Let's Do the SummerTime Warp Again (again)

It’s Week No. 2 of our summer tribute to summertime memories of summer. We’re spending five glorious weeks paying tribute to the books, movies, television shows, and songs that made summer special. Yes, we’re living in the past on an endless loop of catchy pop tunes, page-turning bestsellers and popcorn-required blockbusters.

(It’s all just an effort to get “Call Me Maybe” out of our heads — and if the song featured below can’t do it, then we may have found the all-powerful, catchiest of catchy Songs of the Summer.)

Today, we’re going back to the week of July 16, 1977. Feather your hair, find your lightsabre and follow along. Share with us your summer “Blast from the Past” favorites — no matter what year it might, from 1900 to 2011. Tell us what you were reading in your memorable summers. By commenting below, you’ll be entered to win your very own Pawley’s Island Rope Hammock. Now there’s a great way to swing into the heat of summer reading!

Movie: Star Wars

Here’s a snippet from Derek Malcolm’s original review in The Guardian: Well, they start by saying “A long time ago, in a galaxy far away,” which really means “Don’t worry, it’s only a fairy story.” And then they tell us a tale about a pretty princess (Carrie Fisher) who gets kidnapped by wicked chaps who want to control the galaxies with whom a pretty ordinary bloke, or ordinary pretty bloke (Mark Hamill) falls head over ski-boots in love. Then there’s this nice old retired knight (lucky old Alec Guinness with two percent of the financial action) who teaches our hero to “stretch out with your feelings” and observe the Force of Good pulsing in his otherwise bloodless veins.

Added to that there are two funny (no, quite funny) robots, See Threepio (Anthony Daniels) and Artoo-Detoo (Kenny Baker), an ace pilot (Harrison Ford) who represents our disbelief by proving a sceptic, an apeman or “walking carpet” (Peter Mayhew) who looks as if he’s come straight out of a Neolithic pantomime, and an assortment of villains so unterrifying that it looks as if you’d only have to pinch them to produce a fit of giggles (but who would dare do any such thing to Peter Cushing?).

Ouch. Too bad the movie never found an audience.

Books

The Thorn Birds: Before Richard Chamberlain was forever burned on your brain in the TV miniseries (in all 1970s miniseries, for that matter), there was the bestselling book, The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough. “A sweeping family saga of dreams, titanic struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian Outback,” as described on Amazon.com. Can’t pass that up. (Psst, check out what Richard Chamberlain is up to these days.)

Falconer: From goodreads.com: Stunning and brutally powerful, Falconer tells the story of a man named Farragut, his crime and punishment, and his struggle to remain a man in a universe bent on beating him back into childhood. Only John Cheever could deliver these grand themes with the irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humor that make Falconer such a triumphant work of the moral imagination.