Summer Reading

My childhood summers in Jordan were largely spent lost in a book—or three. Jordan in the seventies and eighties didn’t exactly present a wealth of things for kids to do, particularly for girls. Summers spent at home (and not visiting friends and family in the United States) were bookended with church camps at the beginning and a trip to Petra and Aqaba towards the end. In the middle, the days stretched hot and long and fairly unstructured. When my sister and I were younger, we had a membership to a pool where we were pretty much the only Americans in sight. As children, we got a lot of attention, mostly of the benign, friendly, or curious variety. When we approached adolescence, the attention shifted to a less savory kind, so we let the membership lapse. And so during the summer, we went to church, hung out with friends, did projects at home, and read, and read, and read.

Access to books pre-Kindle was always the challenge. Jordan didn’t have a great public library system, so the British Council’s small lending library was our first and primary source for books. We read the entire collection multiple times over; I can still picture where certain books sat on the shelves. Every once in a while, a local bookstore would carry a spurt of random books in English that my parents would buy. When we went to the United States, we always returned with at least one full suitcase dedicated to books, many of them picked up at used bookstores in the Bay Area. We were able to get some magazines locally, literary gems like Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping, which I also read and re-read in their entirety. Once I got over my early reading delay traumas (a story for another post), I read voraciously. My parents didn’t limit what we read from their books, so I devoured everything my mother had. My father’s taste ran more towards classical Arabic literature, of which I got my fill during the school year, so the summer was dedicated to fun reading. Reading was my primary exposure to English, outside of conversations with my family and some friends, and it was where I developed my vocabulary and grammar and some sense of how to write.

I looked forward with jittery anticipation to the first days of summer vacation when tests were done, I could sleep in, have a late breakfast, and then spend the day reading. I read for hours until I was dizzy and headachy, and then I kept reading some more. With daytime summer temperatures in the nineties and up, and no air-conditioning to be had in our hot apartments, it made sense to pursue activities with minimum physical exertion. We didn’t own a TV or telephone until my later elementary school years, so the habits of reading were set first before any other form of entertainment beckoned.

Reading remains my all-time favorite pastime, second only to eating. If I can combine reading AND eating, well, that’s just a little bit of heaven. When Dan takes the kids to visit his mother, I consider it the absolute height of luxury to get up in the morning, fix my breakfast, and read a book IN TOTAL SILENCE. I revel in the novelty of eating my bowl of oatmeal from start to finish, and drinking my tea while it is still hot, without a single interruption, lost in the world of the book I am reading.

My reading tastes aren’t particularly highbrow. People sometimes assume because of my work as an editor that I read weighty classics or obscure literary fiction. I don’t. I love humor, travel, and food writing. Memoirs have always enticed me, as do good “beach reads.” Mysteries and thrillers—not so much. No science fiction or fantasy at all. I try to work in selections from my stack of New Yorkers periodically so that I can keep on top of what good writing looks like and figure out how the editors edit.

Somehow, even though I am a part-time working parent whose kids are out of school, I cling to this illusion that summer means more time for extended reading. I have three books going on my Kindle and a stack of books from the library, and I would like nothing better than to sit down and while away the hours reading them all. Unfortunately, my kids don’t share this passion, which utterly bewilders me. I have managed to implement a modest summer reading plan for them, and they have each gotten into some series of books that hold their attention. But thirty minutes during the day and thirty minutes at night is the extent of it. They have many other things that they would rather be doing, many of which involve me in some way. When they stop to read, I have to snatch those moments of quiet to get some work done, so my reading gets pushed aside.

Sadly, I can’t read in any moving vehicle, and I can only read in airplanes when there isn’t a whiff of turbulence and I am not dry-eyed and tired (when do those particular stars align??). That doesn’t work very well in the summer when increased car and air travel would naturally provide those times to read. But I still manage to sneak in snatches of reading here and there throughout the day. I read at breakfast when the kids are busy picking on each other and avoiding their food; I read while I cook, waiting for something to boil or finish roasting; I read while waiting for the kids at an activity; I read in doctors’ offices or other waiting rooms; and most glorious of all, I read when I go to bed at night. The end of my day is the highlight of my day. I climb into bed, check in with Dan, and then settle in with a book for as long as I want. I enter this other universe, lit by the halo of my reading light, or the glow of my Kindle screen, and it is very, very good.