Summer Reading

There are down sides to the summer break of a high school student. For me they included never being allowed to put the air conditioner on as cold as I wanted it to be and being forced to have a summer job. In truth I wasn’t forced to have a summer job, but if I wanted money, which I did, then I had to get a summer job. Working really infringed on my summer plans of laying around and binge watching my Friends and MASH DVDs while knitting. Another thing that really sucked about summer was the required summer reading.

I don’t quite know why the high school thought that we students needed to read books from a designated list over our summer break, but that is what we were forced to do. At the end of the school year we received a list of maybe 12 to 15 titles and we had to pick two to read by the beginning of the next school year. At that time we were quizzed on the books we read (or allegedly read) and thereafter never spoke of the books again. Perhaps they thought that our brains would melt out of our ears if we didn’t do some kind of reading over the summer, or maybe they thought we would forget how to read altogether.

What a presumption to assume that no high school student was picking up a book over the summer. Okay, probably most of us were not reading that much, but for that I blame the school. As a child I always loved to read and it wasn’t until reading became homework around seventh or eighth grade that I started to dislike the activity.

Even then it wasn’t that I disliked reading, but I disliked being forced to read something I didn’t choose on my own. If my summer reading books could have been a constant rotation of Harry Potter, historical fiction, and the occasional biography or memoir, I would have been happy. But we were giving a limited amount of choice and instead of inspiring my already existent enthusiasm for reading to keep growing, the summer reading assignment pretty much guaranteed that the one thing I wasn’t going to do during my summer vacation was read.

Here is what usually happened:

1) I would get the book list at the end of the school year and decide which two books I was going to read.

2) For the next six to seven weeks I would do absolutely nothing about obtaining the books, let alone read them.

3) With about a week left until school started, I would storm the library and take whichever books on the list that I could find.

4) I would then spend lots of time with the books close by: sometimes I would hold them and turn the pages reading a little, sometimes they sat next to me on my nightstand untouched.

5) In the last days before school started I would either read the books really fast over the course of several late nights, or I would skim them and hope for the best. Most often it was the latter.

All of that effort (or lack thereof) would culminate in the quizzes I would take on each book during the first week of school. They were piddly little ten question quizzes that mattered very little when it came to my final grade. More than once I failed these quizzes and went on to do very well in my English classes in spite of it all.

Summer reading and other assignments in high school really soured me on reading. Freshman year we had to read Great Expectations. The final assignment for that book was basically a huge outline: we had to summarize every chapter, list the characters who appeared, describe how their situations changed from the previous chapter. I hated every minute of it, never finished the book, and couldn’t tell you a thing that happens in that novel except I think it contains a person named Pip, someone else named Miss Havisham, and a moldy old wedding cake. I have no idea how those three relate to each other, but I’m pretty sure they are from that book.

After high school I made the fatal mistake of majoring in history which, you might imagine, also involves a fair amount of reading. I’m sure it’s nothing to studying law or medicine, but weeks where I was expected to read upwards of two or three hundred pages for homework were not uncommon. That after four years of forced marches through classic literature made reading the last thing I would have chosen to do for fun. Really only a power outage would make me pick up a book at that point in time.

Thankfully I was raised by people who value reading a great deal. I do not personally recall this, but I imagine that I was read to since birth. I know I was read to as a small child. I also remember it being a battle most nights to get me to close my book and go to sleep. The night light in my room was handy for keeping the scary dark at bay, but also for reading the next chapter after I was supposed to be asleep. My sister and I were kept well surrounded by books and never lacked for anything to read. I believe it was these strong roots connected to a genetic love of reading that eventually brought me back to reading for pleasure.

I now have three bookshelves, full to overflowing with books. Two are from IKEA and reside in my bedroom and the little office across from my bedroom. The third lives in my phone on my audiobook app. Between the three I am now in an almost constant state of reading something, either through my ears or my eyeballs. And I think I have cracked the code of making reading fun: you have to make it a little bit of a game.

I use the Goodreads app to track all of the books I read. On that app you can track your progress through each book, but most importantly you can set an annual goal for how many books you want to read each year. For this year my goal is 42 books (42 being the answer to the life, the universe, and everything, it seemed appropriate). While you track your progress you can check to see if you’re on schedule to meet your goal. It calculates based on your goal and tells you that you’re 3 books ahead of schedule, or 1 book behind schedule. Every time I mark off another book, it’s like a little win. Another hurdle passed on the way to the goal.

Another fun thing about summer reading as a grown up: my cousin Abigail made me this book tracker for Christmas, so now every time I finish a book I get to add it on this bookshelf too.

Right now I am behind schedule by three books. For this I blame the nearly 1,000 page Game of Thrones volume that I’m currently on, as well as my recent desire to only listen to podcasts or books which I’ve already read (because it’s comforting and familiar and it doesn’t matter if my mind wanders).

Going into this summer reading season is exciting. It is like a showdown between me and the calendar. I imagine a tiny golf announcer voice in my head as I turn the pages… “She’s making progress, folks, but she’s challenging herself. Taking on all five Game of Thrones books in one year and planning to read another 37 volumes in addition…some might say it’s crazy, but I think she may be on track for her best year yet. Let’s watch what happens…”