Ben's Book Nook #2
summer reading
Hello!
It’s nearly midsummer, which is always a jump-scare. The technical midpoint of the year is frightening for the same reason it’s annoying when Americans call a holiday in November for Thanksgiving. Honestly fuck off! We’ve not got there yet! Summer stretches it’s burnt-orange fingers into October these days, anyway. And the ‘summers’ that we do actually have in summer are patchy, stormy and strange - rain, hail, heatwave, lightning, like a cosmic toddler slamming its fists down one after the other.
So, with the tenacity of a bisexual 24-year old blasting Lorde’s Solar Power album during a blizzard, I tried to manifest a bit of classic summer energy this week by posting a reel of ‘summer fling’ book recommendations.
Recommending steamy-looking romances might seem a bit off-brand for me, I suppose. But there’s an important balance to be struck during summer: recommending compulsive, readable things that will grab people, or immerse them while they’re on holiday*, without giving them disposable tat that looks fun but, at a granular level, degrades and devalues their attention. I think we’ve all read shit that we hoped would be fun-shit or distracting-shit but turned out to just be bad-shit, or it’s weedling little cousin, boring-shit.
The genre we think of as ‘romance’ is particularly blighted by different tabs on the Dulux paint spectrum of shit. The human experience of love comes in a gazillion different variations and is, perhaps, the only thing any of us are ever actually writing about anyway. It feels unfair then, when ‘Romance’ becomes a by-word for bad gunk writing. Obviously there’s an element of misogyny there - romance is, commercially speaking, seen as female-coded, and therefore sappy, sentimental, template, minor. Publishers sell good, nuanced romances as if they were flourescent rubble. Editors sand down spikier romances’ edges. Romantic series are extended beyond all logic, like abandoned train tracks over a dusty cartoon ravine.
But amongst all of this, there are a million gems. My job is to find you them - things that balance both entertainment and, well, something more. Never write off an entire genre. There’s always diamonds in the inky rough. Don’t settle for muck. But don’t forget to put your snout in the trough once in a while! ‘Beach reads’ aren’t just books that you wouldn’t mind losing in the sea. You can, physically, read anything on the beach. Tolstoy is a beach read. And Jilly Cooper is in the British Library. What a life we lead!
*though this in itself is a problem: holiday is escape already - do you want escapist literature on top? If you escape while you’re on holiday, where do you go? Back to reality? Or deeper into unreality? Get too immersed and you might lose yourself completely, the screaming swimming-short-clad central nubbin at the centre of a Hawaii-themed Russian Doll. Happy holidays!
Ben’s Gigs + Book Clubs
Things are hotting up, Book Club-ly speaking. We have one more summer book club in London with consummate legends and real-life couple Christopher MacArthur-Boyd and Grace Jarvis - giving our takes on Ursula K. LeGuin’s fantasy classic A Wizard of Earthsea on July 5th. There’s about a dozen tickets left for this so no time like the present for getting yourself a ticket…
And then the next time I’ll be Clubbing Books will be at the Edinburgh Fringe! On August 17, 18, 19 we will be in a massive lecture hall (250 seats!!!) in Edinburgh doing the books The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain and A Court of Thorns & Roses by Sarah J. Maas respectively. Look at this astonishing poster art courtesy of design expert William Andrews…
Click the image for tickets. Please buy tickets. I have so many tickets to sell.
