Summer is winding down, but if you make it to the beach one last time before fall, I have some reading suggestions.   I am not a constant reader of fiction, but just finished the New York Times Book Review chart topper, Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. The story take place on the North Carolina Coast after World War II.  It’s a murder mystery of sorts, but also chronicles the struggles of an abandoned child whose absorption with nature in the tidewater marshes is an alternative to the connection with abusive and absent parents.  It is an entertaining read for many reasons.  It’s a coming of age story with a young girl/woman as the protagonist, written by a scientist. And, Owens is at her best offering poetic descriptions of the wildlife in the marshes.  

 Crawdads Sing reminded me of some of my favorite novels set in Georgia, novels in which nature figures prominently and small-town or rural settings offer direct access to people’s character and motives.  In The Keepers of Echowah by Sonny Sammons (1995) the great Yankee-owned plantations of southwest Georgia provide the setting for a classic story about twin brothers, their loves and war- in this case, the Viet Nam War. Because I love the longleaf forests of that region, and have spent much of my life there, I connected right away to this riveting story. The writing is somewhere between Ernest Hemingway (in Across the River and Into the Trees) and Stephen King (in his short story cum film, “Stand By Me”). Excellent character studies and reassuring affinity for the natural world.

The film based on Fanny Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café (1987), like the film version of Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), has perhaps driven people of a certain age back to watching these now older movies.  Both books open the past for readers in ways inaccessible to those who watch instead of read. Fried Green Tomatoes may have become a feminist classic, but it is still about friendship that triumphs over all -so its appeal is universal.  Each time I revisit To Kill a Mockingbird , I ask myself how do you take a cast of stock eccentrics, precocious children and tragic figures, pit them against an undiluted evil while running through every imaginable stereotype of southern literature -and still produce a popular, enduring classic novel? I can’t get a grip on that-but both are still great reads.  Tomatoes is set in Georgia, and Mockingbird could just as easily have been. I seem to recall that some scenes from the movie were filmed in Macon Georgia. A new play based on To Kill a Mocking Bird opens on Broadway in the fall.

An edgy and more recent novel, River of Kings  (2017) by Taylor Brown also tells the story of two brothers, in this instance they are paddling their kayaks down the mighty Altamaha River to scatter  their  dead father’s ashes into the coastal waters , waters where he had spent much of his life dragging shrimp nets. As seems to be a current trend, the novel carries three distinct plots. In one, the two brother’s journey is complicated by encounters with suspicious, avaricious and dangerous characters: river poachers, drug smugglers and dangerously unpredictable wildlife.  

In another time dimension, the story of the French fort, Fort Caroline, unfolds. Brown positions the fort at the mouth of the Altamaha, not near Jacksonville, Florida where there are historical markers identifying a different site for the fort. (There must be an undercurrent of archaeological dispute about this in real life). That story covers the horrors faced by the French, who are near starvation, militarily unsupported, and surrounded by increasingly hostile Native Americans. And there is the fear of a possible-and inevitable- attack by the Spanish who claim the strategically important mouth of the biggest single river entering the Atlantic on the eastern seaboard, the great Altamaha.

Romance—or is it only animal lust?- is provided by the tragic love affair of the deceased father with a beautiful and abused wife of a worthless swamp rat. The young heroes of our story are struggling to reconcile conflicting memories of their father while wrestling with their own sibling differences -one is an academic and the other a Navy Seal. Use of the river setting makes for a sense of mounting danger with a satisfying climax. James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) is more visceral and relies much more on stereotypes (poetic dreamers, macho outdoors men,  cross-eyed banjo pickers and redneck rapists for example). I think Brown’s River of Kings is a more challenging and satisfying read.  

Easily available on interlibrary loan or ordered used from Abe Books or Amazon, is one of my all-time favorite:  Chiefs (1981) by Georgia’s very own Stuart Woods. Stuart Woods has written more than 75 novels, mostly detective stories, but his first fiction writing was Chiefs.  A runaway best seller, it was serialized on TV (if you want, you can watch it on You Tube). The book tells the story of three police chiefs in a small town who try to track down a killer who has left a string of corpses over the course of more than twenty years.  Each chief must also contend with the day- to- day problems in their own time setting-like being shot at by drunks and endlessly annoied by not-so-well wishers who know more than the police. The backdrop of unsolved killings gives coherence to a series of lesser plots, all interesting and revealing of small-town life.

Woods’ first book was Blue Water Green Skipper (1977), account of his love affair with the art of sailing.  Autobiographical, it recounts his emergence from his Manchester, Georgia roots to become a New York advertising writer. Having saved a bit, he leaves his job and moves to Ireland to begin his novel-writing career in earnest. Instead, he becomes friends with the world’s greatest designer of ocean- racing yachts, Ron Holland, who lives across the bay. Woods(who has little sailing experience)  buys a thirty- footer himself and prepares to compete in the Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR). Filled with details about learning to sail and his friendships with fellow sailors, Blue Water makes for absorbing reading. It is a story not without danger and tragedy as people struggle against the forces of the sea and the accidents that overtake us all.. Recommended for sailing wannabes like me. It’s a wonderful and oft overlooked book by a Georgia writer.

Finally, if you are the more cerebral reader longing for complex relationships, the excellent writer Philip Lee Williams’ novel, The Heart of Distant Forest, has much to offer. This is literature and there are many reasons this book has not been out of print since its publication in 1982. A retired community college professor moves to the North Georgia mountains. Looking back on his career spent in the backwaters of college education, he is a bit down on himself-and ill. But instead of becoming bitterly irrelevant, he discovers a young boy desperately in need of help. In helping this boy, the narrator rediscovers the honest success and transcendent service he has brought to many students over the years.

Anyone who has spent time teaching in colleges that are not even on the same map with the Ivy League schools, or even the big state universities, would do well to read this-and get reacquainted with the idealism and spirit of inquiry that led them to teach in the first place.

Then there is Pat Conroy. We have lost him, but his books will be fondly remembered when James Dickey’s digression into fiction is forgotten.  Honesty, honesty, honesty-served up with great warmth and compassion. I was in Ireland, staying at a retired banker’s home-lovely people-and noticed on my night stand a copy of A Low Country Heart (a post mortum collection of Pat’s unpublished speeches, notes and letters).  My host and I immediately shared something in common.  Conroy’s The Great Santini is a good way to end your summer reading, and Pat Conroy certainly qualifies as a Georgia writer since he lived and worked in Atlanta for some time before moving back to South Carolina to Beaufort, scene of several of his stories, and near his beloved Charleston and the Citadel. Most of his books have been made into movies-but don’t stop there. Read the books.