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Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
The adolescent angst of this southern bildungsroman radiates off the page, coating you with an almost palpable patina of alienation while the atmosphere of the balmy Louisiana summer is so strongly cultivated that the urge to swat at phantom mosquitoes is almost irresistible. Controversial in its time, Truman Capote’s transgressive journey of abandonment, isolation, unlikely friendship, and acceptance still resonates with the same unnerving tone that it did in 1948, awakening the painfully awkward teenager within all of us.
No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories by Miranda July
One of my fondest summer memories involves accepting the fact that my air conditioner was just going to stay broken, plucking this short story collection off of my roommate’s bookshelf (based entirely upon its intriguing yellow cover), and drinking a series of technicolor rum cocktails while I read in a living room as yet devoid of its furniture, listening to the sounds of intoxicated frivolity wafting through the open windows on the stillest of August nights. Miranda July’s uncomfortably honest vignettes remind us that no interaction is effortless, and no relationship is uncomplicated. We are encouraged to embrace the inevitable inelegance of life and move forward.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
I am somewhat artificially biased towards designating this book as a “summer read” owing to my own unique personal circumstances, namely those that conspired to deposit me on a research boat last May with shockingly few scientific obligations, leaving me free to become as sunburned as I wanted and luxuriate for eleven hours in the middle of Corpus Christi Bay with a weather worn copy of Middlesex. This genealogical epic traces the history of a recessive mutation as it dwells within an Aegean cottage, narrowly escaping eradication at the hands of Ottomans, to its residence in a developing Detroit, overseeing a family’s transition from ostracized bootleggers to middle-class restauranteurs, culminating in its manifestation as a genetic anomaly that incites a child’s identity crisis and radical quest for self-discovery. The closing sentence could be read on an uninterrupted loop for an eternity without losing any of its raw, emotional power.
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