Column: Summer reading … or pushing through Proust

It’s mid-August and indolence has set in.

Although July was pretty merciful weather-wise, August never fails to rev up the punishing muggy East End air masses (that’s what we used to call them in Southern California), making a wide range of outdoor activities unappealing.

Sitting inside with a good book becomes an increasingly welcome option. Like many, I have a stack on an end table next to my black leather reading chair that are old friends, gathered over the years from various points of the literary compass.

Although my hand assembled them, they seemed to have willed themselves onto the table through a power of their own. Here are sketches of some of them:

I have always been a big fan of John Cheever, the master short story writer. The Pulitzer Prize-winning compilation of all his stories never fails to satisfy no matter what page I randomly open to. In his own words he describes them as “stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” Variously dark and deeply humorous, they reek of gin and cigarettes.

Below that volume are his novels “The Wapshot Chronicle” and “The Wapshot Scandal,” starring Leander Wapshot and his sons Moses and Coverly. The Massachusetts setting reeks of intimations of lobster and fried clams.

Wilfred Sheed’s “The House that George Built” is a history of the golden age of American popular music and the George is George Gershwin. I read the chapter on Irving Berlin and then feasted on the chapter on Gershwin, who seems to have been every bit as great a human being as his magisterial oeuvre of songs. The rest of the book is of yet unread, a deliberately deferred pleasure.

A compilation of Pete Dexter’s newspaper columns, “Paper Trails,” is reliably jarring and hilarious. He wrote many of these for the Philadelphia Daily News back in the 1980s when I was a floor below at The Philadelphia Inquirer. The entire building and much of the city couldn’t wait for the next one. He did many under the rubric of “Dr. Dexter’s Sex Clinic,” and the one included here might very well be the funniest thing I’ve ever read.

John J. Rowland’s “Cache Lake Country” from 1947 is an account of his time in the great Northern Forest in the wilds of Canada. It is a galvanizing month-by-month chronicle of his time by the lake of the title and a storehouse of information on woodcraft and nature. Read it twice and counting. Every chapter has him making something — outdoor ovens, thermometers, sailing canoes and dozens more projects.

I thought I could spring this somewhat obscure book on my Vermont friends Bill and Ruth who enjoy such material. Oh, they said, we know that book by heart, and Lewis, their younger son, had made nearly every gadget and contraption Rowland had cooked up. Springing, indeed.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery is best known as the author of the beloved “Little Prince,” which I put down after 10 pages.

But he was also a pioneering aviator and wrote beautifully about his adventures. I have read his “Wind, Sand and Stars” three times and will again. In 1944 he flew a reconnaissance mission over the Mediterranean and never returned.

Eric Kraft has written a series of funny, elegiac, whimsical novels and I’ve read all but one, “Leaving Small’s Hotel,” where the protagonist Peter Leroy and his wife, Albertine, are forced to sell the place. Kraft is a brilliant, clever writer and has picked up along the way one of my favorite blurbs for this series, words to the effect, “having trouble with Proust? Pick up Eric Kraft instead.”

I have a reader’s guide to Marcel Proust’s famously challenging masterwork, “In Search of Lost Time,” because on the floor beneath the table is a boxed set of the seven novels that comprise the massive undertaking. As an English major one cannot avoid being assigned the first novel, “Swan’s Way.”

But a very small percentage of English majors ever even think of reading the next six. Years ago I vowed to push through to the end, but I never even got started. I’ve had these books for so long that they had a different name back then: “Remembrance of Things Past.” Their black spines have been bleached gray and they smell ancient. I still might complete my quest but I’m not betting the farm on it.

Which reminds me of a Proustian Island connection. When my brother came home for Christmas break his freshman year at Northwestern, he brought back some books he had picked up in his immersion into college life.

One was a blue paper-bound book of cartoons, many of whose topics and punch lines went over my young head. If I am not making this up, one strip was set on a beach and had to do with the difficulty of reading Proust. I can’t recall exactly what the punch line was, but I think I know someone who does, the author — the newly ensconced Islander and cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children’s book author and illustrator Jules Feiffer.

Maybe he knows.