Every summer, readers and publishers compile their recommended summer reading lists. Since we love to read at Claire McKinneyPR, we decided to follow suit with our own memories of summer reads that have stuck with us throughout the years.
Sonya:
Like most kids, I loved reading anything but what was assigned in class. The absolute worst were the required summer readings, which I hated as a concept, even when I ended up liking the book in the end (shout out to Fahrenheit 451). While I hated all summer readings, I remember really digging my heels in when we were forced to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle— a novel that was written during the early 20th Century and famously exposed the horrors of the unregulated meat-packing industry in the US. My father had an old copy of it, which he retrieved from a box in the basement and loaned to me for the summer. It was dense; despite the small text, the book was thick and the pages were yellowed and musty. None of this made the text more appealing to me as I flipped through it and noted all the graphic descriptions of the animal butcheries and the unsanitary working conditions.
By the time the book was assigned to us in early high school, I’d been a vegetarian for five years, so the subject struck a particular nerve in me. My big plan to avoid the reading altogether was to protest it on the same moral grounds one might have against dissecting a frog in biology class. All summer, I remember thinking about how I was going to tell my history teacher that I objected to the mistreatment of animals that the book depicted and therefore had a right to refuse to read it. In the end, though, my chronic desire for good grades won out and I begrudgingly read the entire book during the last 3 days of my summer vacation.
When we returned to school, I was quite glad I never brought up my protests to the teacher. In the first lesson about the book, I discovered my gut reaction mirrored that of most Americans at the time of publication: I’d missed the point about the human rights violations and focused in on the animals and the food. Sinclair’s work resulted in an overhaul of food safety standards for the meat industry, but what he’d really hoped for was to change working conditions for the factory workers living in poverty and peril. Reading a book is one thing, while comprehending it is another entirely— perhaps this was an unintentional lesson of the assignment, but a useful one for me going forward nonetheless.
Grace:
Growing up, I had a deep love of reading, fueled by Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and the local library’s summer reading program. My passion naturally dimmed by the way of required reading assignments throughout high school and college and a few books by choice each summer was the best I could do for many years. The summer after I graduated college, I was job hunting and needed something to do with my free time, finally not bogged down with assignments and grades. I discovered my Kindle from a decade past in the back of my closet, dusted it off, and downloaded Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren on a whim.
Instantly it seemed, my love of reading flooded back to me. I was enthralled in the story of Elliot and Macy getting a second chance at their first love. Devouring the book in just a few days led to a summer of many sleepless nights getting lost in the pages of fictional lives and relationships. Over the next few months, I read more books than I had in many years.
Two years later, and I’m still reading every single day. I’ve become a part of hundreds of different worlds and fallen in love with so many different characters that have changed my life. With my (new) Kindle in hand and hardcopies littering my shelves, Love and Other Words, along with that summer, will always hold a special place in my heart for leading me back to that place of childhood wonder I feel through stories.
Claire:
One thing about graduating from college is you lose your vast summers. Mine were filled with fried seafood, waiting tables, night swimming, and reading. You can plop me on a beach with a book and an umbrella and come get me at 5:00pm. By that time I might be on to book #2. When I was 23, those long summers were gone and I had the standard one week of days to escape to my parents’ house in Massachusetts where I could at least read one, maybe two or three books. The summer I read The Stand by Stephen King was one of those post-collegiate times. It was a behemoth of a book and a commitment that was likely to drown out other reading opportunities that week. But there I was on a towel in the sand propped on my elbows with the paperback version cracked open in front of me. The Stand was an experience that dominated my reading time. It was also the last book by Stephen King that I read. I hate to say it but it didn’t leave much of an impression. It may have been too long, or I may have resented it for taking over my week. Books can still inspire emotion in me, even if I don’t respond to what’s in between the covers.
This summer on my list are Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and A Gentleman in Moscow, among others.
When I was young and naïve, I thought the bios you read in theater programs and on the backs of books were written by someone who had a lot of nice things to say about the person. I didn’t know that individual people wrote their own author bio.