So many books, so little time (Photo by Amanda Krotki, Jmore)

From secular to frum and all the Dewey Decimals in between, what are the Jews of Baltimore reading during the dog days of August?

Bedside, poolside or in the cool dark of the basement, nothing is as transporting as a book so good you forget you’re reading. For while reading, perhaps with a grape Popsicle dripping on to the pages, the silver screen is in your mind. Here is a brief summer sketch across the branches of the faith of who is reading what.

“I’m going back to Ecclesiastes,” said Pikesville resident Phil Simkin, 75, a cemetery caretaker who identifies as “intensely Jewish but not intensely observant.”

Noting that Judaism is the only religion (as far as he knows) that requires continued learning, Simkin has been an intense reader since childhood when he borrowed James Norman Hall stories of seafaring from the Pimlico branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library across from the long-gone Uptown Theatre.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be smart enough to understand [Ecclesiastes],” said Simkin, “but I’m fascinated by the mental gymnastics of the talmudic rabbis.”

Just as Mordechai Frager — “… not Orthodox and not Reform, just Jewish” — is beguiled by the verbal gymnastics of writers like Roberto Bolano and Thomas Pynchon. If Bolano is demanding, Pynchon can be impossible. But like my Polish grandmother (a sweatshop seamstress, she read bodice rippers to relax) used to say, Frager must be “a glutton for punishment” when it comes to the tough sledding of literature.

Frager, a 35-year-old Pikesville resident, underestimated Pynchon, saying in early summer that he’d be done in a couple of weeks. As Melville’s birthday approached on the first day of August, Frager was still trudging through the novel that put Pynchon on the map in 1973 — “Gravity’s Rainbow.” How much of a glutton for paperback punishment is Mordi? Frager has been toggling between “Gravity’s Rainbow” and Pynchon’s 1963 debut, “V.”

“‘V.’ is exciting, less weird than ‘Gravity’ but weird enough,” said Frager, who reads Pynchon with the help of online concordances to Pynchon, sort of like a meta-fiction “Guide to the Perplexed.”

“I have to keep re-reading passages,” said Frager. “It’s hard, but fun enough not to give up.”

The gospel according to ‘V.’ — “A schlemiel is a schlemiel. What can you ‘make’ out of one? What can one make out of himself? You reach a point … where you know how much you can and cannot do. But every now and again, [there are] attacks of acute optimism.”

Is that not faith? Maybe not, for as Pynchon writes near the end of the book, “Everyone is some kind of schlemiel.”

Marc Cohen, the decidedly secular owner of At Once Pest Control, reads in bed each evening with his Kindle. A lover of animals (but not bugs), he is currently fascinated by “Sapiens: “A Brief History of Humankind,” by the Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari.

The book traces human history from the Stone Age to the day before yesterday and — no slam against Harari — “I read myself to sleep,” said Cohen. (If you’re looking for an indelibly Jewish book before the summer ends, find a copy of Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep,” perhaps the greatest American immigrant novel yet written.)

Playwright and dental office manager Cronshi Englander is one of those readers who might do herself serious harm if her stacks of books fell over as she was walking by. This summer, Englander finished Anthony Doerr’s 2015 Pulitzer-winning novel, “All the Light We Cannot See.”

“I’m still in awe of the way the story was woven together as well as the beauty of his work, despite the horror of the subject,” Englander said of the book, set in occupied France during World War II. “It’s one of those books I may put away and read again in a few years.” Her caveat: “If I can find the shelf space.”

“My tastes are eclectic,” said Englander. “Mostly fiction — science fiction, steampunk, romance, urban fantasy, mysteries, Terry Pratchett [a genre unto himself] and the occasional graphic novel.”

Not so with Simkin, who respects but no longer has interest in those dead white male heavyweights Hemingway and Fitzgerald, though he may dip into “Moby-Dick” one more time before the lights go out.

For Simkin — the son of a Sunpapers printer named Sam who arrived in the United States from Russia as a 4-year-old — it’s all Torah all the time.

“It’s the only thing I’m interested in at this point,” he said “Maybe I’m cramming for the finals.”

Rafael Alvarez is the author of “Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown” (CityLit Press), a new collection of Baltimore fiction. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.

Also see: 9 Jewish Books to Read this Summer

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