Welcome to Off the Clock — where we step away from the urgent and indulge the enduring.
Every other Saturday, I send a private note to subscribers exploring the curious corners of language, history, and the words we think we know—but don’t.
““Read to live,” says Flaubert somewhere in his letters, and I take him at his word. Books I regard as voyages of discovery, and with an author I admire I gladly book passage to any and all points of view or destination—to Rome during the lives of the Caesars, to Shakespeare’s London, to Berlin and Harlem in the 1920s. I don’t go in search of the lost gold mine of imperishable truth. I look instead to find the present in the past, the past in the present. To discover within myself the presence of a once and future human being.”
— Lewis H. Lapham, 2020
It has become the custom, around this time of year, to issue advice to graduates — most of it well-meant, much of it forgotten by autumn, none of it likely to alter the trajectory of a life already underway.
The more interesting question, born from lazy summer days of childhood but perhaps forgotten in our all-season screen-driven fervor, is: What is summer itself meant to do?
We are handed three months in which the structure of the school year, or of the working calendar, loosens slightly; whatever else those months are for, they ought to be for reading.
In years long past, a weekly visit to our town library, high on a hill, would result in stacks of books — vividly recall stacks of books, ten or twelve at a time — coming home with me and returning the next week as I prepared to find more favorites. It was not a question of whether it would happen; it was a welcome habit. Reading was part of summer life.
The case for reading — sustained, slow, in books, for no reason other than the books themselves — is not nostalgia. It is the only case anyone has ever made for what the humanities are, and the only one that has ever been worth making.
This entry from The Ways of a Gentleman gives you a summer reading list, which is filled with some timeless entries:
Meditations — Marcus Aurelius
Legacy — James Kerr
We Were Soldiers Once… and Young — Harold G. Moore & Joseph L. Galloway
The Boys in the Boat — Daniel James Brown
The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway
Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson
1776 — David McCullough
Washington: A Life — Ron Chernow
A Gentleman in Moscow — Amor Towles
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
What other titles would you add?
In the spirit of not taking much of your time on the weekend, I have some additional reading, in the form of three pieces from the Timeless & Timely archives on what reading is and what it does:
These essays, taken together, are an argument for what to do with the long warm months ahead. Read deliberately. Read what does not pay you back immediately. Read what you do not have to.
What you read when you don’t have to, as the old line goes, determines what you will be when you can’t help it.
There’s so much to learn,
P.S.
You can browse our recommended titles on Amazon and Bookshop.org
My Antonia by Willa Cather, The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett, That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx.
Always at least one Dickens and if I suggest one it’s always Martin Chuzzlewitt. The best.