5 Tips For Conquering Your Summer Reading List

A few books on Writer's Bone's summer reading list.

By Rob Hilferty

Summer is right around the corner and that means most people have a lot more time on their hands. School is out, the days get longer. Most people use the summer as an excuse to travel, go outside, or work on some long forgotten projects. You know, like that book you've been meaning to get around to since Christmas. Or that stack of books you bought last year that you've totally been meaning to get around to once things finally settled down at the new apartment.

Yeah, assuming that you're not just skimming the bolded text like with all numbered lists, you know you're here because you probably need help with the whole reading list thing. I mean, really, what else are you going to for the summer, go outside? Do you know how fucking hot is it out there?

1. Break Your List Into Chunks to Make it Seem Less Daunting

First things first. You want to sit down and actually compile a list of all the things you want to read. Now this may seem fairly straightforward, but you can't just go balls deep on the first thrust. You've got to find and develop a rhythm that's sustainable for at least three months. Look at the list of books you have already. Even with all that Vitamin D from the summer sun, do you really think you're going to be able to read Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow,  and Finnegan's Wake all in a row without wanting to slit your wrists?

Be realistic and spread your books out. Toss in some light fantasy or pulp novels in between the heavier literature to keep you reading consistently. Depending on how ambitious your stack is, separating it into four to six book chunks with good mix of light and heavy reading will drastically reduce your chances of burning out within the first few weeks. And speaking of burn out...

2. Don't Be Afraid to Put a Book Down

Sometimes you really think you're going to like a book only to discover it sucks. Maybe the author pulled a bait and switch on you when you picked up a book about salt only to discover it's actually about cod, maybe reading Mysterious Skin when you're going through a personal crisis wasn't the best idea, or maybe you just really hate this fucking book you're reading right now for no reason.

Hey, it's cool. Put the book down and try something else. You can always go back and revisit that book but for the time being that book, for whatever reason just wasn't the book for you. Put the book down, walk away, and move on.

Cormac McCarthy. 

This guy.

This fucking guy.

What you don't want to do is grit your teeth and push through a shitty book just because it's on your list. Now that's not to say that you shouldn't push through a challenging book that you like, but sometimes those types of books can kill your reading habit. It took me three tries to get through Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian before I finally cracked it. Was it an excellent read? Absolutely. Was it worth my time and intellectual pursuit? Hell yes. Would I recommend it to everyone? Fuck no. The first two times I tried reading Blood Meridian were so demoralizing I actually stopped reading for a month or two afterwards because I felt so guilty about not finishing a book I was really interested in. Admittedly, the book is designed to be arduous for a reason, but not having anything to follow up with just killed my spirit. Had I just dropped the book and come back later I probably would've been able to read it a lot sooner than I ended up doing. However, the guilt was too strong to let me enjoy anything else. If we all followed Kenny Roger's sage advice about knowing when to fold ‘em, it would truly be a better world.

3. Read a Book You Wouldn't Normally Read

Now you're probably questioning this one because you're skeptical about finishing books you're actually interested in but seriously this one works. If you're really into a story driven fantasy novels, maybe try a historically accurate biography. Reading the same types of books can start to feel stale after a while, even when you really like them.

Part of the magic of reading is in discovering something wondrous about something you'd never thought to care about before. Books should inspire and educate people about how the world is, was, and can be. Good books should get you interested in something through compelling story telling and prose. Anyone whose ever read an Erik Larson book knows that he's a storyteller just as much as he's an historian. The point is, go read something different. Go learn something highly technical or read something bafflingly fantastic. Worse comes to worst you can always drop it and go back to your safety zone.

4. Find Someone You Can Talk to About Books

Whether it's a book club, a good friend, or an online forum, finding someone to talk about the totally awesome book you just read is exciting. When you're able to discuss books, especially particularly difficult and layered books, everything just feels better. Maybe you missed some big key piece in the novel that's been making you hate it, or perhaps you can just share in the thrill of talking about something brilliant.

Didn't have a book buddy.

Writing is an art, and despite what some people would say, it's an extremely social activity. I can't tell you how many times I've been gushing about a book when someone else completely unexpected joins in and we get to share a moment. Books are shared experiences, on a personal and societal level. It is our shared language and experiences that truly connects us as a people and books are merely an extension of that connection. Find someone who shares the same enthusiasm or loathing for a particular book and you'll not only want to read more but you may end up hating the human race a little less too.

5. Fucking Relax, They're Just Books

Let's be real here guys. I love books and reading. I mean enough that I'd like to involve them into a future career, but in all honesty some people take this shit way too seriously. Now I know I just spent a couple paragraphs waxing rhapsodic about universal connectivity of a good book, but not every book is like that. Sometimes a book is just a book. Sometimes a good story doesn't go beyond the boundaries of the page, but that doesn't mean they're worthless for not attempting to achieve more.

Just don't tell this guy.

Certainly books have near infinite potential for how they can evoke, and invoke emotions but that's not the goal of every author. Sometimes books educate and illuminate, often times they merely entertain and that's more than okay. Don't be afraid or intimidated of something you're reading. Go at your own pace and forget about the number of books read and instead focus on the quality of the experience. If you rush through your list just to do it then you're missing out on a major part of the reading experience.

Overall, reading should be an enjoyable experience (or uncomfortable depending on what you're reading) and if you're not enjoying yourself then maybe it's time to take a long hard look at yourself and figure out why. Maybe try reading in the sun or some shit? I don't know.

Rob Hilferty's Summer Reading List 

Group A: 

• This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
• The Redemption Engine by James Sutter
• The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
• King of Chaos by Dave Gross 

Group B: 

• An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
• The Gunslinger by Stephen King
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell 

Group C: 

• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• How the Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev
• No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai
• American Pastoral by Phillip Roth 

For more essays, check out our full archive. 

How My Older Brother Made Me A Lifelong Reader

Readers with wheels. My older brother Tom and I following the Hartford Half Marathon in 2010.

By Daniel Ford

My older brother Tom is the smartest person I know.

(Okay, his wife is probably even smarter, but I’ve known Tom the longest, so he wins).

I loved the fact that he was smart when I was growing up. It made me want to be smart. It made me want to read a book at the breakfast table like he did every morning. His example made me want to do my homework right when I got home and strive to do the best I could do in school.

I remember walking into his room as a kid—always when he was out of the house because I was too afraid to ask him to hang out—and marvel at all the cool stuff he had. His Don Mattingly and Wade Boggs baseball figurines, NFL gridiron comforter, his original Nintendo. It was a nerd nirvana!

More importantly, Tom always had a ton of books arranged beautifully on his bookshelf. I didn’t steal them back then because I was still reading illustrated versions of Robin Hood and Treasure Island, The Boxcar Children, and any "Star Wars" novel I could get my hands on. I loved knowing his weightier books were there and he had either read them or was planning on reading them. I would go back to my own room and rearrange my less impressive array of titles on my bookshelf so that each shelf started with the tallest book and ended with the shortest, just like my older brother did.

Thanks to my older brother, this is what my life looks like.

I read everything back then, but I hadn’t had the moment. You know the moment I’m talking about. It's the moment when someone puts a book in your hands and it hits your mind like a thunderbolt and completely changes the direction of your life.

Tom put several books in my hands one Christmas and I’ve haven’t been the same since. He wordlessly handed me a superbly wrapped present. The box was heavy. Since I was only reading thin paperbacks at that point, I didn’t know that meant it could only contain one thing. Books. Heavy, beautiful books.

Inside the box were three books that transformed me from a reader to a reader: To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, and John Irving’s The World According to Garp.

I devoured the first two in short order. My young mind was blown that those two masterpieces came out of someone’s pen. People actually wrote like this? You mean there was more to literature than just pulpy fiction and sci-fi adventures?

Even if I had been a stronger reader at that point, nothing would have prepared me for the opening line to Irving’s classic novel:

“Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.”

Whoa. 

Heavy stuff for a kid who was just trying to survive middle school!

When Tom went to college, I spent a lot of time raiding his bookshelf (and his music collection). He had already made the jump to American history tomes that were way over my head at the time, but which I attempted to plow through all the same. I’m pretty sure I still have his copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States that I stole back in high school (and finally finished as a college sophomore). He moved out after graduating and took all his books with him, but the bookshelf stayed behind. I relentlessly set out to fill it after immediately moving into his old room.

Me holding said copy of A People's History of the United States on a trip to Yankee Stadium.

I had some help thanks to my high school English teacher Pamela Hayward, who consistently handed me books like Crazy in Alabama, Snow Falling on Cedars, and As I Lay Dying, in addition to the required reading for AP English. But the constant was my older brother. Every Christmas, there would be more books. Or gift cards with recommendations attached. Or a loan from his precious collection.

Now, our bookcases are essentially lending libraries between the two of us. He has books on his shelf that I’ve loaned him without having read them, and vice versa. He likes to kid and say that a book has to be on his shelf for 10 years before he reads it (except for Eric Foner’s Reconstruction, which he will never read). If I can’t find a book in my collection, odds are he has it. Some of the best moments of our bonding weekends are spent talking about all the books we have yet to read in front of one of his bookcases (I usually end up taking one or two home with me every time).

His early example also inspires me to buy books for his three kids—as well as all my other nieces and nephews—for birthdays and Christmas. Toys are fleeting and end up as yard sale fodder. Books are a gateway to creativity, curiosity, and fun! I’ll be getting them books even when they think I’m the lame uncle who gives books (including my own someday…don’t judge me) as gifts, because that’s what I learned from my older brother. It has the added bonus of allowing me to rediscover titles from my youth and keep current with today’s children’s literature.

My nephew Jack (top photo) and my niece Katie giving me hope for future readers.

Tom is now a principal at an elementary school in Connecticut, where he’s inspiring a new generation of young minds.

I follow his Twitter account and couldn’t be prouder when I see something like:

Dr. Veronesi read to both kindergarten classes this morning for Read Across America Day! @KathyVeronesi#rsd13ctpic.twitter.com/ehKB3lFLSI

— Thomas D. Ford (@TFord_LymanCT) February 28, 2014

I sleep well knowing the next generation of readers is in good hands.

For more essays, check out our full archive. 

Why I Wanted To Be A Writer: Dave Pezza

This is the debut of a series featuring how all of us at Writer's Bone got our starts. Look for other tales from the crew in the near future.

I look nothing like David Foster Wallace.

By Dave Pezza

At one point in college I realized that writing was something I thoroughly enjoyed, and, quite frankly, I was good at it.

That realization mixed with the remarkable idea that writing is timeless. When you write your mind enters a timeless medium. The fact that the late David Foster Wallace can still shares his thoughts with me in an intellectual and significant way through his words absolutely amazes me.

Ultimately, I wanted to be a writer because I want to converse with others today, five years from now, 100 years from now about my thoughts and ideas. Yes, it is selfish and self-centered in many ways. But ideas shape and reshape our entire world, and how can you get them to work if no one can see them?

If I Had to Choose A Favorite Book With A Gun to My Head:

Favorite Line From Something I've Written:

The second reason was Cindy’s looks. She was not beautiful or classically pretty, rather Cindy was attractive. She had the appropriate curves and tight skin that a twenty-something girl usually has. She had light red hair with few freckles to match, but a pair of emerald eyes Arthur never failed to make note of. She played lacrosse in high school and in college, so she retained much of her former athletic body. She kept her nails short and painted dark brown, changed her hair style every couple of months, and wore clothes that accentuated her toned legs and busty chest. She wore high heels every day and hiked her skirt up just enough to give her 5’3 frame all the legs and height she could muster. All of this was enough to turn the head of every cubicle working salesman who she passed; their cheap suit pants and tight white underwear getting tighter and hotter as her sweet flowery perfume saturated the corridor halls with a carpet bomb of aphrodisiac.”

For more essays, check out our full archive. 

The Art of the Beginning: How to Seduce Your Reader

By Daniel Ford

I want you to think of how some of your favorite books began. While you ponder that, here are a couple of mine:

“It was inevitable: the scent of almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”—Love in the Time of Cholera

“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”—To Kill a Mockingbird

“Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat.”—A People’s History of the United States

“He was the last one to act.”—Sid Sanford LIVES!

Okay, I cheated; the last one is from my novel that hasn’t been published yet. Hey, I wrote it, it can be my favorite if I want dammit.

The scariest thing about sitting down to write is trying to figure out where to start. You’ve got one chance to make a first impression. Your book cover did a great job of getting that book into a reader’s hands, but you’ve got to do the rest of the heavy lifting when that reader turns to the first page. What’s your “Call my Ishamel” or “You better not never tell nobody but God''? Thinking about your opening line should keep you up at night because you want it to one day keep readers up at night long past their bedtimes.

How my beginnings generally look.

Usually, there is much more coffee than featured in this photo. 

I happen to love beginnings. It’s the middles and the ends I struggle with, and really who needs them? With a few exceptions, you’re never going to love a novel as much as you do when you first start it. I wish I could write a novel with only beginnings and get away with it. No plot, no character development, just setting up a world that I might some day want to revisit.

Originally, I went about writing the beginning to my novel after I had written just about everything else. At that point, my novel wasn’t a novel. It was a collection of stories based on this guy I hadn’t grown into yet. I had a loose idea in my idea of smoothing all the stories out to make one coherent story, but everything I had so far was a slew of middles and half an ending.

Then I started thinking about poker. That’s because I was playing a lot of it at the time. I didn’t have much money to lose, but I lost a lot of it during random Tuesday night poker games in Queens. It wasn’t the gambling that was addicting; it was being around a group of friends sitting around a table with a couple of beers and a vague knowledge of how to take each other’s money. I even organized a poker game for my family one weekend that had more color and suspect card playing than a heated game of Go Fish between 3-year-olds.

So I had a bunch of characters I loved and a desperate need to introduce them in a way that was true to them and the story I was trying to tell. And I had a table, some poker chips, and a deck of cards. Putting the two together after weeks of sleepless nightmares and frightening re-writes was like getting the card you needed on the river. The beginning began to suck me in slowly and seductively, and it’s sucked in at least three of the people you’ve read my novel thus far. The idea is out there, you’ve just got to patiently follow the breadcrumbs and not be tempted by subpar openings just to get to your plot.

Some other things to think about when settling on your first lines:

• No idea is a bad idea at first. Get it all out there. You never know which bad idea is going to lead to a better one.
• Don’t be afraid to leave your beginning until the end. Beginnings are where you’re going to make your money, so revisit it often and take time at the end of your process to make sure it reflects your characters and themes.
• A shocking beginning isn’t necessarily a good one. You don’t want to overpromise at the start and then under-deliver in the end.  You’re building a world, don’t light it on fire with your opening lines if you can’t fan the flames or put it out in the middle.

During my high school graduation speech, I said that there really aren’t endings; there are only more beginnings. Endings were really a chance to take a breath before diving into what’s next. That’s what you want your opening to be like for your reader. A huge gulp of air before dipping beneath the surface of your words, only to rise again when your next beginning makes them long for the oxygen of temptation.

Now go write. Always.

For more essays, check out our full archive.