Erie Reader Book Club May Book Selection: The Summer Book

Erin Phillips

The Erie Reader Book Club will be meeting at Werner Books on Sunday, May 26 at 1 p.m. to discuss The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Anyone who would like to is welcome to join the discussion.

SUNDAY, MAY 26

The Erie Reader Book Club's inaugural meeting was a success – a thoughtful, balanced group discussion was had about Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which was chosen for its correspondence with our April issue theme: Earth Day. For May's book selection, the group decided to read The Summer Book by Tove Jansson to correspond with the Reader's Summer Preview issue.

For those unfamiliar with Tove Jansson's work, she was a Finnish author and artist who most famously created the Moomin characters and their subsequent stories, novels, comic strips, and cult-like following. While the Moomin books hold their own in the literary adult world just as well as they do the children's, it is Jansson's non-Moomin novels where her writing style fully shines. Jansson can encapsulate a human emotion with the briefest, most beautifully worded phrase and within her 1972 novel The Summer Book, this talent of her's is on full display.

The book tells the story from the perspective of a six-year-old child, Sophia, who, with her grandmother and occasionally (but peripherally) her father, explores the natural wonder of a Finnish island, where they spend their summer talking about so many things except the death of Sophia's mother. This fact lingers in the background and becomes the unspoken motivation behind the gentle plot. Tapping into the psychology of a child in the most subtle way, The Summer Book is a quiet literary triumph.

Writer Ali Smith says of The Summer Book, "the writing so lightly kept, so simple-seeming, so closely concerned with the weighing of moments that any extra weight of exegesis is too much." She continues, aptly, "the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth."

If you would like to join us for the discussion of this slim, enchanting book, copies are available for sale at Werner Books & Coffee and are 20% off for Book Club members. The Erie Reader Book Club is open to anyone who would like to join the discussion.

1 p.m. // Werner Books & Coffee, 3608 Liberty St. // For more info: events.eriereader.com