I’m a year-round reader, an everyday bookworm. Reading as essential to me as food, yet summer reading is the season I get most excited about. It likely harkens back to my childhood when my entertainment options were limited to the bookshelf and the public library, and then later in high school, required reading. As a forever student, I still hold on to aspects of the required reading during summer break, which includes one classic. This June I reread Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence,” and while I know it was required for a freshman-year literature class I couldn’t recall anything about the book. So, curling up, usually in my hammock (elbowing for room with my kiddos whose radars signal whenever I have a minute to myself) I reconnected with New York’s Gilded Age. I’m proud to have checked off my classic so early in the summer and recently, in a bit of ambitious gloat, I purchased “Moby Dick,” a book I actually have not read. But I might have bitten off more than I can chew.
Beyond my self-imposed classics requirement, my required reading for the summer is a mix of one or two titles selected from a roundup of the season’s most anticipated release, plus several fun, nonserious, non-whaling Captain Ahab books. I spent the Fourth of July at my family’s cabin in northern Michigan and discovered a new-to-me Montana author hiding on one of the bookshelves: James Lee Burke.
While I’m a voracious and ambitious reader, there are certain types of books that I don’t gravitate toward and those are mysteries and thrillers. I’m a scaredy-cat and even trailers for horror movies terrify me. I’ve tried reading mysteries and have found some palatable, like those of the great Agatha Christie, but by and large, I pass over that section at a bookstore. Truly my loss, because James Lee Burke, the 87-year-old bestselling publishing juggernaut from Missoula, wasn’t an author I was ever clued into because he’s considered a mystery writer. On the highest reaches of the cabin’s bookshelf, I found “Feast Day of Fools,” one of the Sherriff Holland novel series, and felt compelled, as I do with most Montana authors, to give it a try, despite the body count.
I carried that novel with me everywhere in case a rare moment of reprieve would allow me to return to the brutal southwestern Texas border town where Sheriff Holland is confronted with the loss of his wife and the return of Preacher Jack Collins, a serial murderer whom Holland knows all too well. I couldn’t put the novel down, and now I’ve added Burke’s massive title list to my towering to-be-read list. Genre categorization is a tricky thing in the book world, sometimes important and good, and other times, in the case of Burke, too narrowing. And as a lifelong reader and book critic, I should know better.
My list of summer reading continues to swell, as it does and as it should because there is always a great next read, but perhaps “Moby Dick” will get shoved to next summer. I think I need to spend a bit more time with Sheriff Holland or check out Burke’s Dave Robicheaux novels. There could be worse problems, other than competing with two budding readers for the hammock. So, it’ll likely be a combination of Percy Jackson and the Magic Treehouse books with the kids and a bone-chilling mystery for me. Good thing the cold-bloodedness of Burke’s characters will be tempered in the heat.
Maggie Doherty is a writer and book reviewer who lives in Kalispell with her family.