I read it in 1968 because it was on a required pre-semester reading list for the college I'd be attending. Set in 1922, like all great summer novels it creates an atmosphere of heat and water and mystery." Gatsby was my first "summer book," the one that decades later still intensely evokes a specific moment in time. Hartley's The Go-Between, Michael Frayn's Skios and, for personal reasons, The Great Gatsby, which he calls "this most perfect novel. And at the edges, the darkness." I like his picks, especially L.P. Water is there too, in every imagined summer-cooling, rejuvenating, the capturer of light. For the Guardian last week, author Tim Lott chose his " top 10 summers in fiction," observing that in an ideal summer, the "world is a place of slow motion, of repose, of transcendence, of sex. These were our summer reading thrones, upon which we draped our lazy bodies and buried sunburned noses in irresistible books. But many of us were landlocked when we were young and associate hot weather reading with cheap, sun-drenched folding chairs scattered across the lawn. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby "Beach read" is the operative term for all discussions about summer reading list season, which unofficially begins on Fourth of July weekend. Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it.?" -F. "Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces.
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