Summer Solstice Reads: How to Handle 15 Hours of Daylight

The summer solstice is upon us once again. I’ve always loved the solstice. Who doesn’t love the start of summer and all it entails: ice cream cones, flip-flops, the smell of sunscreen on the beach? But this year, the solstice feels even more fitting to the timeline in which we are existing. The longest day of the year? That is exactly what the past few pandemic years have felt like: one weird, nebulous, chaotic and LONG year spanning multiple years. In the year of our lives, 2020 to present has been its longest day. Linear time no longer feels true to experience, so even a day where the sun rises at 5:24am in New York and stays up and shining until 8:30pm feels no more out of whack with our normal rhythms than any other part of our current overarching circumstances.
So in celebration of this odd symphony of time and daylight, I created a Summer Solstice-themed amalgam of books. On the longest day of the year, why not touch all the bases and dip your toes into a wide spread of literature and reading. You’ve got 15 hours of daylight to kill!
 
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, written by anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing from UC Santa Cruz, talks about the rhythms, histories and intricacies of the matsutake mushroom—a Japanese fungi that grows in the wake of human-caused forest degradation. It is perfect for the summer solstice: We emerge from the ruins of winter just like this mushroom emerges in the wake of destruction. Tsing emphasizes the resiliency of the matsutake; our arrival at 15 hours of sun is an apt reward for our resiliency in enduring those bleak winter months and New York’s fickle spring. The book also includes some beautiful photography and illustrations throughout, which are a great treat.
 
Stonehenge (by Bernard Cornwell). Though we aren’t sure of how or why Stonehenge was built, we do know that its layout is positioned directly in relation to the summer and winter solstices (and many think that the solstice may have inspired its construction). If you stand inside Stonehenge on the longest day of the year, you’ll see the sun rise directly over the Heel Stone. In fact, the summer and winter solstice are some of the only days of the year that the monument is open access and where you can actually go up and touch the stones! Consequently, this is the perfect day to read Cornwell’s historical fantasy novel. The book is Cornwell’s imagined answer to how and why Stonehenge might have been built—a dramatic tale of rivalry between three brothers competing to build a monument to their gods.
 
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven L. Hopp, Camille Kingsolver, and Lily Hopp Kingsolver). This James Beard Award winning pick from 2007 highlights the solstice’s themes of fertility, abundance and the miracle that is our Earth, and its awe-inspiring patterns and products. The book follows American novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family’s journey to consume a diet of entirely locally-produced food. They start a farm in Virginia and eat only food they’ve grown themselves or purchased locally. Not only does it touch on the theme of fertility— a cause for summer solstice celebration throughout history, but it is also great gardening and farmer’s market inspiration for the coming summer months!
 
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy made the list mainly for its length, coming in at a whopping 1,225 pages when first published. What better day to finally pick up one of the longest classic novels than the longest day of the year? The story spans from 1805 to 1820 so you can take this one bit by bit. Follow five aristocratic Russian families perhaps by portioning out one fictitious nineteenth-century year for each of the 15 hours of 2022 daylight.
 
A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold is another classic from the non-fiction realm. This collection of essays from 1949 tracks changes to author and environmentalist Aldo Leopold’s farm in southern Wisconsin. It is a foundational text in land ethics, conservation and environmentalism. It describes the beauty of ecology and poses important philosophical questions that we can relate to our environment, conservation and climate change. With so many daylight hours available, there’s no better chance to grapple with some of our world’s biggest and most important issues and questions. And its 2020 edition (eAudiobook format), re-published for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, includes an introduction from Barbara Kingsolver, who readers will recognize from earlier on in our list.
 
Klara and the Sun, written by Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, tells the story of a 14-year old girl, Josie, and her solar-powered, artificial friend Klara, who narrates the tale. It is dystopian, science fiction, where the sun plays a central role, just as it does in our real-life summer solstice. A great selection to wrap up this list and remind us of the sun’s power. And even better to read in the park while the sun smiles down on you for the rest of the summer.

Laura Michael works as BKLYN Incubator's Community Relations Coordinator, to facilitate collaborations between library staff and community partners. She loves Brooklyn, biking and baking and tries to combine all three in a community-based experimental project called Baba Yaga Baking.