At the tail end of last year, Tingle Alley’s readers shared the names of books they felt deserved more attention in 2004. Getting my own vote in the nonfiction category was Peter Turchi’s wonderful Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. The director of the Warren Wilson MFA program, here in Asheville, Turchi is the co-editor of two other books, The Story Behind the Story and Bringing The Devil To His Knees.

On the coffee table (for afternoons) is C.J. Hribal’s new novel, The Company Car. I’m about 3/4 of the way through it. What I most admire about CJ’s work is its emotional honesty; though the publisher is, understandably, promoting it as funny, it’s a remarkably open-eyed investigation of the pains of family life, and of married life. On the edge of the tub (so being read in bits and pieces) is Barbara Greene’s (Graham’s cousin) Too Late to Turn Back, her version of the trip they took together to Liberia in the 1930’s (this spring I read Graham’s Journey Without Maps, his version of the story, which includes some of the most memorable passages I’ve read in years). On the top of the stack on my dresser (so the last thing I read at night) is Charles D’Ambrosio’s recent collection of essays, Orphans; he’s very smart, he writes wonderful prose, and he resists being clever or mocking in the self-congratulatory way that some other literary essayists have been, recently. Beneath it, so strong contenders for August, are Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (finally), Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story (which I’ll bet you my wife steals from the pile; she’s a much faster reader than I am), Jean Thompson’s story collection Who Do You Love, and Pagan Kennedy’s The Exes. We got spoiled by all the wonderful bakeries in Oslo, so on the kitchen counter is Bernard Clayton’s New Complete Book of Breads — as soon as I pick up a reliable thermometer, I’m putting it to use. And I’m reading two novels in manuscript: Richard Schmitt’s (The Aerialist) Kodiak, which doesn’t have a publisher yet, and Robert Boswell’s new novel, which will probably come out from Knopf next year.

That’s my excuse for putting off Harry Potter, not to mention Don Quixote, even though all the talk about the 400th anniversary has me thumbing through it….

* I heard about Maps, however, by way of New Hampshire, thanks to a review at The Mumpsimus. Also check out this nice write-up of a Turchi reading at Conversational Reading.

Laura Lippman’s latest mystery, To the Power of Three, is due out July 1 from William Morrow. Chicago Sun-Times has called it “the best mystery novel of 2005 so far.” Tingle Alley loved it too.

I’ll be touring this summer, which means lots of time to read but with a profound bias toward paperbacks. Plus, I’ll be going to bookstores, which means I’ll inevitably acquire more books. And I have a manuscript “for my consideration” as the blurbing game goes.

I plan to split my reading between books in and out of my own genre. Out — Home Land, Niagara Falls All Over Again, Crooked River Burning — trade paperbacks already on my shelves that have gone unread through no fault of their own. Inside my genre, I want to catch up with some newish writers — John Rickards, Kevin Wignall, Stuart McBride — and go back for the work of two women I’m embarrassed not to have read, Louise Welch and Denise Mina. Also, I’m keen to read Mark Billingham’s Lifeless, although it’s only available in the UK edition. (Yes, this choice of British writers in my field is quite deliberate, as I’m in the delicate stage of writing my own book and I’m less likely to imitate their voices.) And now that you’ve endorsed Project X, I want that, too. [Yeah, we’re now pretty much handselling Project X door to door. Did we mention it’s available in handsome paperback? READ IT! READ IT! — ed.]

My most recent reads were Freakonomics and The Wonder Spot and I loved both. I’m struggling a bit with Saturday, which makes me feel stupid and lowbrow, but I’ve made it to page 150 and am determined to finish. So beautifully written, but . . . a five-page description of a racquetball game? Is it McEwan’s game plan to make me yearn for the reappearance of the menacing Baxter and his red BMW, then feel guilty for needing some outburst of violence to propel me through a day in a man’s life? If so — well done! I did love the passage about Perowne’s poet daughter and poet father-in-law and their falling out. And the bit about meeting Tony Blair.

RELATED:
• Tingle Alley effuses over Project X; Robert Birnbaum interviews its author, Jim Shepard.
• James Wood reviews Saturday. The five-page racquetball scene pisses him off too.
• A profile of Louise Welch, and one of Denise Mina — both from Glasgow.

Critic Michael Gorra’s most recent book is The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany. He also chairs the English department at Smith College. (A fun fact of interest to at least three of you (two of you?): Like Dan Chiasson and me, Gorra is a former student of William H. Pritchard. It’s like a cult, a Johnson Chapel-based cult.)

Summer reading—I guess that phrase doesn’t include the stuff I have to look at for something I’m working on. So that lets out Moby Dick and Cormac McCarthy and a shelf of Conrad criticism, all of which I’ve enjoyed. (Moby Dick is much much weirder than I remembered, which could either mean that I know more than I did in grad school, or that my taste has become more conventional; probably both.) Beyond that, I’ve got a little stack of recent novels, though nothing terribly surprising—Gilead, Never Let Me Go, and The Known World. So far I’ve only read the first, which is just about as good as all the prizes etc. might make one hope. It’s not long but I read it slowly, in 10-15 page sections, and that seemed to fit the central fiction that the book is a letter composed over a period of time. I also use summers to read classics that lie outside my usual beat. This year I hope to read a bit of Zola, either The Kill or La Debacle, and also Giorgio Bassani’s Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Already I’ve been reading Elizabeth Bowen, to whom I’ve never done justice before, and have pretty much decided to teach The Heat of the Day next spring. Both it and The Death of the Heart end with a kind of terrifying abruptness, as though there ought to be more chapters. Or rather I want more, and yet also accept the rightness of not having it. But you know what? Summer is also about irresponsibility, about going to the office in shorts and dropping all your plans to follow a whim, and I wouldn’t bet against my spending late July with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

RELATED:
• Guest essayist Joy Neaves writes an appreciation of Gilead for Tingle Alley.
• Over at Bookdwarf’s, you can listen to an audio file of Michael Gorra and James Wood speaking in honor of the Graham Greene centennial. Good stuff.

The first in a new series in which people share what they’re reading and recommending this summer.

Dan Chiasson is a poet and critic as well as an old pal of Tingle Alley’s. His (phenomenal) first book of poems is The Afterlife of Objects. His next, Natural History, is forthcoming from Knopf in fall of 2005.

The first thing everyone must read this summer is Frank Bidart’s book Star Dust. Very few works of art give the feeling of permanence on a first or second reading, but this one does. Very few books of poems compel and enthrall by such a variety of means, including shock (there is a passage in the long poem from the volume, “The Third Hour of the Night,” that is perhaps the single most disturbing thing I have ever read); abstract thought (about art and artifacts, about the workings of desire, about poetry and its use and misuse, and centrally about the human drive to make); tenderness (the ferocious heart at the center of this book is also very naked and vulnerable); lyricism (read the title poem, among the most sumptuous lyric poems you’ll read)… I could go on. I’m reading other things this summer: Michael Schmidt’s wonderful The First Poets about nearly forgotten ancient Greek lyric poets; David Ferry’s Georgics; and the galleys of a new book on Henry Adams by Gary Wills. But the Bidart book is the main thing. If I had the money, I would buy it for you.

RELATED:
• Adam Travis interviewed Frank Bidart for the June issue of Bookslut.
• Read “The Third Hour of the Night.”
• Read a selection of Bidart’s earlier poems here.