Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Summer

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Light in August
Author: William Faulkner
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: October 1990
No. of Pages: 507

Synopsis: 

Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, plagued by visions; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.

Title: Summer Crossing
Author: Truman Capote
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2006 (2005)
No. of Pages: 126

Synopsis: 

Flame-haired Grady McNeil is beautiful, rich and defiant. Her privileged society life leaves her wanting more than her conventional parents have in mind for her, and excitement comes in the form of the highly unsuitable Clyde, a Brooklyn-born, Jewish parking attendant. When Grady’s mother and father leave her alone one summer in their New York penthouse, her secret affair intensified and she is forced to make decisions that will alter her future indelibly. Anticipating Holly Golightly with its free-spirited heroine, Truman Capote’s recently discovered debut novel is also a captivating portrayal of first love.

Title: Summer
Author: Karl Ove Knausgård
Translator (from Norwegian): Ingvild Burkey
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 401

Synopsis: 

 It is completely dark out now. It is twenty-three minutes to midnight and you have already slept for four hours. What you will dream of tonight, no one will ever know. Even if you were to remember it when you wake up, you wouldn’t have a language in which to communicate it to us, nor do I think that you quite understand what dreams are, I think that is still undefined for you, your thoughts haven’t grasped the concept yet, and it therefore lies within that strange zone where it neighter exists nor doesn’t exist.

The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard’s newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family’s life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects–mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few–he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion.

At his most voluminous since My Struggle, his epic sensational series, Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling.

Title: Summer Light, and then Comes the Night
Author: Jón Kalman Stefánsson
Translator (from Icelandic): Philip Roughton
Publisher: HarperVia
Publishing Date: 2021
No. of Pages: 246

Synopsis: 

A profound and playful masterwork of literature from one of Iceland’s most beloved authors.

In a secluded Icelandic village of only four hundred inhabitants, where the summer brings infinite light and the winter brings eternal night, life appears unremarkable. Yet, sometimes in small places, life becomes bigger. A new road to the capital city of Reykjavik has change on everyone’s minds…

There is the beautiful, elusive Elisabet, who cuts a surprisingly svelte path at the Knitting Company. Neighbours Kristin and Kjartan, who seem ordinary but for their explosive passion that bewilders even themselves (and ignites the spectacular revenge of Kjartan’s wife). Timid Jonas takes on the role of town policeman when his imposing father passes away. And then the most successful businessman in town abandons his Range Rover and gorgeous wife in exchange for Latin books and stargazing.

Winner of the Icelandic Literature Prize and longlisted for France’s Prix Médicis étranger, Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night ponders the beauty and mystery of life and our deepest existential questions. Unexpected, warm, earthy, and humorous, Stefánsson explores the dreams and desires of these everyday people and reveals the magic of life in all its progress, its limitations, its ugliness, and, ultimately, its beauty.

Title: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
Publisher: Washington Square Press Atria
Publishing Date: May 2018
No. of Pages: 385

Synopsis: 

Reclusive Hollywood icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant to write her story, no one is more astounded than Monique herself.

Determined to use this opportunity to jump-start her career, Monique listens in fascination. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to leaving show business in the ’80s – and of course, the seven husbands along the way – Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and great forbidden love. But as Evelyn’s story nears its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

Written with Reid’s signature talent for creating “complex, likable characters” (Real Simple), this is a mesmerizing journey through the splendor of Old Hollywood into the sobering realities of the present day as two women struggle with what it means – and what it costs – to face the truth.