Extend Your Summer With A Beach Read

The Summer We Read Gatsby

By Danielle Ganek

Extend your summer delights with this beach read.  It’s a quick trip out to Southampton, and then weeks languishing by the sunny shore.  Two sisters, with very different mothers, share memories of a beloved Aunt Lydia and their summer visits to her beach home.  Eccentric Aunt Lydia has now passed away.  The two sisters are very different women, one quietly practical and the other a larger than life romantic.  They meet for a few weeks at Fool’s House, so named long ago by Lydia, to pack it up and sell it.  Or, can they revive it?  They find that there’s little they agree on.

Aunt Lydia’s will had been written in the flowery words she’d loved all her creative life.  The will included that she’d bequeathed her house and all its contents to her beloved nieces.  She was quite specific that they spend a month in Southampton together in the summer and seek a “thing of utmost value” from within this cherished place.  So here they are, like it or not.  Can they at least cooperate well enough to uncover this hidden value?

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator Nick Carraway remarks, “You can’t repeat the past.”  It was Gatsby who answers, “Why of course you can.”  These sisters immerse themselves in the eccentric life, traditions, and romance of the house and friends they thought they knew from so many summers ago.  Over these few weeks they find out how little they did know.  Now they learn so much about this place, its character, and each other.

It’s hard to resist a book that starts, “Hats, like first husbands in my experience, are usually a mistake.”  This Summer starts with an extravagant Gatsby-style party, introduces some memorable characters, follows clues to a mysterious stolen painting, along with a stolen first edition of The Great Gatsby, reveals romantic games, and also a secret about Aunt Lydia.  Then, like most summers it ends all too soon.

This is Danielle Ganek’s second novel.  Although American, the author spent most of her childhood in Brazil and then in Lausanne, Switzerland.  She says she always felt like a foreigner, even when she returned to the U.S. at 16.  “Being a perpetual outsider made me a constant observer and I began writing as a child,” she says.  “I’m a fiction writer.  I’m a big believer in our ability as readers to suspend our disbelief.” 

Thereby hangs a tale . . . .

Jimmy Carter's Full Life

A Full Life

Reflections at Ninety

By Jimmy Carter

“Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be,” this quote from Robert Browning, could be a great description of this optimistic book by our thirty-ninth President, Jimmy Carter.  I was privileged to briefly meet the President, when he was at Third Place Books signing this 29^th book he’s authored.  His warmth, humor and optimism comes through immediately in person, as it does in this book.

Jimmy Carter at 90 reflects back on his full life, and the reader is treated to an in-depth description of the events and people who shaped his life actions and decisions.  It seems he’s packed several lifetimes into one, and as he quipped to one of the people at the book signing, “I’m not done yet.”

He was born in 1924, and I enjoyed reading about his childhood in rural Georgia, a life very foreign to what I’m used to.  There were many parts of his life that I wasn’t aware of, and it was interesting to see, in hindsight, what he felt led him into the next stages of his life.  His time in the Navy was riveting, and how he came to the decision to return to Plains, Georgia to be a Peanut Farmer and business man.  His caring for the people in his community is what led him to government office, beginning locally.  His election campaigns really showed his personal connection made with the electorate.  It also gave a glimpse from comparison how very different times have become.

The strength of his convictions carried him through a tough, and also incredibly giving and meaningful life.  I was fascinated by the information about his Presidency, what he felt his priorities were and why.  He is consistently very good about letting you know the why’s of his times.  He’s honest about his regrets, and humble about his successes.  He also shares his reflections on current events and times.

And this book has a wonderful, unexpected treat inside.  The President has included some of his wonderful poems that he’s written throughout his life.  He includes the poems he wrote at the different times of his life.  They are often insightful.  He also includes personal photos and copies of his own paintings.  I especially like the painting he’s titled Home in Plains.

We’re fortunate to have available the reflections of this humble, sincere man who was the thirty-ninth President, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, who with his wife founded the Carter Center – a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of people around the world.  He’s still living a full life, and we can all learn from his tales of caring, perseverance, staunch belief, and moral character.

Thereby hangs a tale . . . .