Summer Reading
What I remember most about my childhood summers is reading books. Hundreds of them, icons of a child’s limitless potential. On the porch, in the yard, in my room, at the pool, I always had a book in my hand and my nose between the pages.
The weather this week makes me think of the stories I loved as a child, the ones I read from morning until night (and later, with a flashlight under the covers) during those long lazy days of summer.
What kind of books? Adventure books.
I was probably four or five when I first read The Bears’ Vacation, my introduction to the toddler version of adventure. I marveled at the antics of the silly father bear and the patient, if not slightly amused, mother bear. They felt like a real family to me, and I slept with that book under my pillow so I could read it as soon as I woke up each morning.
In elementary school, I only wanted to read books about kids and animals who were going somewhere exotic, trying something new, or facing a big physical challenge. The library shelves were full of those (and still are).
I was amazed by the people who wrote the stories:
What kind of brilliant mind could dream up adventures about a little creature named Ralph S. Mouse?
Or the amazing mongoose, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi?
I was even more intrigued and inspired by the characters themselves:
Pippi Longstocking, daughter of buccaneer captain of the South Seas? The strongest and most independent 9-year old on the planet?
What about Encyclopedia Brown’s amazing powers of deduction that bested all of the neighborhood adults?
I wished Leroy, aka Encyclopedia, lived in my town so I could solve mysteries and save the neighborhood, too.
Of course, there was a special place in my heart for the pioneer adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder, from her Little House in the Big Woods to that blizzard-bound Little Town on the Prairie. Reading in my warm bed while lightning bugs blinked outside my window, I could almost feel the frostbite inching up my fingers as Laura and her sisters twisted hay to throw into their stove so they wouldn’t freeze to death. Between Laura Ingalls and Nancy Drew, teenage sleuth extraordinaire, I truly believed there was nothing I couldn’t do.
I wanted to be like them, and I wanted to have all the adventures they did.
As I think about those wonderful childhood summers full of reading, there are so many books that come to mind, most of which stay with me today:
The Chronicles of Prydain, beginning with The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander. A pentalogy that I read every summer for probably five or six years in a row starting the summer after third grade. I didn’t know what “coming of age” or “bildungsroman” meant at the time, but I rooted for Taran of Caer Dallben, Assistant Pig-Keeper, with all my heart. Just writing this makes me want to read the whole series again right now!
The Hobbit. Thank you, Mrs. Fox, for introducing our fourth grade class to that reluctant hero, Bilbo Baggins!
The White Mountains trilogy by John Christopher. I also didn’t know what dystopian fiction was in fifth grade, but I loved this series, which rivals any current YA dystopian fiction sequence out there. The game “sphere chase” from those books? Looks alot like Quidditch. Just sayin.
And of course, Watership Down, which I loved so much that I dedicated a whole blog post to it a few months ago.
Treasure Island, Charlotte’s Web, The Lord of The Rings, The Sword in the Stone, The Trumpet of the Swan, The Dark is Rising Sequence, and the list goes on and on.
I certainly put the Harford County Public Library bookmobile librarian through her paces.
I always checked out the limit, and she’d encourage me not to borrow them all if I wasn’t going to read them.
Ha! I finished them in record time and then would have nothing to read for a few days until the bookmobile came around again.
My grandmother donated her book limit to me so I wouldn’t run out before the traveling library returned to our neighborhood. These books represented a treasure trove of adventure, fantasy, exploration, sacrifice, friendship, courage, and inspiration.
The best part of these stories for me, both then and now, is that the adventurers who lived in them, whether fictional or real-life trailblazers, showed me a way of life and a way of thinking that expanded my little world. They pointed to what was possible. I knew it when I was a kid, and it is still true today. I am grateful for all of them.
It’s the reason why I am working on my own adventure fiction novel today. I hope I can live up to that standard - to show, in an entertaining and inspiring way, that the only limits in our lives are those we agree to.
Has a book ever inspired you to try something new or challenge yourself? What is your favorite childhood “summer read”? Please add a comment and let me know!
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