Romancing the Genres

Summer Armchair Travels

When you say summer reads or beach reading, I don’t think I’ve ever really understood the term.  I   read a book because I wanted to, not because it was a “summer “read.

In the house I grew up in, I had a beach chair under a tree in the back yard, If the tide was  not in, I usually found myself in that seat reading, anything and everything. We lived two blocks from the beach so in the summer, if the tide was in I was at the beach,

Summer was the time I read any and everything I could get my hands on. Just as I did the rest of the year. I just had more time to do it.  I didn’t have school to worry about and even if I had a summer job, it was usually part time.  I have wonderful memories of summers spent reading in my chair in the yard. From that chair I travelled many places.

I went to the wilds of Canada with Mrs. Mike, Nazi Amsterdam with the Diary of Anne Frank, I traveled back in time to colonial Boston, Victorian England  and  the Civil War of the south.

One of my favorite memories was the afternoon I spent reading Gone with the Wind. I took my lunch out to the yard and began reading didn’t stop until my mom called me in for dinner. She said every time she looked out the window I was reading.  I was engrossed in Ashley, Melanie, and of course Rhett. I thought Scarlett was a spoiled little brat. I felt as if I was in the middle of the siege of Atlanta and not in a back yard in Boston. I finished the book that night before going to bed.

So when I hear summer reads I don’t think of lying on the beach but of traveling, even if it’s from my arm chair, Traveling to all the exciting worlds contained in a book.