‘She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.’
The sea is also where Edna's story ends, although as I’ve written before, this element of the book is not without ambiguity, and the sea plays a pivotal role in the book as a beautiful metaphor for the freedom and control Edna longs for.
A perfectly sized book for laying on the sun lounger, sipping a Sazerac Cocktail.
For reading by the pool…
The Guest by Emma Cline
I love Emma Cline’s writing; no writer gets me turning the pages of my book faster than she does.
I wrote a full essay on this one back in 2023, comparing its themes, protagonist and ending to that of The Awakening. It tells the story of Alex, a sex worker who has accompanied an older businessman, Simon, to his summer house in Long Island, NY. Told over the span of a week, we see Alex as she steps out of line whilst in Simon’s home, causing him to send her back to the city.
Alex, however, decides she will spin out the rest of the week bumming around, sleeping where she can, and returning to Simon’s house for his end of summer Labor Day party.
What follows is a page-turning yet stomach clenching few days of watching Alex make bad decisions in order to find a place to sleep each night.
Much of the action of the novel involves pools and water; Alex seems fascinated by them, and spends as much time as possible in or around them. It is a recurring theme to the book, including the somewhat ambiguous and controversial ending. Though a contemporary novel, there are many suggestions around water as an escape and the idea of living on the fringes of societal expectations, similar to those found in The Awakening.
In Cline’s novel, Alex takes any chance she can get to dive into the nearest swimming pool, of which there are plenty within the gardens of the rich people’s summer houses. She also spends a lot of time on the beach, diving into the waves, and challenging herself to see how far she can swim out before she tires too much to get back to shore. This provided a great deal of foreshadowing; like Alex recognised that at some point, she might not be able to make it back to shore - or in life - and that she may sink.
Just remember to have a life preserver beside the pool whilst reading…
A picnic in the park…
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
Don’t be put off by the “Classic” status of this novel. Again, it’s a pretty short read, and it’s one of the least taxing classic books I’ve come across.
Although there is an underlying sinister tone to the storyline of the book, I was surprised to find it so funny; it is laced with dark, ironic humour. It reminded me very much of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in that way, as well as the way both writers’ employ the tool of prolepsis.
The novel is set in the Australian countryside, where a party of schoolgirls are taken from a girls’ boarding school on a beautiful summer’s day for a picnic to Hanging Rock. Whilst on the picnic, however, three girls go missing. The rest of the novel then explores the reaction and aftermath of the disappearances and the search party sent out to find the girls. The harsh but beautiful Australian countryside provides a backdrop to the story, and adds to the air of strangeness, mystery, and remoteness of the book.
The setting of the novel has been cited as symbolic to the story as a whole. Hanging Rock is a volcanic formation in Victoria, Australia, which, for tens of thousands of years, acted as a sacred meeting place for several Aboriginal tribes. An enormous and remote area, it remains a wild and untamed place. The book has often been linked to a comment on British colonialism, with some critics citing Lindsay’s use of setting to introduce a dangerous, imposing element to threaten the supposed community of the school, which perhaps represents the colonists’ attempts to repress the nature of both the landscape and the original inhabitants.
I would suggest taking your picnic somewhere less remote whilst you read the book 😂
A day in the English countryside
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
For sheer indulgence of the eccentricities of the genteel English countryside, Dodie Smith’s classic I Capture the Castle cannot be beaten.
A quintessentially English novel, it tells the story of the Mortmains, an eccentric English family living in genteel poverty in a decaying castle. Cassandra Mortmain is the central narrator, an intelligent teenager, recounting the story through her journal pages. The story becomes a coming-of-age tale, as Cassandra moves from being a girl at the opening, to a young woman at the closing of the novel. A budding author, Cassandra attempts to ‘capture’ the picture of the characters who inhabit the castle and populate her world, in preparation for the writing of her own novels.
‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog’s blanket and the tea-cosy. I can’t say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring…’
The whole of Cassandra’s family provides material for her.
We have her feckless writer father, who had some early success with an experimental, modernist novel, and decided to buy a dilapidated old castle in the middle of the Suffolk countryside with the money he made from it. As he struggles to write his next book, the family are forced to sell furniture to buy food.
There’s also his second wife Topaz, a beautiful artist’s model, who likes to walk around naked much of the time. And Cassandra’s sister Rose, an English beauty, who wants to become the heroine of a Jane Austen novel. Love interests arrive in the form of a pair of wealthy American brothers who have inherited a nearby Hall and become the family’s landlords.
Cassandra’s relentless attempts to make it as a writer and sort out the rest of her family - including locking her father in a tower to force him out of his writer’s block - are funny and heartwarming.
‘Only half a page left now. Shall I fill it with ‘I love you, I love you’ … No. Even a broken heart doesn’t warrant a waste of good paper…’
I Capture the Castle is something of a conundrum: at first glance, a quintessentially romantic comedy, but at its heart, one which captures a young woman’s discovery of her sense of self, and that moment in time when she begins to understand how the world works, and subsequently, her place in it.
On a more general note, as a piece of English fiction between the wars, it is still an entertaining romp, filled with misunderstandings and humour.
Perfect for wandering around a stately home or sipping iced tea in the shade of a willow tree.
That’s it for now on recommendations to take on some lazy summer day trips. Let me know in the comments if you have any other recommendations - I’m always on the lookout!
Some nice reads here. Hanging Rock is still on my list, and the summer could be the ideal time.
I really enjoyed the way you paint the scenes and details - very immersive. I've added a couple to check out at the library. I watched picnic at hanging rock and didn't realize it was based on a book. Thanks for sharing.