take me to the lakes

postcard 60: on a mini seasonal guide of books, movies, and music for summer

Solitude and the summer moon.

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prelude

“She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard.”

—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

Mini seasonal recs are back for postcards! I missed doing this for spring, and am so excited to do it for summer. This is a slightly updated version from last year’s (my tastes have changed but not that drastically), so if you were here for that post, welcome back! All of my playlists have been refreshed.

LISTENS // For me, summer sounds like the outro of Chiquitita. The beat of Supercut. The intro of Brazil. Any song that feels drenched in sunlight, like something you can listen to while sitting on a beach on the hottest day, eating strawberries and drinking a crisp glass of white wine.

Here are six other playlists of mine that I have on repeat in the summer!

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READS // My themes and specific characteristics in books that I search for every summer are NYRB classics, essay collections about loneliness, minimalist writing, melancholic plots, relationship fiction with no happily ever afters, hazy mid-century books set in the Californian desert, the rose colored glasses of childhood nostalgia, books that feels like water cascading, quiet stream of consciousness.

Here is a list of all of my summer rereads: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Bonjour Tristesse by Fraçoise Sagan, Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector, The Waves by Virginia Woolf, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger. I always find myself picking these books up like a tried and true habit.

(here is my reading syllabus for summer).

reading syllabus for summer

Some books I want to read before the season ends are: Heat Wave by Penelope Lively, Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, Little Reunions by Eileen Chang, The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, Paradise by Toni Morrison, Parade by Rachel Cusk, Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, and The Feast by Margaret Kennedy.

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WATCHES // My summer watches are a bit more complex than my spring watches because they’re divided into three categories. First: early 2000s romantic comedies (but special mention to Set It Up). Some of my favorites are: 13 Going on 30, 10 Things I Hate About You, 27 Dresses, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, The Proposal, and Palm Springs.

(this is my letterboxd! add me!)

Second are melancholy movies that feel like the late summer breeze. I watch these whenever I journal and still feel pensive, or whenever I want to watch something thoughtful (and sad).

And third are raunchy comedies. I usually am pretty impartial to them, but some are really funny and really good. Like that famous Animal Farm quote goes: “all raunchy comedies are equal but some raunchy comedies are more equal than others”.

….or something like that.

interlude: what i read this week

I’m on a mission to read as many NYRB classics as I can this summer. I finished On Being Blue by William H. Gass, A Month in the Country by J.L Carr, and Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood. I rated all of them 4 stars (I don’t think I’ve rated a single NYRB book below four stars, their curation is just that good). This week, I am reading Good Behavior by Molly Keane and Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum, both of which I have only heard good things about. I’m halfway through Good Behavior, and anyone who loves a dysfunctional, messy family tale, this is your book. Such smart, brilliant writing as well.

Other than that, I am still trekking through Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (which I am determined to finish by the end of next week so I can stop writing that I’m still reading it). And since NYRB books are quite heavy, I’ve been carrying around Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys to read on the subway and bus. And for my big nonfiction book (in which I read slowly and take notes), I’ve still been reading Sophie’s World and it’s still as interesting and digestible as it was when I read it more than a decade ago.

I promise I will update my Goodreads sometime this month!

Here are ten articles you should read this week:

1. The Domestic Disappointments of Natalia Ginzburg by Dustin Illingworth

   In the novels of Natalia Ginzburg, family has a private grammar. “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people,” she wrote in Family Lexicon, her most celebrated novel, “just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other.”

2. A Cure for Individualism by Tim Connolly
   It runs deeply through the Western outlook, hailed and condemned in equal measures. For a corrective, look to Confucius.

3. 1988—? by Eileen Chang
   “The three huge horizontal layers, a single silent travelogue in technicolor on a cracked silver screen, no audio added, played soundlessly in one corner of an exhibit that was running at a loss, and no one was watching.”

4. The Ecstatic Swoon by Robert D Zaresky
   As Stendhal knew, the reason for art is to make you feel. Do not try to grasp the artwork: allow it to grasp you instead.

5. A Third Thing Grows by Susan Moon

   How learning a third language became a place of reconciliation for my mother tongues.

6. Give Her a Snake by Mary Beard

   The myth of Cleopatra may offer women an image of power, but at the cost of implicating them in the misogynistic fantasies of patriarchy. For women, ‘Cleopatra’ is a trap.

7. The Climate Crisis is Worse than You Think by Elizabeth Weil

   A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.

8. Street Haunting: A London Adventure by Virginia Woolf

   “The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful.”

9. Carmen Maria Machado's Many Haunted Stories of a Toxic Relationship by Katy Waldman

   Katy Waldman reviews Carmen Maria Machado's ”In the Dream House,“ a formally inventive memoir that recounts the author's experience with an abusive relationship.

10. The Dirt on Pig-Pen by Elif Batuman

    “I first encountered the Peanuts strips around age six, when my father started taking me with him to the used bookstore.”

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postlude

Boating in Central Park by Edward Henry Potthast

things i love: my new wall shelves, various bottles from officine universelle buly, sunshine after a week of rain, byredo’s summer rain candle, walking in the morning, giving friends gifts.