My Summer Reading List
From Benjamin Franklin to Kamala Harris, from 2 Tone to Chicago Soul, and from the Seventies to 1984.
If you’re new to Wordsmith, welcome. I typically post a long weekend read and one or two shorter(ish) midweek articles. Free and paid subscriptions are available, but if you’d like to keep the words flowing, the latter is much appreciated. You get bonus posts, an exclusive podcast, and you keep the site going for everyone else. Thank you and enjoy.
I’m a writer. Which means I’m a reader. After all, you can’t write much of merit unless you read much of merit. My problem is, I want to read everything, just like I want to write everything and indeed, do everything. So my pile of books to read grows steadily larger as I add in an additional bad/good habit of dipping and diving between them, because if I can’t read them all in full, I want to at least experience some of them all. I am forever hoping that days will open on the horizon where I will be able to do nothing but read and conclude them. This never happens. Not even in summer – perhaps, especially not in summer, given that one thing I am particularly bad at is relaxing on the beach.
Nonetheless, I have a new pile of books by my bedside that reflect a decent cross-section of my interests and each of which has its own back story. I’m sharing the list for fun, for feedback, to encourage myself to read further, and with the possibility that you may be inspired to dig deeper into one or two yourself.
Ben & Me: In Search Of A Founder's Formula For A Long And Useful Life, by Eric Weiner (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, by Kamala Harris (Penguin, 2019)
Did you know that Benjamin Franklin, the oldest of the Founding Fathers, also founded the first American public library – in 1831, 131 years before anyone in Britain got around to a similar concept? (His was in Pennsylvania, the UKs was in Salford.) The importance of books in Franklin’s life was reflected deeply in his influence on what became, at the end of his lifetime, the United States of America: he worked at his brother’s printers during what should have been his schooling years, wrote letters, pamphlets and books galore, and amassed a personal library of precisely 4,276 volumes at the time of his death, an inventory that discounts those he borrowed, sold or swapped so as to read more, or loaned out never to have returned. But most importantly of all, with the founding of that first lending library, he encouraged others, those he would have considered less fortunate than himself, to read for their education and enlightenment..
It seems appropriate then not only that I have Eric Weiner’s new memoir-biography of Franklin out from the Mid-Hudson Library System, where I always get some satisfaction at seeing my own books in the catalogue, but that I picked up the Kamala Harris political campaign book masquerading as an autobiography from a library of a different sort. The Little Free Library – a simple concept in which residents erect a small repository for recycling books, encouraging passers-by to “take a book, share book” – is now apparently a global movement, but it too was born in the USA, as recently as 2009, courtesy of Todd H. Bol, in Hudson, Wisconsin.
I know of at least four Little Libraries in Kingston, New York, alone, so maybe it’s no surprise that there is also one in my new neighbourhood just outside the city. Nonetheless it feels both curious and yet reassuring that this one should be tucked away in one of the semi-circular roads that is common in the “estate” (I don’t have a clearer descriptive term) we are now calling home. I’m not sure why someone decided to dispose of Harris’ 2019 pitch for Presidential consideration just as the pressure gathered upon President Biden to quit the 2024 race and allow Harris to stand as presumptive nominee for real, unless they too could read the tealeaves and wanted someone like myself to come along on an exploratory jog of the area, snap it up and learn more about the woman who may be running our country come next January.
It’s early days reading both books, which I am attempting in tandem, given the central characters’ similar pioneering nature, and so I will reserve final judgement. For now, Weiner’s book is surprisingly lightweight, perhaps necessary given the number of hefty words already expended on Ben, and his personal approach – per my previous post on The American In Me midweek update on July 3, Weiner decided to retrace Franklin’s own footsteps as the most journeyed American of his time – feels in equal parts both invasive and informative.
And all I will say for now about The Truths We Hold, published back when Kamala Harris knew she was going to be seeking the US Presidency (i.e. 2019), is that if any of her Presidential rivals in 2024 doubt her Black Pride, twould only have to read the opening chapter to be assured otherwise. In this, Harris (almost certainly via a tepid ghostwriter) details how her mixed race background, as the eldest daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who divorced acrimoniously when she was young, led to an upbringing in the Black neighborhoods of Oakland – but for a little known brief sojourn to Montreal, Canada, where her academic research mother took a University position – and her early engagement in civil rights, social justice, the gospel church, and Black popular culture alike.
But to read such a chapter would require opening a book to actually read it, along with a degree of intellectual curiosity, and I am certain that the maximum number of presumed Presidential candidates for the ballot this November who possess such attributes numbers just one. And that is the one I will be voting for.
Could Benjamin Franklin, who owned slaves early in his life but changed his views to become a staunch abolitionist, just as he started out as a Colonialist but became such a key figure in the birth of an independent USA, have imagined us being this close right now to a Black female President? We tend to wase precious energy believing we know what the Founding Fathers thought, so it’s only conjecture, but yes, of all those white men, I suspect Ben could indeed foresee a Black woman in the White House, because he always had faith in a more egalitarian future - one in which the USA never needed taking back, only taking forwards.1
A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (NYRRB 1977)
This book too was acquired from a Little Library, and in such pristine condition I suspect it has never been read. Indeed, it has been sitting within my hand-crafted non-music bookcase for a while now, nestled alongside other travel tomes that are an easier and faster read. And there it may have stayed if Nathan James Thomas of Intrepid Times, whose own contributions to the literary canon of travel and tourism were discussed when he was a guest on my One Step Beyond podcast, didn’t send out an e-mail about an upcoming travel writing class, Stories from Yesteryear, citing A Time of Gifts – “written more than 40 years after the trip it described took place” - as “One of the greatest travel books ever written.”
So out it comes from the bookcase, next to the bedside it goes, and through the early pages I have traipsed, though judging by an Introduction that references it as “layered” and “dense,” this may truly be one that requires long bus journeys in distant lands to fully absorb.
Too Much Too Young: Rude Boys, Racism, and the Soundtrack of A Generation, by Daniel Rachel (Akashic, 2024).
This one I will need to read to the end, and soon, given that I received a free copy to help prep me for an event at the Orpheum Cinema in Saugerties, NY, on September 9, at which I will be interviewing author Daniel Rachel, and we will be showing the 2 Tone film Dance Craze. (Tickets available here.) Fortunately, I lived through much of 2 Tone, and so come to the subject with familiarity. I’ve also read much of Daniel Rachel’s initial foray into publishing, Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters, a project he undertook with almost no journalistic experience, which makes the list of interviewees and the quality of the finished work all the more inspiring. Too Much Too Young has already received its share of plaudits, and I suspect I will conclude reading it the same way I felt upon receiving it – that it is a book I wish I had written. I look forward talking with Daniel, with whom until now I have had but one pleasant London pub conversation - in person about it.
Just Backdated: Melody Maker: Seven Years In the Seventies, by Chris Charlesworth (Spenwood, 2024)
If there was ever a truly perfect time and place to be a music journalist, Chris Charlesworth lived it: in the heady days of the mid-1970s, when rock excess was taken for granted, access to such excess was as readily granted to accredited music journalists, and Melody Maker was selling so many copies every week it could afford to have a full-time staff member stationed in New York. Charlesworth was the man with that dream posting, and he has enough stories about rubbing shoulders with the likes of Lennon, Moon, and Led Zeppelin at the peak of their powers, and hanging with the likes of Bruce, Elton and Debbie long before theirs, that filling an entertaining memoir should prove a cinch. Add in his early days amidst the rise of the British music press, some first-hand sex-and-drugs stories, and it only requires Charlesworth to have applied his proven editing skills to his proven writing for Just Backdated to be a proven winner.2 Officially published in September, Just Backdated – named for his blog, itself from a line in the greatest song of all time – is available for pre-order now.
1984: British Pop’s Diving Year, by David Elliott (York House, 2020)
Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power by Aaron Cohen (University of Chicago, 2019)
Finally, two seemingly disparate and somewhat older books about music, linked primarily by their authors, neither of whom I believe know the other, but each of whom recently asked for my address so as to send me copies unrequested. I feel genuinely fortunate that I am considered worthy of such lovely gifts, and in a world where all things were equal, I would devour each of them immediately, given that the subject matter speaks to me in each case, and the authors have quite clearly done their homework and then some. However, I live in a world where all things are unequal, and I hope that David and Aaron alike will understand if it takes a while, there always being something else that speaks of a more contemporary urgency – indeed, in the case of Too Much Too Young or the short-term loan of Ben & Me, a straight-up deadline. But posting this summer reading list ensured that I did not leave either 1984 or Move On Up in the freshly sorted bookshelves in my own new library/office and that they have moved on up to the bedside instead. And should the beach successfully claim me on what is left of this summer… well yes, there is always hope.
What is on your reading shelf this summer? What would you be taking to the beach if you were going? Or do you prefer reading at home? What travel book would you recommend for a long bus or train ride? What’s the last music book you enjoyed? (Or hated?) Why did I not list any novels here? And how do you recycle your own reading habits – via a neighborly Little Library, the local Thrift Shop or, like Ben Franklin, by building a bigger book collection until it numbers in the thousands?
More about that sentiment and the poem I drew it from in the forthcoming Midweek Update.
I am not unbiased in my enthusiasm, for not many years after Chris’s return to England, he took a job at the sheet music publishers Music Sales, known disparagingly in the book industry at the time for cut-and-paste forays into flimsy biographies. There he gradually transformed the company into an established and respected publisher, arguably the biggest and certainly among the most important in global music books, in part by backing authors like me. Chris commissioned my first two books (biographies of Echo & The Bunnymen and R.E.M.) and not just co-commissioned (along with a n American company that supplied the necessary advance), but encouraged and supported the vast biography I then wrote about Keith Moon, which itself helped rewrite the template for the music biography, proving that 650-page books on dead drummers could sell by the bucketload if suitably supported, edited, published and marketed.
Great list Tony. The 1984 & 2 Tone books sparked my interest. Thanks for sharing !
Interesting list! I may have to check out Harris's book. The last good music book I read was Anatomy of 55 More Songs by Marc Myers. I enjoy reading about and dissecting songs from the past.