Certain holidays are just teeming with stories, such as the one known for “A Christmas Carol,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Preacher’s Wife,” “Home Alone,” or even that Yuletide classic, “Die Hard.”
So yes, Christmas is well-represented by both religious and secular works, but even a ho-hum holiday about a precognitive rodent inspired a good movie in “Groundhog Day,” so it’s worth exploring what others have to offer.
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One Thanksgiving when I worked at a record store, my colleague played Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” assuring me that it was the only rock-era album set on the very holiday we were missing. He sounded authoritative on the topic, though I would have sought a second opinion from one of the store’s many knowledgeable customers had literally anyone come into the shop.
In fact, my only notable achievement that day was accidentally dropping my lunch, a hot dog from the gas station (as all other nearby eating establishments were closed), into a bucket of brackish mop water. Instead of that dripping yarn, however, I’ll suggest that if you’re looking for a Thanksgiving novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” is an excellent choice.
So enough preamble, what about today, the Fourth of July, especially if you’re in the mood to slip away to a quiet spot to read after the parades and fireworks – or instead of parades and fireworks if your local event has been canceled as has been the case in downtown Los Angeles, Whittier, Bell Gardens and Cudahy.
Look, any book-receiving dad can tell you: There is an endlessly generating supply of nonfiction about the founding of the nation, but to keep this brief so you won’t miss the barbecue, you might try Rick Atkinson’s newly published second installment in his Revolution Trilogy, “The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780,” or a Revolutionary War title from David McCullough, Eric Foner, Gretchen Woelfle or many others.
But for (mostly) fiction of more recent vintage, here are some possibilities I found through web searches, Reddit threads, recommendations or faulty memory.
Let’s just get the ringers out of the way: The Pulitzer Prize-winning Richard Ford novel “Independence Day,” the bestseller “Fourth of July” by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro and Ron Kovic’s acclaimed memoir “Born on the Fourth of July.” Hard to argue with any of those.
Nor will I have anything bad to say about Bill Pullman’s President Whitmore in “Independence Day,” who tells an assembled crowd, “We can’t be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests” in his famously stirring speech that makes some people get teary, I hear.
But let’s get back to books.
Books that have Fourth of July elements. (Covers courtesy of the publishers)In the story collection, “The Bazaar of Bad Dreams,” Stephen King has a short story called “Drunken Fireworks” … and really do you need to know anything more? Also associated with the Fourth of July weekend, Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” was a massive bestseller before it was a blockbuster film and theme park mainstay, and people of a certain age (cough, mine) will remember seeing its striking cover on spinner racks or on their parents’ shelves for years.
Interested in something visceral and terrifying but with fewer sharks? Stephen Graham Jones cuts through slasher film tropes with “My Heart Is a Chainsaw,” which has its own Fourth of July moment, while Tananarive Due’s “The Good House” and Dan Simmons’s “Summer of Night” also touch on the holiday – at least according to online commenters, as I couldn’t readily find copies to check (and notably, I am also a scaredy cat).
For a different kind of horror, Joyce Carol Oates’s novella “Black Water” seems inspired by the 1969 death of campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, who asphyxiated after a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy went off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island into the water and only he escaped. In Oates’ version set in the early 1990s, Kelly Kelleher, the young woman, and a fictional vodka tonic-slurping senator are leaving a July 4 party when the car he’s driving plunges into the water, and we are privy to the swirl of Kelly’s thoughts as it happens.
In the final section of Colson Whitehead’s ‘70s-centric “Crook Manifesto,” the second novel in his Ray Carney trilogy, the fence-turned-furniture store owner Carney is trying to come up with a radio ad for the 1976 Bicentennial as the city is experiencing a wave of arson attacks. Ideally, you’ll have read the first book before this one, but an expertly written crime novel like this is exactly what I’d like to read if I get the time today.
How about something romantic? The Revolutionary War is the setting for romance novels like “The Turncoat,” “The Tory Widow” and “The Traitor’s Wife,” and while I haven’t read Jess Lourey’s “Knee High by the Fourth of July,” this is a more modern story that has murder, a stolen statue and a Brad Pitt lookalike that fuel the plot.
Or what if you need reassurance that our ideals survive even during turbulent times? That the American melting pot can provide sustenance for all? Turn to poetry, especially the fine Independence Day collection assembled by the Poetry Foundation.
Try reading “Immigrants in Our Own Land” by Jimmy Santiago Baca, a heartbreaker that begins, “We are born with dreams in our hearts / looking for better days ahead.”
Or Gregory Djanikian’s sweet, language-loving, “Immigrant Picnic,” in which he writes about frantically hosting his immigrant parents on this most American holiday: “And I’m grilling, I’ve got my apron / I’ve got potato salad, macaroni, relish / I’ve got a hat shaped / like the state of Pennsylvania.”
Revisit Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” – an iconic American poem that, according to a piece by Austin Allen, is “an Italian sonnet composed by a Jewish-American woman, contrasting an ancient Greek statue with a statue built in modern France.” Now on a plaque inside the Statue of Liberty, the poem had been forgotten at the time of the poet’s death. Thankfully, it was rediscovered.
And today? Maybe, like Walt Whitman, we’ll “hear America singing.” I hope so.
I’ll stop here, but what books or poems did I neglect to mention? Plenty of them, I’m sure, but these picks are just to get you started. You’ll know what you want to read today, whether it’s one of these or something lurking in your TBR pile or a copy of the Declaration of Independence.
Thanks for reading this, too. I hope you have a peaceful day with friends, family and new acquaintances – or a very good book.
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