Summer began in earnest this weekend, didn’t it? The wall of heat just beyond our home’s entrances — ugh. Still, we were able to take two ten-mile rides and to sit out in the yards for a time in both the mornings and the evenings. We love to watch our many feathered visitors. With profuse thanks to the air-conditioning gods, we cooked good meals and desserts this weekend, too, and practiced music, studied, finished Season 7 of The X Files, and, of course, read.

After swallowing whole Emma Cline’s The Girls (which is a recommendation, of course), I went in search of my copy of Helter Skelter and finally read it (which is another recommendation — of both the novel and the non-fiction work). Cline nailed the idea of a girl’s search for self-definition in the measuring looks / glances of others, particularly men. One reviewer took the novelist to task for not immersing Evie in the cult’s horror, but to me, that was the point: She was defined by her association, however brief or peripheral.

For the commonplace book:

p. 27
Back then, I was so attuned to attention. I dressed to provoke love, tugging my neckline lower, settling a wistful stare on my face whenever I went out in public that implied many deep and promising thoughts, should anyone happen to glance over. As a child, I had once been part of a charity dog show and paraded around a pretty collie on a leash. How thrilled I’d been at the sanctioned performance: the way I went up to strangers and let them admire the dog, my smile as indulgent and constant as a salesgirl’s, and how vacant I’d felt when it was over, when no one needed me anymore.

I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you — the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.

p. 99
The possibility of judgment being passed on me supplanted any worries or questions I might have about Russell. At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person.

p. 103
There are those survivors of disasters whose accounts begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that the noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before.

Did I miss some sign? Some internal twinge?

p. 351
It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn’t accumulate as I’d once imagined. […] I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.

And from Helter Skelter:

p. 52
Autopsy reports are abrupt documents. Cold, factual, they can indicate how the victims died, and give clues as to their last hours, but nowhere in them do their subjects emerge, even briefly, as people. Each report is, in its own way, the sum total of a life, yet there are very few glimpses as to how that life was lived. No likes, dislikes, loves, hates, fears, aspirations, or other human emotions; just a final, clinical summing up: “The body is normally developed… The pancreas is grossly unremarkable… The heart weighs 340 grams and is symmetrical…”

Yet the victims had lived, each had a past.

It has been three months since my last bookish post, but I attempt to keep my list current, even when I haven’t enough time to write. With forty-nine books, I am (slightly) exceeding my (modest) goal of two books per week. As I’ve mentioned before, I am a promiscuous reader, loving, leading on, leaving in various states of undress many, many more books than that number would indicate, but I generally include only the cover-to-covers in my list; hence, forty-nine.

Random reading notes:

■ How is it possible that two decades have passed since I first read The Sparrow and breathlessly pressed it on my husband? Twenty years. Well, Russell’s unusual and wonderful novel — with its astronomy-, music-, language-, relationship-, anthropology-, and religion-infused discussions — was the first selection for the summer session of our family book club, and the novel was even better on rereading.

p. 278
Standing in the hallway, John Candotti and Edward Behr could hear half of the conversation taking place inside the Father General’s office quite clearly. It was not necessary to eavesdrop. It was only necessary not to be deaf.

“He was bound to find out eventually,” said Brother Edward placidly. Anger, he believed, was healthier than depression.

Amen, Brother Edward. Amen.

■ Last year, Roger Rosenblatt’s Kayak Mornings left me cold, but this year, Making Toast, his earlier memoir about loss and grief, seemed to meander less and, therefore, mean more to me.

p. 39
Because I could not understand why she died, I sought to make other things less confusing. I cleaned out junk-closets, gave order to a chaotic shelf of CDs, and cleared an ivy-choked area of the yard.

■ Has anyone else picked up Joe Hill’s The Fireman? It would have been a passable beach read had it not been too long by four hundred pages and had it not suffered so much in (inevitable) comparison to Stephen King’s The Stand. The parallels to his father’s novel were, apparently, intentional:

Two-thirds into writing the book, it suddenly hit me how much The Fireman parallels The Stand. There were some strong threads connecting the two. So, do you run from that? I think it’s more fun to embrace your influences than to try to bury them.

Read the complete interview here. Our family book club’s “reach goal” for last summer was to finish The Stand, a reread for me and for my husband. Only he succeeded, but he does listen to audiobooks while commuting, so he has an advantage over the rest of us. The remaining members have recommitted to finishing by mid-August.

■ I think all of my favorite lines from Cardenio belong to the (wrongfully) much maligned Doris. Early on:

To be honest, I’ve never understood
Why I shouldn’t tell the truth.
I mean the assumption that this is beneficial to the world,
to be nice, to be pleasant,
is just unproven.

Difficult people are always the ones who advance civilization.

And much later:

Well, there’s a mature decision!
What are the odds, Anselmo,
that your second marriage will last as long as your first?

It’s a comment on the excellence of the Shakespeare Project of Chicago that they made this rather tedious work so watchable. For more information about “Shakespeare’s lost work,” visit The Cardenio Project.

■ I have read five more graphic collections since my last post, for a total of ten, to date. While, I am enjoying all of the series, none is a “gateway” volume. If you seek one, though, it’s Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man or Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth.

■ A Good School is, quite possibly, the best book I’ve read this year — which may have been the same thing I said about Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road eight years ago. In “The Lost World of Richard Yates” (Boston Review, October/November 1999), Stewart O’Nan wrote:

Once the most vaunted of authors–praised by Styron and Vonnegut and Robert Stone as the voice of a generation–he seems now to belong to that august yet sad category, the writer’s writer. Andre Dubus, who was his student at Iowa, revered him, as does Tobias Wolff, and the jackets of Yates’s books are adorned with quotes by the likes of Tennessee Williams and Dorothy Parker, Ann Beattie and Gina Berriault. When authors talk his name pops up as the American writer we wish more people would read, just as Cormac McCarthy’s used to. In the acknowledgments section of his novellas, Women With Men, Richard Ford makes it plain: “I wish to record my debt of gratitude to the stories and novels of Richard Yates, a writer too little appreciated.”

With his insightful and ranging appreciation, O’Nan — also a writer too little appreciated (if you are not familiar with his work, begin with A Prayer for the Dying and Last Night at the Lobster) — all but ensured that Yates would be revisited: Many of Yates’ books are, of course, back in print, and his “painful and sad” first novel received big-screen treatment in 2008. In fact, I finally saw the film last week, which led to the mentally intoned assertion, “The book was better,” and to the shelves, where several Yates titles awaited me. By the way, fans of John Williams’ Stoner will also appreciate A Good School.

From Revolutionary Road:

p. 59-60
And even after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today. “Oh Jesus,” Shep might begin, “you know this character next door to us? Donaldson? The one that’s always out fooling with his power mower and talking about the rat race and the soft sell? Well, listen: did I tell you what he said about his barbecue pit?” And there would follow an anecdote of extreme suburban smugness that left them weak with laughter.

They would all agree, and the happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

p. 128-129
“This whole country’s rotten with sentimentality,” Frank said one night, turning ponderously from the window to walk the carpet. “It’s been spreading like a disease for years, for generations, until now everything you touch is flabby with it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

More book notes will follow.