Traditionally, summer's a time for breezy reading - beach books frothier than the surf.
Alice Gordon and Vincent Virga seemed to realize that when compiling this collection of essays, poems, paintings and photos about the season. But rather than buck the trend by offering a selection of high-minded meditations, they've opted for the middle ground here.In "Summer," what we get is light but serious-minded - a book that's fun, fanciful, but with a kick.
Since the volume's an anthology, I started by leafing through at random. The first thing to catch my eye was all the white space. Japanese books have less negative space than "Summer," but then if you believe form follows function, a book about summer almost begs to be filled with sunlight.
Shuffling around in the pages, I found some old summer favorites: paintings by Edward Hopper, the photo of Marilyn Monroe on the grate, some recognizable light verse from John Updike and Ogden Nash. There are some baseball pages for "boys of summer" fans. Fans of the "girls of summer" will find a beauty or two seeded into the pages here and there.
And the list of contributors runs from Ray Bradbury and Ray Carver to Wallace Stevens and Louise Erdrich.
Some of the pieces are obliquely about summer - that is, they tend to use the season as a jumping off point to meditate about other things. But others go right to the heart of the matter and dig around for the essence.
Louise Erdrich's "Winter Gardens" begins with "My family has always planted in the wrong season . . ." and ends with this beautiful paragraph:
In short, "Summer" won't weigh you down, yet it will help you see there's more to the season than just "hazy," "crazy" and "lazy."