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Deep Reading Long and absorbing books for summer

Often when people think of summer books, they look to lighthearted reads that fit with the season’s freewheeling spirit. But here’s a different proposition: Summer is when you are most likely to have the time and energy to delve deeply into literature. It’s just the right season to pick books that will transport you to other times and places, challenge you with their complex themes and story lines or awe you with their rich use of language. Here are a few nice long and absorbing books, most recently out in paperback, that do all of this and more.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (Paperback edition, Vintage Books, January 2010, $15.95, 667 pages). This epic novel of twin brothers’ love and estrangement takes you to India and Africa, and then to an embattled training hospital in the Bronx. It is a medical tale that interweaves passionate romances, Ethiopian history and culture, and immigrant stories. It will make you laugh and make you cry, and it will remind you why you love to read.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Random House Trade Paperbacks, December 2009, $15, 349 pages). Winner of the 2009 National Book Award, this is a profound, big-hearted mosaic that slices through a few days in the summer of 1974 when Philippe Petit strung a tightrope wire and danced between the World Trade Center towers. Hailed as one of the great New York novels, it could also be considered a series of interconnecting short stories that capture the voices and the souls of 10 New Yorkers whose lives end up linked in unexpected ways.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett – (Hardback edition, Amy Einhorn Books, 2009, $24.95, 451 pages). This book has been such a huge success that the publishers aren’t bothering to bring it out in paperback until 2011. Rather than wait that long, see if you can borrow a copy from a friend. Plenty of people are reading it and loving it. Set in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 and 1964, it is a book about writing a book that is set in motion by Skeeter, a recent college graduate and aspiring writer who chafes at the rigidity and racism that surrounds her in her privileged white world. She decides to collect the stories of black maids who, reluctantly at first, decide to join the civil rights movement by sharing their experiences with the wider world. Stockett excels at creating beautiful, heroic characters and at conveying a range of possible relationships and emotions. She also does a great job portraying quintessential, grown-up mean girls who take advantage of the prevailing prejudices and institutionalized injustice to wreak havoc on their black maids’ lives. A must read for all.

Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos (Paperback edition, Grove Press, September 2009, $14.95, 560 pages). Local author Stephanie Kallos follows her beautiful debut novel, Broken for You, with another captivating read that weaves fantastical elements into the lives of ordinary people. The setting is a small town in Nebraska; the protagonists, three grown siblings drawn together by their father’s sudden death, are all quirky and in sore need of love. They have yet to come to terms with their mother’s disappearance in a tornado when they were children. Kallos’ power as a writer shines throughout, but particularly when telling the story of her mother’s journey from innocent coed to bitter woman debilitated by MS.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (Paperback edition, Ballantine Books, October 2009, $15, 320 pages). This first novel by Seattle-born author Jamie Ford is a coming-of-age story set in part during World War II in Seattle’s International District, which was then strictly divided between Chinatown and Nihonmachi or “Japantown.” Forced to wear an “I am Chinese” button by a father who was as fierce, if not fiercer, in his anti-Japanese sentiments than his white counterparts, the 12-year-old Henry defies his family and befriends a second generation Japanese-American. Ford adds to our understanding of what the relocation of Japanese Americans to internment camps looked and felt like right here at home.

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff (Random House Trade Paperback, June 2009, $15, 544 pages). Like all of the books on this list, The 19th Wife jumps deftly between past and present. It interweaves the saga of Ann Eliza Young, the disillusioned 19th wife of the early Mormon leader Brigham Young with a modern day story of Jordan Scott, who was forced as a young teen to leave his family’s polygamist compound in the hinterlands of Utah. His mother, herself a 19th wife, is accused of killing her husband, and Jordan’s return to Utah to solve the mystery of his father’s murder reveals the corrupting influences of polygamy and blinding faith.

©Copyright 2010, Caliope Publishing Company