Author Jade Chang on the books she's reading to keep summer going
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What does summer feel like to Jade Chang and why does time seem to stop?
Hey, it's NCR's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbong. We just passed Labor Day, which means on the horizon is sweater season, football season, latte season, all the autumnal stuff we all love. But at least where I am, it's still hot. And by definition, we have yet to reach the autumnal equinox, which means it is still summer. And so today we have for you a conversation. About summer books. Not books about summer necessarily, but books that are spiritually summer, with novelist Jade Chang and NPR's Elsa Chang. That's after the break.
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So are you one of those people hanging on to August, like just trying to cling to the last days of summer? Well, maybe one way to hold on to that summer shimmer is through books. So we wanted to talk to a writer about what summer means to her, what she's reading to keep summer going, and to talk about her newest novel, which I just read this summer, called What a Time to Be Alive. Joining me now is my dear friend who I love hanging out with here in LA, author Jay Chang. So cool to have you at MPR Well. All right.
It's such a pleasure to be here. Hi, Elsa. Hi,
Jade. Okay, so summer is kind of a whole vibe, right? It's a feeling. It's not just a season. Yes. What does summer mean to you?
Well, you know what? I'm gonna tell you what summer reading means to me, and I think what summer itself means to me is kind of encapsulated in that, which is We always think of it as like time by the pool, time at the beach, but I feel like summer is about time itself and how it kind of stops. I mean, I think the reason we love summer is because as kids it was non school time. Yes.
Right? I have this association with freedom. Yes. Boundless freedom.
Yes. And yet also there's there's something almost kind of Like you don't have to reckon with your own mortality in the summer.
Ooh Okay, now we're getting very deep. I see that you brought some books here to conjure up this vibe of reckoning with or not reckoning with not reckoning. Tell me what you brought in. Some of these books were published quite a while ago, I guess. Yeah.
So that's the other thing is I think that summer makes you feel like things don't have to be so current. Like you don't have to be, you know, immediately on trend figuring out the exact next thing. Although for the first book, if you did go see the big summer blockbuster, The Odyssey. Yes, I did. This is a great book to read after that. If you wanna stay In that great Greek world. It's The Corn King and the Spring Queen. It came out in nineteen thirty one. It's definitely not a current book.
Uh-huh.
It's by Naomi Midgeson.
But what's the timelessness of it that that you're tapping into? Why does it pertain to this theme of timelessness in summer?
It's because it's a long journey. I feel like there's something about a journey where This is a little cliche, but it's not about the destination, right? It's about traveling through all these different lands. It's about discovering different kinds of philosophy, different kinds of food, different kinds of ways of being. And yeah, and that's very much what this book is about.
I see that you brought another book about the Sahara Desert.
Yes.
Tell me about that one.
Okay, so you I wonder if you are familiar with this writer, Samal. She is a Taiwanese woman. Oh, no. She was writing Yeah. So Stories of the Sahara is a recent translation, but She wrote travelogues for a Taiwanese newspaper about living in the Western Sahara Desert in the 1970s. So when I was growing up, my mom would tell me about having read these. Oh, very cool. Yeah. And then you finally have recently read it. And that I recently read it. It came out, this translation came out in 2020.
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