The Library
Tove Jansson’s 'The Summer Book' + my recommended reading
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For the past couple of years, I’ve run a book group here on Substack, sharing a classic book every month or so. This has often felt a bit unwieldy (especially for people who don’t want to join in) (which is the majority of people), so I’m finding a new home for it here.
Every month, I’ll recommend a book that helps to define The Clearing, and perhaps some supporting reading too. There will be an invitation to read along if you want to, albeit a slightly gentler one. But I’ll also share the new books and proofs that have stacked up by my reading chair (only the good ones) and the articles that have snared my attention. And I’m desperate to know what you’re reading, too.
I am forever conscious that we’re a community of readers here, and I hope you’ll enjoy this expansion of our shared love of words and ideas. Onwards…
Publications & Proofs
Great new books I’ve read lately:
The Fullness of Time: Marking the Day by Birdsong, Blooms, Shadows and Stars by Cathy Haynes
The Book of Mysteries: Wild Time and the Ritual Year by Rebecca Tamás
Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain by Zakia Sewell
The Sleepless Ape: The Story of Sleep in Human Evolution by David R. Samson
Arachnomania: Spiders and the Cultural Work They Do For Us by Maria Tatar
When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard
The Land and Its People by David Sedaris
Receipts from a Bookshop by Katie Clapham
Selah: A Bayo Akomolafe Reader edited by Eden Pearlstein
Proofs I’ve read that are coming very soon:
How to be Hopeful by Caitlin Moran
The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men by Jon Ronson
Zen and Ghibli: Life Lessons for Lasting Happiness from the Legendary Studio by Toshio Suzuki
Essays & Articles
Backsliding: on the paradox of willpower, an essay about Simone Weil, addiction and the experience of self-control by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Susanna Clarke on how narrative can shape our experience of illness
Milking it: inside America’s lactation rooms
Driving Mr Albert: a trip across America with Einstein’s brain by Michael Paterniti
Walking in the Shadows: Britain’s Corpse Roads
The Art of Intensive Care by Elinor Cleghorn
The body’s newly-identified system, the interstitium
The Library Read
What else could I choose this month, but The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. It’s frankly baffling to me that we haven’t talked about it already. Often described as a novel, it’s more of a series of vignettes across a long summer spent on the archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. A girl and her grandmother go about their daily lives, both silently mourning the girl’s mother. Their conversations are frank, funny, grumpy and deceptively simple. More often than not, they’re circling the topic of mortality, and how we can possibly come to understand it.
It’s the kind of book you can read in an afternoon, but which you’ll think about for the rest of your life. The setting is based on Klovharun, the island where Tove and her partner Tutti lived every summer - to learn more about that, I highly recommend Notes from an Island translated by Thomas Teal, a collection of their writing and paintings about their time on their beloved skerry. Letters from Tove, an anthology of Jansson’s correspondence, captures more of the thoughts and experiences that fed this extraordinary book. But you don’t need any background reading to love this book. It more than speaks for itself.
Who’s reading with me? Paid subscribers can join us on Chat next week to share your thoughts as you read, and catch up with the conversation in a post.
& Finally
What have you been reading lately? I love to know! Please share your recommended books and articles in the comments.
Take care,
Katherine
The Colophon
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Recently read the wonderful A Thousand Feasts by Nigel Slater - a delightful smorgasbord of snippets and fragments from diaries and reflections, like wandering through a culinary and garden sensory-scape.
Thanks for the recommendation re: Tove Jansson, I'm going to check it out! I just finished reading The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout for a book group and Whistler by Ann Patchett for pleasure. Now I'm reading Killers of the Flower Moon -- I like to try and keep a good balance between fiction and nonfiction.