Lazy Summer Daze [jessi]

I remember when I was growing up, in the summertime, our local library (in partnership with Reading Rainbow, and Public Television—supported by viewers like you) always had summer reading programs. The goal of these, of course is to lure children into the library, who wouldn't otherwise set foot inside. "If we can get them through the door" the librarians still reason, "into the cool dark aisles, with rows of Newbery winners, and cushy bean-bag reading nooks; if we can do that, we can get them hooked on Harry Potter." And of course, once one has plowed one's way through one's first 784-page book, it's entirely possible that one can get talked into beginning another, and another.

The summers when Jana and I were signed up, we didn't have Harry Potter, but we feasted on L. Frank Baum, and Lucy Maude Montgomery, gleefully watching mom sign off on each of our finished books, attesting as a parent, that her child did not lie about the completion of such. We weren’t quite so gleeful when she took The Baby-Sitter's Club books out of our to-be-checked-out stack, and replaced them with Scholastic's biographies of Founding Fathers, and forbidding even Marguerite Henry’s horse books until we had finished at least one. Still, those were heady days of acquiring imagination and knowledge.

As I got older, and the paper certificates that the library issued to those who met their reading goal lost their power as incentive, and I stopped plowing my way head long through a pile of books, with an August 31 deadline looming like a Texas thunderstorm on the horizon. When I was in college, my friends and I took pictures of each other next to our giant stacks of required reading. One semester my Riverside Chaucer made a great base for a veritable Babel's tower of literature. Usually by the time the final sentence was laid down for the final essay, we were so ecstatic at being finished with the rigidity of institutionalized education that we declared we would read only for enjoyment until fall semester boxed us in again. Summers were spent roaming free across the country on road trips, volunteering at summer camps, or interning in silent and overly-air-conditioned offices. I still read during those summers, but couldn't be talked into the structure of a list. I picked up whatever appealed to me, and sometimes it was Les Miserables, and sometimes it was something decidedly less cerebral.

I have been out of college for three years, and this summer will be my second sans summer camp. In drastic attempts to keep my brain from melting away in the tediousness of my job, I have, for the first summer since the Summer Reading Program at the Library, made a summer reading list. I'm kind of excited. I may even have my mom check them off and sign at the bottom.

To make it, I culled my own stack of nearly 50 as yet unread titles. (I counted 45 on my shelves yesterday, and found two more under my bed this morning.) I seem to be unable to walk out of Henderson’s Used Books with less than five books in hand, and it is a personal point of shame that I am more of a compulsive book buyer than a great reader. So, 47 volumes it is (unless I find more under the bed), and from that, I’m pulling 13 books for the Great Summer Reading List. One for each week through the end of August:

The Book of Chameleons – Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Diamonds for Moscow – By David E. Walker (this one I bought at Henderson’s solely for the cover: vintage 1950s penguin paperback green-and-white two-tone. Shameless, I know.)

5 Red Herrings – Dorothy L. Sayers

Kidnapped – Robert Lewis Stevenson

Cost of Discipleship – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Blue Like Jazz – Donald Miller

The Idiot – Dostoyevski

The View From Saturday – E.L. Konigsburg

Paradisio – Dante

Piers Plowman – William Langland

The Pooh Perplex – Fredrick Crews

The Hiding Place – Corrie Ten Boom

Reflections on Psalms – C. S. Lewis

So that’s the list. Now let’s here from you: which books, out of the millions in print, available at Barnes and Noble, Henderson’s, Amazon.com, or your local library will you choose to rest tent-like over your face while you snooze in the Saturday sunshine?