I start every summer with the best of intentions: to attack one big book from the past, a classic that I was supposed to have read when young and ambitious. Often the pairings of books and settings have been purely accidental: Moby Dick on a three-day cross-country train trip; The Magic Mountain in a New England beachside cottage with no locks on the doors, no telephones or televisions in the rooms, and little to do beyond row on the salt pond. Attempting The Man Without Qualities on a return to Hawaii, my native state, however, was less fruitful: I made it through one and a quarter volumes, then decided that I’d got the point and went swimming instead.
But this summer I find myself at a loss. I’m not quite interested in Balzac, say, or Tristram Shandy. There’s always War and Peace, which I’ve covered some distance several times, only to get bogged down in the “War” part, set it aside for a while, and realize that I have to start over from the beginning again, having forgotten everyone’s name and social rank. How appealing to simply fall back on a favorite — once more into The Waves or Justine, which feels almost like cheating, too exciting and too much fun to properly belong in serious literature.
And then there’s Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which happens to be the name of my favorite cocktail of the summer, created by Micheal Cecconi at Savoy and Back Forty. It is easy to drink and knocking back three or four seems like such a delightful idea. Cecconi’s theory: “I take whatever’s fresh at the green market and turn it into liquid.” The result is a pure shot of afternoon in the park, making one feel cheerful and peaceful all at once, lying on uncut grass with eyes shut, sun beating through the lids…
【小题1】What can we infer about the author from the first paragraph?| A．He enjoys reading when travelling. | B．He shows talents for literature. |
| C．He has a cottage in New England. | D．He admires a lot of great writers. |
| A．Get confused. | B．Make no progress. | C．Be interrupted. | D．Be carried away. |
| A．To Read or Not to Read | B．My Summer Holidays |
| C．The Book of Summer | D．It’s Never Too Late to Read5 |
