What We’re Reading: Summer Edition

Summer reading plans and aspirations from the New Yorker staff. This is the first of a two-part post.

Packing my bag for a week away, and here’s what’s going in it: Colm Tóibín’s irresistibly titled “New Ways to Kill Your Mother,” a book of literary essays, to enlighten me; the great Janet Malcolm’s new collection, “Forty-One False Starts,” to inspire me, and Rachel Kushner’s “The Flamethrowers,” before I’m absolutely the last person I know to read it. I’m also eager to read Susan Choi’s new novel, “My Education,” which looks delicious.

—Rebecca Mead

Right now I am halfway through “El Hombre Que Amaba a Los Perros,” a novel by the Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura Fuentes. It’s a big, ambitious novel based on the story of Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, who ended his days in Cuba after spending twenty years in prison following Trotsky’s murder. Padura is Cuba’s most successful living author and the book won him the country’s national literature prize last year. It will be published here under the title “The Man Who Loved Dogs” early next year.

I am also about to finish the galley proofs of another novel, “At Night We Walk in Circles” by the immensely talented Peruvian-American author Daniel Alarcón (whose stories have been published in The New Yorker.) The book comes out in October.

The other books on my next-up list for this summer include: “Violentology,” a rather extraordinary book, very large format, with black-and-white photos and words by the American photo-journalist Stephen Ferry. It tells the story of Colombia’s conflict, now winding down, that began many decades ago.

I will also read the first-ever English-language edition of “Operation Massacre” by the late Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh. Regarded as a pioneering work of narrative journalism as well as of true crime, “Operación Masacre” as it was originally titled, tells the story of the massacre of a dozen or so political suspects by the Argentine police in 1956. The story is an uncanny foretelling of the repression to come in Argentina, and in Walsh’s own life; he was disappeared by the military in 1977, a day after publishing his now-famous “Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta.”

I am also hoping to read two more big books, both big histories, by the end of August: William Dalrymple’s “Return of a King.” It’s Dalrymple’s most ambitious book yet, about the first disastrous invasion of Afghanistan by the nineteenth-century British. And, last but not least, an epic undertaking: “Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East,” by my brother Scott Anderson. It comes out in August.

—Jon Lee Anderson

I’m reading “War and Peace” as I travel through the Middle East. It’s a battered Signet Classic paperback, copyright 1968, translated by Ann Dunnigan. The covers, fraying and crumbling, cling to the rest of the book with the aid of of scotch tape. John Bayley’s introduction has broken from the binder completely, along with the first thirty-two pages.

I’m on page four hundred and sixty-nine, which means I have only nine-hundred eighty-six pages to go. (Pierre and Andrei have just met on Andrei’s estate, Bogucharovo, and are having a philosophical argument about the utility of trying to do good in the world.) I’m in Tel Aviv, and headed, soon enough, to, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon: war here, peace there. I wonder whether my copy can survive the journey.

People considering reading “War and Peace” are justifiably terrified by its length; it is eight-hundred thousand words long. But readers should not be daunted by Tolstoy’s prose, which is clear and simple. “War and Peace” is a fast read. Here’s a sample from page four hundred and fifty-seven. Andrei, wounded while fighting Napoleon’s invasion, has just returned home to witness the birth of his son and the death of his wife. He has resolved not to return to the front. Here he is alone with sister, Marya, and his baby boy.

Prince Andrei looked at his sister. In the dim shadow of the canopy her luminous eyes shone more brilliantly than usual, filled as they were with tears of joy. She leaned over to her brother and kissed him, slightly catching the curtains of the crib. Each made the other a warning sign and stood still in the dim light of the canopy, as if unwilling to leave the seclusion where they three were alone, shut off from all the world. Prince Andrei was the first to move away, ruffling his hair against the curtains.

“Yes, this is the one thing left to me now,” he said with a sigh.

—Dexter Filkins

“Religion and the Decline of Magic,” by Keith Thomas; “Rome,” by Robert Hughes; “Eat the Document,” by Dana Spiotta, “Dear Life,” by Alice Munro; some Elmore Leonard.

I don’t read beach books—I wish I did—but I don’t get to the beach much. So what I read during the summer is the same kind of thing that I read during the rest of the year. Very often, I go by word-of-mouth, depending on the mouth.

—Joan Acocella