SUMMER READING
I was one of those kids who took their summer reading list and raced to the store to buy the books and then shoved them on a shelf and forgot about them till the end of July. I was also that kid that spent the last two weeks of summer reading non-stop, eight hours a day, finishing my required assignments only the night before school started.
My older sister would encourage me along. She’d bring me an ice-cold Coca-Cola and promise me that even though I could hear all the others kids outside swimming and playing no one was really having any fun. Of course, she had finished her reading weeks before and savored her Halloween candy well into December.
Now, all grown up, I can think of no better way to spend the summer but to plop myself down on the beach and read. Since I no longer live in LA, the beach part is harder to pull off, but I still love the idea, pleasure and reality of summer reading.
My list is long this year — Chris Bohjalian’s The Double Bind, Khaled Hosseini’,s A Thousand Splendid Suns, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Randall Kenan, Let The Dead Bury Their Dead, Patricia Marx’s Him Her Him Again The End of Him, Ann H. Gabhart’s Orchard of Hope and Virgina Boyd’s One Fell Swoop — and many, many more that have found their way to my bedside table now forming a wall between me and the bathroom!
But I find it rather fitting, or possibly ironic, that the very school I went to here in town has placed my book on their summer reading list. I can’t help but wonder how many girls will be reading about Catherine Grace and the folks in Ringgold — well into the night the day before school starts!