For many, warm weather means summer reading, whether you’re vacationing, enjoying more leisure time, or you just enjoy reading at home. “City Lights” gathered recommendations from writer Matt Nixon, also a bookseller at A Capella Books. He joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to share his curated list of great reads for the summer.
Highlights from Matt Nixon’s summer reading picks:
“A Tiny Upward Shove” by Melissa Chadburn – “It’s remarkable, and I’d even go so far as to say it’s not only the best thing I’ve read this year – I don’t know that I’ve read five better things over the last several years,” Nixon attested. “There’s no way I’ll do justice to the beauty and grace that exists within these pages…. Our main character is a young woman named Marina Salles, and it opens at the moment of her death at the hands of another person, of a man. And as she’s dying, we take on the viewpoint of what we come to find out is the ‘eswang’ …. It’s a Filipino myth of the spirit, and we’re guided then through Marina’s life, three generations of women.”
“Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel – “It’s wonderful. It’s life affirming. She’s gotten a lot of press of recent; her 2014 novel… ‘Station Eleven,’ was long-listed for the National Book Award,” said Nixon. “[‘Sea of Tranquility’ is] a bit of a time-hopping narrative structure, but what really gives it resonance is that one of the areas that the book is in takes place in 2203, and there is an author who wrote a best-selling book about a life in a pandemic…. It really speaks to our times and what it means to live through a pandemic, and the hope and the joy of life that can still happen, and what happens after that. And it’s really meaningful in that way, but it’s just a ripping yarn too.”
“Young Mungo” by Douglas Stuart – “For those who read… his 2020 Booker Prize-winner ‘Shuggie Bain…’ it’s a lot of the same milieu; that hard-scrabble Thatcher-era Glasgow. It’s got a real tactile sense of place, and just the sadness and the futility…. The shipbuilding jobs have left, and there’s just a lot of desperation in the air,” Nixon said. “In the midst of all of this you have Mungo, who has a torn-up, separated family, an alcoholic mother. And he finds a neighbor, James, who’s Catholic, and it becomes a friendship that’s bonded over racing pigeons, and then they begin to discover what those feelings might be – and they’re forbidden. It’s just a wonderful story of the flower in the cracked sidewalk – that hope can exist in such a toxic place.”
