What Pupils and Staff Are Reading This Summer: 6

As we approach the end of the summer term, PGS pupils and staff reveal what they are planning to read over this summer holiday. 

Russell Olson (RMO)

As with most summers, there are a hundred books on my reading list. Realistically, I’ll probably only get around to a handful. 

Shelly Bond, editor-extraordinaire, has recently released Heavy Rotation, a comic anthology dedicated to college radio stations. Lots of great writers and artists are attached to it and I’m anxiously awaiting its delivery.

I’ve recently moved house and in packing up my books rediscovered a volume I forgot I owned: Innocent When You Dream, a collection of Tom Waits interviews. I’ll be dipping into that throughout the break. Probably accompanied by plenty of Waits’s records...although I suspect I’ll get hung up on Rain Dogs, as per usual.  

The Great Godden by Meg Rossoff keeps catching my eye in the Library. If it doesn’t go out on loan before my last day, I’ll nab that. The reviews have been gushing and there’s a Waugh-ness/Faulkner-ness about the plot which sounds right up my street.

One of my favorite comic artists died suddenly last month. John Paul Leon was a titan of the inkwell and a great influence on my own sense of pictorial narrative. I’m certain that his books won’t be far from my reach during the coming weeks.

Summertime also means P. G. Wodehouse. My wife has been steadily replacing my paperbacks with the gorgeous Everyman editions. Not sure whether I’m in a Blandings or a Psmith mood. Time will tell.

If I’m lucky, I’ll pull The Continental Op off the shelves too. It’s a collection of short stories from Dashiell Hammett so hopefully, I won’t feel compelled to read it cover to cover. Nothing beats a bit of pulpy, noir fiction on a lazy Sunday afternoon. But who am I kidding? I’ve got a seven-month-old to chase around. Lazy Sundays might just be a thing of the past. Le sigh.

Jennifer Hill (JMH)

I have just finished gathering together this eclectic pile for my summer reading, from the wonderful new books in the Library - which will surely anger the piles of books already at home waiting to be read. 

I’m most looking forward to:

Young Adult Fiction - The Dark Lady by Akala. It has everything I love in a book (and I didn’t know they could all go together!) A historical setting, a dark detective plot, a prophetic dragon, a daring prison escape and echoes of Shakespeare! What more could you ask for from one book.
Adult Fiction - At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis, this year's winner of the International Booker Prize - among many others. It’s the story of a Senegalese soldier in the first world war, depicting first his rise to horror movie level brutality and then his descent into madness. 

Henry Wiggins (HRW)

As ever, my intended summer reading encompasses both fiction and non-fiction whilst indulging some of my usual interests; popular music, cultural history and American literature. In terms of popular music, I enjoy any of the ‘history of rock’ books that appear relatively regularly from the music writer and broadcaster David Hepworth. His latest ‘Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There: How a Few Skinny Brits with Bad Teeth Rocked America’ promises the usual entertaining mix of highbrow commentary and lowbrow gossip that make them so entertaining as it focuses on the British rock takeover of America from the arrival of the Beatles at Idlewild Airport, New York (soon to be renamed JFK) in early 1964 through to David Bowie’s first major tour of the States in 1974. In a similar vein, I enjoyed Craig Brown’s Beatles biography ‘1, 2, 3, 4; The Beatles in Time’ so much last summer that I am planning on reading ‘Ma’am Darling; 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret’ which is a subject I never thought I would be interested enough to read a book about. 

On a slightly less scurrilous level, David Abulafia's The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans comes highly recommended as a sweeping history of man's relationship with the oceans surrounding him from (gulp) 176,000 BC to the present day. I usually prefer my history to be a bit more small-scale and focused than this but it is a fascinating subject and seems a fitting topic for a book read on Southsea beach over the summer. 

In terms of fiction, I plan to read Howard's End by EM Forster, one of the greatest of all British (actually, deeply English in particular) twentieth-century novels and, as we approach the centenary of what is widely regarded as the birth of the modernist movement proper in 1922, one of the key works of literature that pre-empted and foreshadowed this movement when it was completed in 1910. Finally, it's not quite fiction per se (but it is American), A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life by George Saunders (one of the greatest current American authors and a professor of Literature at Syracuse University in New York) looks at fiction and the short story in particular via his criticism of works by the Russian masters Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol. If that sounds a bit heavy or esoteric, then I recommend his earlier novel Lincoln in the Bardo which is a masterpiece.