6. What PGS Staff Are Reading This Summer

Emma Burns

I  am so looking forward to my summer reading this year . 

I have just finished Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra, a terrific book which structures an intertwined narrative about World War Two fascist Italy and the witch-hunts in Hollywood in the early 1950s to engrossing effect. 

This has led me to Jonathan Coe, a great writer , and his novel Mr Wilder and Me : set in the late 1970s, it tells the story of Hollywood director Billy Wilder's struggles to write, finance and shoot his penultimate film Fedora, as observed through the eyes of a young Greek interpreter. The novel contains a mixture of real and invented characters. (Do watch Billy Wilder's greatest movies this summer if you can: Stalag 17, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment and Some Like It Hot (which is never not number one in lists of the best comedies of all time.)) Adjacent to Wilder is a biography of Arthur Miller who was famously married to Marilyn Monroe who starred in Some Like it Hot and The Seven Year Itch, directed by Wilder. 

Sticking with Hollywood , who can resist the furious love of Burton and Taylor - twice married movie stars who practically invented modern celebrity. This biography, Erotic Vagrancy, promises to be alluring and rather tragic in equal measure. 

Still with celebrity , I will read Barbra - an autobiography of the greatest female singer of all time- and one of only 29 people to be an EGOT - a winner of an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony - the "grand slam" of American show business. This leads into a fun book by Guardian columnist Emma Brockes called What Would Barbra Do? I’m intrigued to learn the answers!  Also listed here is Hellfire, a stunningly reviewed biography of hellacious rock and roll rabble-rouser Jerry Lee Lewis. 

Finally in the nonfiction is Adam Mars -Jones’ memoir of life with his father, Kid Gloves in which he details growing up with and then taking care of his father, High Court judge William Mars-Jones. It takes in a lot of social history of the 70s and 80s and I’m expecting it to be an absorbing read as the author is an acclaimed critic. 

Moving to fiction , I will read two Annie Ernaux novellas - she is a Pulitzer Prize winner who I've not had the pleasure of reading yet: A Woman’s Story and Shame.

Recommended to me by Dr Webb is the intriguing Enter Ghost; this sounds fascinating: an actress returns home to Palestine and finds intense emotional links between her emotional life and her homeland.

Linking to this, I have picked out Yehuda Amichai Selected Poems. Amichai was an Israeli poet, much admired by Ted Hughes and whose early work was translated by Hughes’ second wife Assia Wevill (whose biography Lover of Unreason is absolutely compelling.) 

I found Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North in a charity shop and will read it as another example of what happens to humans when they are displaced and exoticised.

Also recommended in the Literary Society was I Who Have Never Known Men by Jaqueline Harpman, an apocalyptic dystopian novel which I had not heard of before a presentation by sixth formers.

Train Dreams Denis Johnson: another charity shop find. Michael Ondaatje has called this novella about a man’s life journey through the American West at the turn of the twentieth century ‘a masterpiece’. Robert Grainier journeys along a railroad, struggling to make sense of the bewildering changes transforming the nation. 

Dead Animals by Phoebe Stuckee is a furiously paced horror mystery which looks very exciting; Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh is a modern novel abbott a depressed young woman living with an alcoholic father; One Sunday Morning by Amy Ephron is a novel set in the Jazz Age of New York which looks great fun. Equally uplifting will be Michiko Aoyama’s novel, What you are Looking for Is in the Library about a librarian posing the great question of the library, and maybe of life: what are you looking for?

Lastly, my professional non-fiction reading will be Overschooled but Undereducated by Abbot and Mctaggart about how institutional systems treat adolescents and their progression through life. 

Phew! Right, now I’ve written about them, I need to go off and read them. Have a great summer reading your choices!