“One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by.” ~ Jeanette Walls
“Summer reading,” the woman said, with an apologetic shrug translating as a plea for forgiveness. That outgrowth of embarrassment was meant to explain both the book and its title, neither one of which I remember to this day. What I do recall well is the significance I attached to her contrite description of the book’s lack of value or need to be taken seriously because it was ‘summer reading’, with all that conjures up. I’d simply peered at the book’s cover as she sat next to me on the bus gazing at everything except the book, but she’d leaped quickly to an assumed pejorative on my part and categorized her choice as something acceptably lesser because it was ‘summer reading’.
I spent the rest of my ride next to her lost in a world of summers long ago, when I was a schoolgirl with a long reading list of mandatory titles, required reading before what I hoped would be a vacation from school pressures, but worried about getting through them all before the summer even started. Why was that? Possibly because I was a late reader (many writers are) so always felt reading might be, could be, would probably be a challenge, even though I loved storytelling, both biographical and fictional. And yes, the summer was long enough for me to get through the ten required titles on the school’s list, but it was about as much fun as pulling teeth, right up to the last book I was always plowing through the week before we went back in the fall.
