The other day I ran into a friend at Newtonville Books, a lovely independent bookstore in, yes, Newton, Mass. She asked me for suggestions for her book club and I told her about the wonderful novel I’ve just finished reading: “Room” by Emma Donoghue. Then, as we stood near the new book table, I saw another great book and another. Before I knew it, I was suggesting all of them for the summer.

If you’re looking for some great books to read this summer, here are my picks. I think they’re all out in paperback.

“Room” by Emma Donoghue is a modern day myth of the cave. A five year old boy tells of his life in a magical secluded room where he and his mother create a world of their own. In fact, his mother has been trapped in this room for seven years by her rapist–but, caring for her child, and living for him, she manages to create an entire world. This book is scary and magical. It’s about motherhood, myth, illusion, isolation and convention.

“The Master” by Colm Toibin is a novel about the extraordinary Henry James. Toibin imagines the self-aware and highly closeted James with such intimacy and feeling. You end up moving past admiration to sympathy.

“A Visit from the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan is a jumpy, lively novel in snap-shots or stories or vignettes about a number of people loosely and sometimes closely connected with each other and with the music industry. Egan is interested in time–and her novel has a time-lapse effect as we watch these people age and divorce and self destruct. The book is sad and funny and acutely observed.

These are three novels I highly recommend–if you haven’t read them already.

What are you planning to read this summer?

I’m a slow starter when it comes to novels. It usually takes me a year to figure out just what I’m doing. I write notes, I draw pictures, I read, I pace, I sleep, and I write many many pages.

Then at some point in this process, during which I write and unwrite many chapters and follow many false, leads, I begin to see where my book is heading. The questions and conflicts I want to explore begin to come into focus. I start hearing the characters talk to each other, and I start writing with more purpose and confidence.

I’m at that point now with my new book. I still have a lot of work to do, but I feel I’ve set the thing up properly. This is the end of the beginning.

A novel is much like a sting operation. So much depends on preparation. You’ve got to do your homework, and get all the details right in order to surprise (maybe even frame!) your reader.

If you are writing a book–or thinking of writing a book, allow yourself the luxury of starting slow, forgive yourself your tangents, permit yourself to think first before writing.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, because I had to switch to a new computer and I lost the link to this blog! If I were better with technology I’d have figured out a way to recover my blog more quickly–but it took me a while. I had to get my friends at Authobytes to help me. They’re used to technology challenged writers, because they specialize in web sites for authors.

Well, I’ve missed writing here, and now that the summer approaches, I hope to get back to posting more regularly about life as a writer and a reader.

Last week I recorded a pod cast for “The New Yorker.” Every month they ask a writer to choose and read a story from the magazine. Then the fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, interviews you about the story.

The story I wanted to read was Cynthia Ozick’s “The Laughter of Akiva”–a masterpiece, in my opinion. If you haven’t read it, you can find it in “The New Yorker”‘s on line archive. I think it’s one of Ozick’s best–perhaps her finest short story. Alas, it wasn’t short enough for the podcast. I had to find something I could read in less than half an hour. After some searching, I settled on the classic, early Updike story”A&P.”

So many of us grew up with that story. It’s anthologized everywhere, and I read it in high school and in college and then taught it as a graduate student. It’s a story I’ve grown up with. I figured I knew it well.

Knowing a story well and reading it well are two different things, however. And when you read fiction aloud you notice entirely different aspects than when you read it silently. I’m a confident reader, but I realized as I sat in the parking lot before my podcast and reviewed the story in my car, that I’m not often asked to perform other people’s work. I’m confident because I’m always reading my own! When you’re reading your own work you know it from the inside. When you read someone else, you have to study phrasing and syntax, practice certain words. You become an actor, imagining and projecting another author’s voices.

I recorded the podcast in a studio in the vast Christian Science Church complex here in Boston right across the street from Symphony Hall. With the help of a sound engineer, I read the story into a large microphone, and then went back and “fixed” every word or phrase I muffed. Together with the Q&A with Deborah, the whole process took almost two hours.

In that process I heard things in “A&P” that I’d never noticed before in all my silent readings. I heard the complexity of Updike’s sentences, the layered effect of past and present tense throughout the story as Updike moves from the narrator in the moment to the narrator reminiscing about the moment. I heard the full range of Updike’s vocabulary, from slangy and adolescent to eloquent and mature.

If you think you know a story, read it aloud. You can learn so much about fiction by performing it.