Getting youth to read over the summer can sometimes be a challenge. Luckily, there are several fun and non-stressful ideas out there to keep them engaged with reading. In my opinion, striving for a particular number of books or meticulously noting down which books you’ve read may not be the approach for you and may actually increase the amount of stress you have. Reading one book over the summer might be what you’re aiming for, with the goal to enjoy yourself. That’s why I hope these summer reading program ideas provide some inspiration and enjoyment when it comes to reading for fun this summer.

1. Get Caught Reading

Getting students to read in fun, unique places can entice them to take part in different summer reading programs. Having prizes for the coolest places can also be effective. In the past I’ve had a lot of success with this one, with students having their pictures taken on trampolines, up trees, even in dryers (definitely don’t encourage that one). I usually put an asterisk on these ones as I hope students can provide a review of the book they’ve chosen with the picture, considering the whole idea is for them to choose a book they love!

2. Shared Reading

This one can be tricky but worth it, in my opinion. I get students and staff to choose one book to read over the summer. I try to get them to choose in May or June so I can get more copies of the book. I also strongly encourage them to visit local libraries to borrow the book. I then post regular updates about the book over the summer in the attempt to create a shared experience. The uptake on this program might not be massive but if a student or parent wants to be involved I will do everything I can to get the book into their hands. It’s a lot of fun to get students to vote on which book will be the summer read.

3. Surprise Summer read

I’ve written before about this great program. This works with younger students, teens, and definitely adults. I get people to tell me their favourite genre, which can be anything. I will then take a book from our shelves, wrap it up, and deliver it to them before the end of the school year. I ask that the teachers and students write a review of the book on a recipe / display card that I can then put on display in September. It’s a lot of fun and works really well.

4. Give Away Those Weeded Books

This has to have some clarification. I do not recommend giving away weeded books that are so ratty that they look like the Dead Sea Scrolls. In my experience, we sometimes have books that are in great condition but never circulate for reasons that no one will ever understand. These books might find a home somewhere if they are simply moved to a different location or seen in a different light. This is why I recommend giving them away as part of a relaxed summer reading program. I cannot stress enough the impact of giving away books can have on students: they really love getting books. Having a table of good quality weeded books is a great way to keep them reading over the summer.

There’s a lot going on in every wine glass. This overpriced grape juice has a long history, with some wineries dating back hundreds of years. Oenology (winemaking) has been developing for centuries, and today there has never been more choice among wine. Reading books for beginning wine drinkers will make the wall of wines in your local store far less intimidating.

Unfortunately, wine is still a privileged world that has only been welcoming to non-white, non-male people very recently. Wine experts Desiree Harris-Brown, Tish Wiggins, and Julia Coney have not yet published books, but they provide a necessary perspective as women of color in the historically exclusionary industry.

Wine just doesn’t need to be as pretentious as some people make it out to be. Most wine store owners want to help you find a bottle that you’ll like at their store so you’ll keep coming back — it’s in their best interest to help you. They’re also generally enthusiastic about wine and want you to enjoy it, too. If you want to arm yourself with some background knowledge before entering the store and staring at the shelf of wines, these books will get you started and give some good direction.

Beginning Your Wine Journey

I became aware of Advancing Paul Newman, Eleanor Bergstein’s 1973 debut novel, through Anatole Broyard’s dismissive review, which I came across in some undirected archival wandering. His grating condescension spurred me to read the novel—one of the best minor rebellions I’ve ever undertaken. (Bergstein is best known for writing the movie Dirty Dancing.) “This is the story of two girls, each of whom suspected the other of a more passionate connection with life,” she writes of the protagonists, best friends Kitsy and Ila. The romance of their friendship holds together everything else: trips to Europe to collect experiences (which, of course, often disappoint), becoming or failing to become writers, love affairs and marriages and divorces, their idealistic campaigning for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. But Advancing Paul Newman is not simply a story of friendship, albeit one between two complicated women. The book is also gorgeously deranged and witty, told in fragments and leaps. “Don’t find me poignant, you ass,” Kitsy snaps at her ex when he happens upon her eating alone in a restaurant. After bad sex in Italy, she says matter-of-factly, “This was a good experience because now I know what it feels like to have my flesh crawl.” Ila is “glorious when in love, undistinguished when not in love,” and sleeps with two men on the day of Kitsy’s wedding. “There were reasons.” When she has a story accepted by The New Yorker, the proofs are returned with only one sentence intact: “Madam, the gentleman across the aisle is staring at my upper thighs.” The novel’s title comes from one of Kitsy and Ila’s duties in the McCarthy campaign: to arrive in advance at Paul Newman’s public appearances on behalf of McCarthy. They act as political fluffers, exciting the crowd and leaving for the next event just as Newman’s car pulls up. (Spoiler: they never meet him.) “Why in the world are you doing that, Miss Bergstein?” Broyard asked, frustrated, in his review. I think I know: the search for a passionate connection with life is chaotic; the lives of young women encompass more than a man thinks they should.  

—Elisa Gonzalez
Read Elisa Gonzalez’s entry in our annotated diary series on the Daily here. 

The Swedish novelist Lena Andersson is a genius at conveying characters whose minds have been so thoroughly consumed by idiosyncratic, self-serving logic that they just barely manage to keep up their attachments to other people. I read her newest novel, Son of Svea, late last year, and her 2013 novel, Willful Disregard, last week. The latter’s protagonist, Ester Nilsson, is a icon of limerence: after giving a lecture on a prominent artist, Hugo Rask, and sleeping with him during a week-long tryst, she allows their flickering relationship—which she insists is budding, full of anticipation—to become the predominant organizing principle of her life. Hugo is cold, flinty, and brusque, but to Ester, his unyielding communications are fodder for endless interpretation. I was reminded, while reading, of a quote from Adam Phillips that runs through my brain like an earworm: “Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.”

In our Spring issue, we published selections from Annie Ernaux’s 1988 diaries, which chronicle the affair that served as the basis for her memoir Simple Passion. To mark the occasion, the Review has begun asking writers and artists for pages from their diaries, along with brief postscripts.

Dear Levin,

No one wants to hear about your parrot. Even your dreams are more interesting. Even the word you stammer in search of to get across the precise nature of the pain in your stomach.

Almost ten years ago, I published a novel called Nevada with a small press called Topside that doesn’t exist anymore. You may or may not have heard of it, but if there are trans people in your life who are readers, they probably have. It became a subcultural Thing. It’s been out of print for a few years, but in June, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will bring it back into print.

People have called Nevada “ground zero for modern trans literature,” and while I get that—before it was published, I don’t think I’d read a novel with a trans character who I didn’t at least sort of hate—I don’t really feel like a genius visionary who invented literature centering marginalized experiences. At the very least, this idea occludes the work other people had done that made Nevada possible. So instead of celebrating myself, I want to use this opportunity to say thanks, and to think through some of the influences and experiences that shaped the novel.

FICTIONMANIA

At one point in Nevada, Maria mentions the “stupid 2002 internet.” At a Q&A following a reading on the 2013 book release tour, I was asked what that meant. I struggled to come up with a decent answer. We are so steeped in for-profit social media today that it’s hard to remember anything else. It wasn’t until the night after that reading, lying awake and beating myself up for not having a good answer, that I thought of a pretty good one. It is a website called Fictionmania. It’s still online. And if you’re hungry for that post-post-vaporwave retro “2002 internet” aesthetic, great news: it hasn’t updated its design since it came online in 1998.

While reading Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion, I often caught myself mistaking it for a diary. The memoir details an illicit affair in prose that feels startlingly immediate, full of particulars that seem to surface in real time: a skirt in a Benetton shop; a list of fortune-tellers in the telephone book; the faded lettering of a plaque that reads PASSAGE CARDINET, near where the author sought a clandestine abortion years before. Yet I was continually made aware that time had passed, and this was last year’s love seen through this year’s eyes: “From September last year,” Ernaux writes, near the beginning, “I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come around to my place.” The details of this “most violent and unaccountable reality” have been refracted and altered, distilled into a remarkable book.

I recently read A Girl’s Story, Ernaux’s 2020 memoir of another doomed and passionate love—her first, in the summer of 1958—and was struck by her description of the process by which she reconstructed her former self, the diligence with which she studiedthis young “girl of ’58.” Ernaux googles her summer-camp bunkmates and considers pretending to be a journalist so she can call them up and ask about herself. She looks at a photograph of her long-lost lover’s great-grandchildren. While reading an old diary, and letters she sent to a classmate, she recognizes certain falsenesses in them—pretensions, lies, self-deceptions. The quotations from books she copied down in 1958 now strike her as a more direct means of access to her state of mind then. All memoir involves time travel, and yet Ernaux, as she twists and turns, trying to cross the schisms between her various selves, manages to create what feels like a new tense—a literary time zone that can hold it all at once.

In our Spring issue, the Review published some of the source material on which Ernaux based Simple Passion: selections from her real diaries from 1988, which describe her affair with a married diplomat from the Soviet Union. Here is that violent and unaccountable reality, recorded at a distance of mere hours. Many entries are short, factual, engaged with the torment of love and logistics: “Last night he called. I was sleeping. He wanted to come around. Not possible. (Éric here.) Restless night, what to do with this desire?” Others are breathless and breezy: “I realized that I’d lost a contact lens. I found it on his penis. (I thought of Zola, who lost his monocle between the breasts of women.)” To read them is to encounter something like a pentimento, the revelation of writing underneath other writing—a quality that already suffuses so much of her work. We can, of course, marvel at what Ernaux was able to make of these entries in Simple Passion. But they offer their own distinct and potent pleasures, the rare, delightful, occasionally shocking intimacies of reading someone else’s private thoughts.

To mark the appearance of Ernaux’s diaries, the Review has been asking writers and artists to share pages from their own. Yesterday on our website, we published the first in the series: part of the poet Elisa Gonzalez’s 2018 journal, which documents the aftermath of an affair and a marriage. Reading them now, she, too, had some distance from this former self. “I used to accept, unquestioningly, that pleasure was fleeting,” she writes in a postscript. “but now I think it has an afterlife, during which we integrate it into all the griefs we also feel.”

These diaries feel like gifts, or offerings, that are unlike any other kind of writing. There is, as Ernaux herself writes in a brief introduction, “a truth in those pages that differed from the one to be found in Simple Passion—something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.”

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

“Barneys was more than a department store,” issue no. 239 contributor Adrienne Raphel reminisces in a new essay on the Daily. “A glowing spiral staircase, white as milk, wound its way through the store—the Guggenheim, but make it fashion.” This week, we’re unlocking an Art of Fiction interview with the bard of postwar American consumerism, Don DeLillo, as well as Zadie Smith’s story “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” Mary Ruefle’s account of shopping—as in shoplifting—at Woolworth’s in “Milk Shake,” and a series of photographs taken of Paris’s legendary market, Les Halles, in the sixties.

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, poems, and art portfolios, why not subscribe to The Paris Review? You’ll get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 135
Don DeLillo

In our Spring issue, we published selections from Annie Ernaux’s 1988 diaries, which chronicle the affair that served as the basis for her memoir Simple Passion. To mark the occasion, the Review has begun asking writers and artists for pages from their diaries, along with brief postscripts.

July 13, 2018

I was up all night and it’s afternoon now. Maybe writing this will let me go to sleep. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been awake for six months. Longer? In Cyprus I felt like I never slept. Even when I did my body felt impatient, braced, alert, waiting for the knock of the cat’s paws on the bedroom door at 5 A.M. I would be out of bed before she could start mewing for food. “Acutely, terribly awake,” I wrote in a poem I’m still trying to finish. She knew I was an easy mark, looking for an escape into the day. I saw nearly every sunrise from my window onto the garden. The bougainvillea. “I want to make love to everyone who’s ever lived,” I wrote in the same unfinished poem. An unwise wish, and a lie, of course, if taken literally—but the feeling. What was I trying to ask for? Pleasure. Recompense from the world. Surprise. The end of desire. Something.

And now I’m a sad woman, apparently; sleeplessness is entirely changed, desire’s not ended but it holds hands with pain. He does not come to me because he does not want to come, and not for any other reason. It’s all very boring, this recitation. Last night it rained horribly but even so I forced myself to go to Chelsea for dinner with J. and her friend Y., who has one of those jobs I always want when I find out they exist. He’s an expert on repairing antique, or simply old, sound equipment. I envy expertise that seems both useful and specific. And like you had to actually do something to acquire it, like it’s not just blather. J. was late, so I had to make conversation with Y. while he finished a blueberry galette. The galette was a godsend, actually, since I had just listened to his complaints about how blueberries are an inferior fruit, tasteless, and the only reason he was making this was because J. had requested it. And then, after I had enough wine to feel like talking, J. arrived, and everything improved as they sparred the way old friends do. I didn’t eat enough for Y.’s satisfaction, so he chided me and then forgave me after I ate more galette, and then he started playing records on a record player so beautiful I didn’t want to go near it, and then J. got out the molly and coke. We took a signed photo of a famous musician off the wall to do lines off of, now I don’t remember who, but Y. joked “he’d approve” so it was probably Keith Richards or someone like that. I saw K. R. joke once about how his ghostwriter did all the work on his memoir. It sounds like a relief to have someone translate, or invent, your memories, to tell your life story so you can read it.

My mother is a Renaissance historian who specializes in Venice and paintings of breastfeeding; her books and articles have subtitles like “Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture” and “Squeezing, Squirting, Spilling Milk.” I have an early memory of her taking me to a Venetian church to see Tintoretto’s Presentation of the Virgin, a depiction of a three-year-old Mary being brought before the priest at the Temple of Jerusalem. The child Mary is shockingly small. Dwarfed by a stone obelisk carved with faint hieroglyphs, she ascends a set of huge, circular steps inlaid with abstract golden swirls. Onlookers crowd around, including three sets of fleshy women with children who dominate the scene and who, my mother explained to me, are likely wet-nurses. Breastfeeding women are often allegories of caritas: Christian care. This vision of femininity—as carnal, and as both literally and figuratively nurturing—reappears, centuries later, virtually unchanged, as the central conceit of Cecilia Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams.” In her selections, the woman’s body once again serves as a breeding-ground for personal and political metaphors, and the artist’s relation to her own embodiment as cornerstone of her creative practice.

Alemani’s show, which includes an unprecedented eighty percent women artists from the highest number of nations in the Biennale’s history, was wide-ranging, surprising, and often exciting. But the corporeal interpretive framework that “Milk of Dreams” insists on was disappointing in its failure to imagine (imagination being another theme of the show) a new future for feminine forms of expression. The description for every single subcategory of the main exhibition references “hybrid bodies,” “corps orbite,” “somatic complexity,” et cetera. Even the work described to me as “abstract” was mostly vaguely suggestive of womblike figures. There was a lot of fan art dedicated to Donna Haraway, whose “Cyborg Manifesto” once offered a revolutionary vision of embodiment—but was published nearly forty years ago. If the work wasn’t thematically body-related, it likely involved a textile, a well-known medium for women (often worn on bodies). And though many of the “leaves, gourds, shells, nets, bags, slings, sacks, bottles, pots, boxes, containers” (this is the actual title of one of these sub-exhibitions) were really quite cool, it’s frustrating to be told to relate to oneself solely as some version of a clay pot, even a subverted one.

Among the artworks less mired in the biomorphic, I liked: Jessie Homer French’s paintings of climate disaster transposed into flat, Wes Andersonian landscapes, including one in which pixel-like stealth bombers glide over desert shrubs and windmills; Monira Al Qadiri’s shimmering, slowly rotating, jewel-toned sculptures inspired by the Gulf region’s “petro-culture,” which resemble rococo drill bits hypertrophied into palaces; a sensorial maze by Delcy Morelos, made out of dense cubes of soil, cacao, and spices, which was somehow both comforting and uncanny; and Jamian Juliano Villani’s painting of a traffic light submerged in a whirlpool of foliage. Her goat wearing UGGs was great, too, and perhaps the only nod towards the girly in the show. There’s a video by the Chinese artist Shuang Li, which seems to be narrated by human (?) manifestations of digital images or pixels, in a series of surreal statements formulated with the narrative simplicity of religious or mythological texts. The strangest sequence features a chubby white girl illuminated by a fluorescent ring light eating chicken fingers (perhaps our Mary at the temple), whose moving image simultaneously tunnels into and spirals out of itself, until the ring light appears to be the entrance to a psychedelic well, or a black hole (of YouTube).

Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which opened at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, continued to work on me long after I’d emerged from the theatre into the megawatted midtown Manhattan night. The play’s world—much like the white, rightwing, Catholic, intellectual milieu of Arbery’s upbringing in Bush-era Dallas—wasn’t something I’d seen onstage before. We meet Arbery’s cast of five characters seven years out from an education of Plato and archery at an ultra-strict religious college. They hunger for passion, touch, reason, the pain and vitality of others, and for one another. They are characters to be reckoned with, if kept at a careful distance. 

Arbery’s latest work, Corsicana, an excerpt of which appears in the Spring issue of The Paris Review, is a different kind of play, one that invites you in rather than takes you over. It is about gifts, the making of art, and, more poignantly, the sharing of it. Named for the town in Texas where the play is set, Corsicana opens in the home of Ginny, a woman in her midthirties with Down syndrome, and her slightly younger half brother, Christopher, who are grieving the recent death of their mother. Ginny has been feeling sad, depressed maybe, and Justice, a godmother figure to the siblings, introduces them to Lot, a musician and artist who uses discarded materials to create sculptures that he rarely shows anyone. Lot got a graduate degree in experimental mathematics, and, as he tells Christopher, succeeded in proving the existence of God, although he threw the proof away. “Art’s a better delivery system,” he says. 

Arbery’s dialogue has an unnerving way of being at once caustically funny and prophetic; perhaps it’s no surprise that he is much in demand as a writer for television and film. Earlier this month, I called him in London, where he was working as a consultant on season four of Succession, a series that I, from my sofa in Brooklyn, was struggling, without much success, to resist rewatching. 

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Actor LeVar Burton will be hosting the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee. The spelling bee started in 1925 and aims to help students “learn concepts and develop correct English usage that will help them all their lives.”

The choice of host comes naturally as Burton is a lifelong advocate for children’s literacy and was the former host and executive producer for PBS’ Reading Rainbow as well as last year’s fan favorite for becoming the new Jeopardy! host.

Over 200,000 people watched live last year as 14-year-old Zaila Avant-garde from New Orleans became the first Black American to be named the spelling bee champion, winning a $50,000 prize.

This year, the semifinals and finals will air live on June 1st and 2nd, respectively, and take place near Washington, D.C. It can be viewed on the ION, Bounce, and LAFF networks.

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Docile by K. M. Szpara for $2.99

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The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen for $2.99

Killing November by Adriana Mather for $1.99

Iredell-Statesville Schools in central North Carolina have dealt with near nonstop book challenges and read-alouds over the last six months during school board meetings. Moms For Liberty has a large and vocal presence in the community, and that group led the efforts to challenge 75 books in the district.

One of the leaders of the book challenges has made a name for herself by harassing the school administration and by attempting to break into one of the local middle schools to take photos of two particular books she said she “knew” were in the collection. Paula Mimnaugh has been a staple at Iredell School Board meetings since last summer. She proudly wears a Moms For Liberty shirt, and she’s shown up at other school board meetings in her area. At one, she tied wearing masks to Marxism. She was aghast she was not allowed to just enter the school library and look for books.

The Iredell-Statesville school district came to a decision in mid-April about the list of challenged books. Fewer than 12 books will be reviewed, including Lawn Boy, All Boys Aren’t Blue, Ask Me How I Got Here, Another Day, Out of Darkness, Blankets, Flamer, George, and Girl Mans Up. A full list has yet to be released.

At the latest school district meeting, Iredell’s board took a new approach to responding to public comments about books. As people queued up to speak — several of whom planned to continue reading passages from books they disagreed with aloud, with the requisite caveat that young people in the audience should leave because the content was not appropriate for minors — the board chair asked the speaker once they began whether or not they had filed a formal reconsideration for the book.

As the first speaker approached the mic wearing her Kelli Moore for North Carolina shirt (Kelli Moore is a tea party affiliated candidate and involved with the “Mama Bears,” another group akin to Moms For Liberty), the board chair Todd Carver asked if she’d filed a formal complaint over the book.

I’ve been learning lessons from literature for as long as I’ve been able to read. Actually, come to think of it, I’ve been learning lessons from literature for longer than that – my parents used to read me bedtime stories, and I always fell asleep to fairytale audiobooks. You know, the ones that came on cassette tape? The dark ages, if you will. Those lessons have stuck: for one thing, if your prospective mother-in-law tries to make you climb a gazillion mattresses to prove that you’re good enough for her son, just assume she’ll be insufferable all her life and move on.

Anyway.

Once I did learn how to read, the world of sources to learn from expanded. This wasn’t always a good thing, mind you. I read a lot of classic children’s books that were rife with problematic content. I was a child who thought that books were all but sacred, so it meant a lot of unlearning as I grew older and learned to think for myself. It also meant that I tried to do a lot of weird things – weird, at least, for a person whose age was in the single digits. I wrote a will (in a notebook, with a number 2 pencil) at the age of 8 because Amy March did so in Little Women. Needless to say, my mother started monitoring my reading more closely after that. Who knew what else I’d try to emulate.

Some of my most memorable life lessons, however, I’ve found in the Brontë sisters’ books, Anne Brontë’s in particular. I’ve written previously about why I love her so, and I still stand by it. Sadly, Anne, like her siblings, died young, with only a couple of completed works. What these novels lack in quantity, though, they make up for in quality. Both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are incredible books that I reread regularly, and I’ve learned a lot from them. Shall we go over some of these life lessons from Anne Brontë?

Lesson #1: You Can’t Change People

In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen, the protagonist, falls in love with a man whose values don’t match hers. However, Helen is convinced that she can change him. It’s a common misconception, of course, especially considering that Helen is a sheltered 18-year-old girl, and Arthur Huntingdon, the man in question, is almost a decade older. Helen learns this lesson at horrifying speed when she finds herself trapped in an abusive marriage with no legal recourse.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the Koreadathon, a readathon put together by two BookTubers: monica kim and books with chloe. Long story short, I loved it (it was my first readathon ever). But that’s not quite why I’m here. The readathon challenged participants to read a manhwa, graphic novel or webtoon from a Korean author. I’m already familiar with manhwa and webtoons. So I beelined towards the graphic novels and found a tiny but amazing corner of stories that I just have to share. During that week I just read one graphic novel. But choosing only one was such a hard decision because there are several amazing Korean graphic novels out there. Most of which I’ve compiled in this handy list for you!

I just want to add a few more things before I start with the list of Korean graphic novels. Most of these are stories are translated from Korean (by the same translator). But I threw in a couple that aren’t, that I still consider good fits for this list. For example, one of them was originally written in Swedish by an author who was adopted from Korea, which is actually what the graphic novel is about. Additionally, there are other Korean graphic novels out there as well, including from several of the same authors I’m mentioning below. So this list is by no means all there is of Korean graphic novels at all.

Without further ado, let’s get into it!

8 of the Best Korean Graphic Novels