Found Around the Shelves: Summer Reading Memories

I had so much fun with the previous post that I did, in which I revealed my large tiny book hoarding problem by gathering all of the unread books lying on my shelves, that I've decided to do some occasional themed posts on my book collection. It's really not that big, so we'll see how many topics I can think of before I run out of books to talk about (Of course, I can always add more, but I'm trying to be good with my book buying). And yes, sometimes I have way too much time on my hands that ideas like this even pop into my head.

Since it's the middle of summer, I thought a timely subject would be books that were assigned for school to be read during summer vacation. It also sort of ties in to my previous post about the book hoarding because I still have some of these books 20 or so years later, which explains why most of them look the worse for wear:

When I moved a few years ago, I did a pretty thorough clean out of my books while packing, and quite a few titles from my old school summer reading lists got tossed. I figured that I wasn't likely to read them ever again, and I really can't say that I've been itching to reread James Agee's A Death in the Family, Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County, or Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding, among others. The books that I have kept weren't necessarily because I loved them, but for whatever reason, I just didn't want to part with them. There's also still the mystery of where my copy of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man went. I know I lent it to somebody in college, but it was never returned. That book made zero sense to me when I read it for my senior year of high school, so it's not like I was crying over it going missing, but it has given me a phobia of lending my books out that persists until this day.

I remember actually being excited to receive my first summer reading list when I went to high school orientation. Ahh—the optimism of a freshman! The following year, I wasn't quite so thrilled when those pieces of paper were handed out toward the end of May, and I absolutely dreaded the sight of them at the end of junior year. I think my favorite list is still from freshman year, when I read To Kill a Mockingbird, The Pearl, and Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. The selections after that were more miss than hit. I didn't realize it at the time, but they were slowly putting a damper on my love of reading that I wouldn't break out of until I was well into adulthood. I did rather like Les Misérables, though. I only had to read the abridged version, which is why my copy in the photo is so small; the unabridged version is over 1000 pages. My cousin, Ally, owns a copy, and seriously, it could double as a makeshift weapon.

Senior year's summer reading assignment was quite a drudge because I'd chosen English as one of my concentration subjects, and I had to take two English classes that year—which meant two summer reading lists. Les Misérables was on one of them, and I think I had a bit of luck because another book was on both lists. I had to read The Bridges of Madison County that year, and why, I could never figure out because our reading diet consisted almost exclusively of classic literature. Maybe it was because Bridges was still selling copies like mad at the time, and they just wanted us to read something off the bestseller's list for a change. I had the worst time reading Madame Bovary; Emma Bovary, if you thought your ennui was unbearable, you should have tried reading about it.

I really have to laugh at that reading list now because back then, I never thought I'd get to the end of it. There were about seven books on it, and I can usually read at least that many in a month now. When I was 17, though, the last thing I wanted to do was spend my summer doing my forced reading for school. There was only one time when I had to read a book over the summer for college, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, and that was for a special incoming freshmen event. And with that, my summers of required reading were finally over.

If there are any summer reading memories you'd like to share, whether they're happy stories or horror stories, feel free to leave them in the comments!