Summer reflection

Having moved through Memorial Day, graduations and spring showers, summer now tantalizes our senses, offering up promises of hours beachside and opportunities to rest and contemplate. Perhaps one of the greatest contrasts summer holds in comparison to the rest of the year is that it seems so much slower, with so many more hours and, in the best of scenarios, fewer tasks to attend to and more new places to visit and explore. Time appears to stretch with heat, which is a nice reprieve from the rapid pace of the previous months, filled with myriad demands and head-spinning changes.

I am hoping to fill this summer with books that unpack some of the changes unfolding in the world we inhabit. Be they fictional or true, these books that delve into issues attending our rapidly shifting world can accompany us through our slower summers, helping us to consciously re-emerge from vacations and into reality just a bit brighter and bolder.

The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reached a new level of fame this year when Beyoncé featured a sample of her TED talk, in which she addressed and defined feminism, on her recent self-titled album. Nigerian author Adichie takes up a critique of the realities of varied current social issues in her newest novel Americanah, addressing gender relations as well as those of race and class in America and Africa. The story of a young Nigerian woman named Ifemelu who immigrates to America, Americanah resists simplified narratives of how race now operates here, illustrating the complexities of how it is understood and acted upon through language, performance and behavior. Adichie is a beautiful writer, issuing forth a searing and potentially even grave novel with tremendous empathy and warmth.

Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch opens with the sort of rapid change that shakes and affects one’s life in the most core fashion when the mother of the protagonist, 13-year-old Theo Decker, is killed in an explosion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The expansive and involved story that unfolds incorporates art-world intrigue, coming-of-age love, and a deep, twisty mystery, but most of all probes into how to continue after tragic, dramatic loss. While something of a psychological thriller and a Bildungsroman, The Goldfinch is also perhaps ultimately a primer on moving forward when one’s life has been changed forever.

Taking up the sorts of changes that now penetrate our everyday lives and minutes, Astra Taylor’s recent study of the power and promise of the Internet, including its failings and untapped potential, is the subject of her book The People’s Platform. Taylor argues that while the Internet, and other technologies that rely upon it, are often understood and promoted as open, fair and accessible to all, in fact the technological reality of our present is saddled with the familiar problems of corporate monopoly and unfair economic practices. Taylor offers models for thinking anew about tech’s potential, with more public involvement and less elite profiteering.

And finally, as tech industries quickly transform the landscapes of our online lives and the realities of California, I recommend a work put together by Bay Area-based writer Rebecca Solnit published a few years ago (in 2010). An atlas of San Francisco, accompanied by essays from writers local to the area, Infinite City will be part deep summer reading, part travel handbook. As Silicon Valley wealth quickly floods and overwhelms the city, entire neighborhoods have become nearly unrecognizable in the last year. Infinite City provides a thoughtful guide to landmarks that may soon cease to exist as the city quickly changes. Use it to roam, explore and think about a world that could soon be history and memory.