Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 6, 1994 TAG: 9406070060
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Plenty of magazines are offering their own versions of Recommended Summer Reading, too, and the most recent Book-of-the- Month Club News is emblazoned "Have a Book-of-the-Month Club Summer!" "(Every book half off!)"
Local libraries are getting out the word on Summer Reading Programs. Bookstores are putting up displays of Blockbuster Books for the Beach. And everyone I know, myself included, is restacking all the books they purchased over the winter, in order of reading priority.
I'm putting the really fat books on top.
But who am I fooling?
Only myself, if I'm fooling anyone at all.
For, what makes me think that I'll read more this summer than I've been reading this winter? What makes anyone think such a thing? Nothing sensible, that's for sure.
In fact, if we were sensible about it, we'd think that it was long, lonely winter nights that called out as the perfect time to curl up with a book and a cup of tea.
But somehow instead, the notion has gotten widely a-loose that it's the leisurely, sultry, summer days that beg to be filled with the whisper of turning pages.
Ha!
People buy fat books for summertime reading only because fat books stay flat across your face, however brisk the beach breezes. You can doze for hours under a really fat paperback, happy amid the sound of surf and the smell of sun-tanning lotions.
People buy fat paperback books for the summer because it doesn't matter much whether you use the cover to swat mosquitoes or as a coaster for your beer, because it doesn't matter much whether you accidentally drop a paperback into the pool, and because, in an emergency, it doesn't matter much whether you tear out the pages you've already read to sop up the mustard the kids have spilled all over the car's back seat.
This is what constitutes our Summer Reading Boom: the purchase of cheap, fat paperbacks instead of the purchase of expensive sunglasses, sleep aids or paper towels.
Could we have a little truth in advertising, please?
Every year since I was in college, my New Year's resolutions have included this one: "Read more books." I keep tabs on myself to see how I'm doing.
Every year since college, I've done about the same. Summer, winter, spring or fall, it's four books a month for me.
Some months a couple fewer, some months a couple more. But, in the end, it averages out: I read in June, July and August as I read in February - slowly, and often nodding off.
This is a shameful admission for a writer. After all, what's supposed to matter more to me than books?
I console myself with this: I do buy a lot of books. I arrange them in neat, prioritized stacks around the house. And then when summer comes, as I said before, I shift the stacks. And, indeed, I do put the fat ones on top.
But I look for the nice, fat paperbacks. The ones that can't be ruined by chlorine or beer. The ones that will flatten a fly in a single swat.
Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB