Summer Reading

“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.” — Clifton Fadiman, 1941

There are so many things I remember about our town library from my childhood days.

The smell of the books — a faint musty smell, as if caught somewhere in the netherworld between a new bookstore and a used bookshop.

The children’s room was arranged with tiny chairs and tables, with well-loved stuffed animals sitting around one as they enjoyed a ficitious tea party. Hello Pooh. Hello Kanga.

And in the summer, the bookmobile would be parked at the top of the hill just in front of the library entrance, waiting to be stocked up before it headed across our rural Connecticut town, serving as something of a literary ice cream truck and dispensing intellectual treats to children in far-flung areas.

I’d quietly pad over to the check-out area, where the librarian would open each book, carefully remove the card housed in the pocket inside the back cover, and ask for my library card, with its embossed metal plate that worked with the special machine to stamp my ID number the book cards.

I can still hear and even feel the machine’s THUNK breaking the silence of the library, as it documented my association with each book, indelibly connecting us on a journey to destinations from the Sherwood Forest to 17th-century Paris to Baker Street and beyond.

Vintage library card with metal plate

The tradition of summer reading lists that began in childhood has extended to adulthood without the seasonal constraints. Now, the reading list is perpetual.

There are so many classic books to read — so many Great Books that serve as a feast pro mente — books that maybe we tell ourselves we’ll read some day, and maybe the summer is the perfect time to do that.

But rather than donning these starched collars of the academy, we slip into something more comfortable, like a modern blouse of a new memoir or a comfortable but tattered sweatshirt of a favorite old book.

Even in 1953, when Ogden Nash published this poem in The Baker Street Journal (the quarterly publication of the Sherlock Holmes literary society The Baker Street Irregulars), he understood the lure of the familiar amid more scholarly intentions.

Each June I Make a Promise Sober

by Ogden Nash

Every summer I truly intend
My intellectual sloth to end.
Leave Dumas and Conan Doyle behind me,
And let the dog days, when they find me,
Find me beside the sea perusing
Volumes of Mr. Hutchins’ choosing,
Congesting my uncultured head
With famous books I haven’t read —
With Milton’s Areopagitica,
The almanacs of Gotha and Whitaker,
With Lysistrata and The Frogs,
And lots of Plato’s dialogues,
With Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle.
Erasmus, and Tyl Eulenspiegel,
Corneille and Moliere and Racine
And Rasselas and The Faerie Queen.
Every summer with me I wager
That I’ll read these masterpieces major.

Each June I make a promise sober,
That I’ll be literate by October,
Lose d’Artagnan and Sherlock Holmes
In worthier and, weightier tomes,
In Nietzsche and even preachier Germans,
And Donne’s more esoteric sermons,
The lofty thoughts of Abelard,
And Rilke, Kafka, and Kierkegaard;
Loop in one comprehensive lasso
Turgenev, Thomas Aquinas and Tasso,
The Conquest of Peru, by Prescott,
And David Harum, by Edward Westcott.
Of the classics, from Beowulf to Baedeker,
I know less than a first or second gradeke,
So every summer I truly intend
My intellectual sloth to end,
And every summer for years and years
I’ve read Sherlock Holmes and The Three Musketeers.

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You know what? It’s the summer.

Read what you like, not what you think you have to read. 

There’s so much to learn,