A Moveable Feast: Reading as One's Summer Fare

Once upon a time, I was a voracious reader. And a devious one. As a child, during the school year, I managed to read what I wanted instead of doing my home studies because I had my mother convinced I was learning more that way. When summer came, I would borrow as many books as the library allowed each week (twenty? thirty?), devour them all, two or three in a day, return them and mark them on my reading chart.

I won prizes for the number of books I consumed in a summer. The Bobsey Twins. Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys. Narnia. The Anne books and every other story by L.M. Montgomery. Little Women, and their eight or more cousins. Historical fiction. Biographies of kings, queens, inventors, and social reformers. Not a lot of fantasy. No poetry.

I am not the reader I once was. In some ways, that's a bit of a shame. What I wouldn't give for spending whole days reading! I wish I could return to those lazy summer days on the farm when the best way to escape the heat was by diving between the covers of a book and tasting the delights of the written word. Now I am lucky to find my literary escape in bed in the last fifteen minutes of my day.

I am a reader still, but one whose tastes and habits have changed. If I could go back to my privileged position of childhood, I would want to take my adult perspective with me and glut my reader's appetite on the really good books while I had all the time in the world! Wouldn't you? J.R.R. Tolkien. Madeleine L'Engle. Poetry by the pitcher-full.

Such a luxury not being possible, I've discovered a snacking approach to summer reading helps appease my cravings. And it gives me time to digest what I've read. Last summer I tasted my first Tolkien with The Hobbit. It was a feast enjoyed in chapter-sized bites over several weeks. I savored the pacing of Tolkien's prose and the delicious descriptions of Bilbo Baggins.

This summer my reading list on Good Reads comes in sixty flavors and counting. I've started off the season long picnic with a friend's original 157 page manuscript fragment. And it was very good. Now I have proceeded to Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years at Kent's recommendation and Annie Dillard's The Maytrees, which is poetry in novel form whose setting is beside sea.

What are you reading now? How does it compare with your summer reading in childhood? Are you on Good Reads? Won't you join me?



Image: Bookstore in Haworth, West Yorkshire, 2007