- #An intense and irresitable desire for freedom full
- #An intense and irresitable desire for freedom professional
Neely, supposedly modeled after Judy Garland, is the child star who grew up too fast and dreams in dollar signs and bright lights. Each woman seems to simultaneously play into and revolt against their archetype: Anne is a bookish “good girl” who, like Belle in Beauty and the Beast, craves adventure, excitement, independence, and true love.
#An intense and irresitable desire for freedom professional
The three women have very little in common, but their professional and social circles collide, resulting in a bond born from the shared understanding of what it means to exist as a woman under patriarchal rule. Jennifer North is an up-and-coming blonde bombshell whose looks rival Marilyn Monroe. Seventeen-year-old Neely O’Hara (birth name: Ethel Agnes O’Neill) is a lifelong vaudeville performer aching for Broadway acclaim. Anne Welles is a Radcliffe-educated beauty from Massachusetts who moves to New York City to escape her judgmental hometown. Susann’s debut centers on three young women who are hoping to make it on their own terms. Jacqueline Susann’s best-selling 1966 novel, Valley of the Dolls, has it all: sex, scandal, a dashing English playboy who (I imagine) looks like Cary Grant, glamour, stardom, and DRAMA. When I pick a book to read at the beach, I want to be entertained by the storytelling as much as I want to dive into the depths of the human condition. Who gets to decide the definition of a “summer read”? For me, summer reading isn’t so much a chance to shut off my brain, but an opportunity to lose myself in another world. Speedboat is the type of book you can read on the subway, each short section timed almost perfectly to last from Dekalb to West 4th or you can read it in its entirety one perfect afternoon, sitting at a terrible aluminum patio table, switching chairs to stay out of the direct sun. My summer read is not an escape, but a bedding in. Even as a kid, I’d look forward to August when all the rich people left for their cooler, bigger houses in the country or at the beach or some other unbelievable place, when my parents would delight in the availability of parking spots and the chance for us to eat together in empty restaurants. I have always made certain to spend the summer here, when the city is hot and horrible. I am a native Brooklynite, and therefore better than you. And for me, the summer is always about New York. Which is all to say, this is a very New York novel, perhaps the most New York novel. There is therapy, there are cabdrivers, and the greatest little section about running away from rats. She travels, has advanced degrees, teaches, takes Valium, sleeps with men, gets pregnant. Jean Fein, our protagonist, is a reporter for a tabloid paper. Cumulatively, the book somehow exposed the horrible reality of a bourgeois life you hate yourself for aspiring to.
#An intense and irresitable desire for freedom full
It was modernist, told in vignettes, full of aphorisms there was no plot the characters were privileged and smart and caustic and did boring things like go to parties and speak about the essence of life.
In 2013, NYRB reissued Renata Adler’s 1976 novel Speedboat, and everyone was talking about it. (Which is not to say this list is wholly without obvious suggestions.) Also, there are plenty more books in this category, so as ever, if you are so moved, please add your own favorite novels to read during the summer to the list in the comments. NB: You’ll notice that this list skews “literary”-surely at this point no one need suggest that the books of Emily Henry or Elin Hilderbrand make for good beach reading, so hopefully you’ll find some less obvious suggestions here. So if you’ve already blazed through the season’s new books (good for you) or just prefer to read something no one else you know is reading (good for you!), but can’t decide what to put in your beach (good for you) bag, here are a selection of very good summer novels, as the Literary Hub staff defines them, published in any year other than this one. In other words: you know it when you see it.
That’s right, I’m afraid the answer is: vibes. What makes a summer novel? It might be set in during a summer (One Fateful or otherwise), or it might be, for one reason or another, particularly appealing to read during the summer, or it might simply.
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