Summer Reading revisited
I have to say that the term ‘summer reading’ elicits mixed feelings for me. As a parent, I found myself, by August, exhausted in efforts to coax my girls to finish their summer reading assignments for school. Passive resistance was their strategy for making me crazy.
As a former educator, I see the value of summer reading assignments but not if the only follow-up is a test to validate which students read the book. Many books that appear on school lists are challenging for students, as they should be, but students need a chance to debrief about the books, have a classroom discussion and process the material.
‘Summer reading’ for adults is an altogether different concept. A recent New York Times article, written by Jennifer Harlan, traces the history of ‘summer reading.’ Would it surprise you that increased technology, improved transportation, workplace advances and the rise of the middle class ALL fostered the notion of summer reading in the United Staes? Yes, toward the turn of the century, middle class workers began to have paid vacations and could afford to take the train or drive their car to a nearby moutain or seaside resort for a week or two. With the invention of wood pulp paper, book makers begin to mass produce paperback books while the novel gained popularity as a respected genre of literature. Book publishers capitalized on the idea, and the “NYT Book Review” published its first special edition featuring books suitable for summer reading in June of 1897.
Books ‘suitable for summer reading’ were geared toward a female population whose literacy rates had skyrocketed during that time. Female writers, likewise, began to churn out romantic stories that became very popular. Even Louisa May Alcott, before writing Little Women, wrote a book called Perilous Play about a group of vacationers who were bored one summer afternoon and took to eating bonbons laced with hashish!!
While there are still plenty of authors who write light fiction with a summer vacation setting, these books are not the only books we read during the summer. Men and women, whether riding on a plane, sunning on the beach or swinging on a porch, relish their reading time during the summer. Writer Hildegarde Hawthorne summed up the pleasures of summer reading in a 1907 Book Review. “A deep peace fills your soul,” she wrote. “Here is this delicious book and the whole day, both yours.”