Dispatch: On Summer Reading

Typ­i­cally, read­ing lists pub­lished at this time of year are designed to help you with that cru­cial part of North Amer­i­can vaca­tion decision-making: which book do you take to that house at the beach or the cabin in the woods? I’ve always found this a puz­zling prac­tice, since I rarely read when I’m on vaca­tion, beach chairs being noto­ri­ously uncom­fort­able and cab­ins utterly devoid of decent light­ing (or decent cut­lery, for that mat­ter). And frankly, good vaca­tions and good authors com­pete for the same cog­ni­tive ter­ri­tory: the for­mer com­pels you into the ver­i­ta­ble moment, and the lat­ter draws you into a con­trived one. No, far too much effort on the part of the pub­lish­ing indus­try goes into cre­at­ing read­ing lists for that brief bit of sum­mer fling that is best spent doing other things.

A far greater ser­vice to bib­lio­philes would be to offer read­ing lists catered specif­i­cally for those peri­ods of monot­ony con­comi­tantly blessed with com­fort­able seat­ing and ade­quate light­ing: the wait­ing rooms of doc­tors’ offices or the arrivals area of a major air­port. And of course the sub­ur­ban bus commute.

So, here is my mod­est con­tri­bu­tion to such an effort: this is a list of what was actu­ally being read* on my com­mute to and from work yes­ter­day. Or at least, 60% of what was being read. Dis­cre­tion pre­vented me from overtly iden­ti­fy­ing the other 40% obscured from my view:

The Morn­ing Commute

• Bro­ken by Kel­ley Arm­strong. (“…a preg­nant were­wolf may have unwit­tingly unleashed Jack the Rip­per on twenty-first-century and become his next target…)
• The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabal­don, the fifth install­ment in the Out­lander series fea­tur­ing the time-traveling Frasers.
• The Work­place Haz­ardous Mate­ri­als Infor­ma­tion Sys­tem (WHMIS): A Guide to Train­ing. (Yikes)
• The Ottawa Sun, a tabloid-style news­pa­per (3 commuters)
• Le Devoir, a French-language news­pa­per pub­lished in Mon­treal and dis­trib­uted here in Ottawa (and elsewhere).

And The Return Trip

• Zig Ziglar’s Secrets of Clos­ing the Sale by Zig Ziglar. On the back­cover: “He will undoubt­edly go down in his­tory as the num­ber one sales­man of our time!” — Mary Kay Ash
• Great Expec­ta­tions: Author­i­ta­tive Text, Back­grounds, Con­texts, Crit­i­cism (Nor­ton Crit­i­cal Edi­tions), by Charles Dick­ens. This the author­i­ta­tive Nor­ton crit­i­cal edition.
• The Sky­s­tone: The Dream of Eagles by Jack Whyte, first vol­ume in the Camu­lod Chron­i­cles. “Caius Cor­nelius Bri­tan­ni­cus was not a good invalid…”
• What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of Peo­ple Who Answered the Ulti­mate Ques­tion by Po Bronson.
• The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown.
• Angels & Demons by Dan Brown. His sec­ond appear­ance on this list, and in hard­cover no less, mak­ing him the most pop­u­lar author on this commute.
• Metro, a free daily news­pa­per (2 commuters)
• The Ottawa Sun (2 commuters)
• A Bar­beque Man­ual. I couldn’t tell which man­u­fac­ture, but the man­ual was thick and appar­ently engrossing.

*The advan­tage being that the choices made are inti­mately tied to the con­text in which they are read, and so we can have some con­fi­dence these are choices emi­nently suit­able for the com­mute. This is of course in sharp con­trast to typ­i­cal sum­mer read­ing lists that are crafted in the sun-free envi­ron­ment of pub­lish­ing establishments.