My school never had summer reading lists either, but I always loved summer because it meant I had time to go through shopping bags full of books, mostly while floating on the swimming pool.

I miss summer.

I miss summer.

Oh, god, yes, when it wasn't the time of "doing the same thing, only while sweating." When you could head out with the dog with a book and find a tree and do nothing for hours but read.

I remember that the summer before senior year, I chose to read The Sound and the Fury. We split into discussion groups the first day, and my group spent most of our time going, "What the HELL was that?"

One spring break, I read Animal Farm, 1984, and Brave New World. For fun. But then I ended up writing a paper on the last two, so that worked out.

One spring break, I read Animal Farm, 1984, and Brave New World.

See that's practically a book in itself: The Spring of My Dystopias.

I miss that version of summer too.

I am having a little reminder of it this week because I took yesterday and today (and next Tuesday and Wednesday) off in case I was going to manage to get to see FotREE in the theatre. But I didn't - so instead: lazy days of reading, knitting and shockingly: sorting through stacks of stuff to organize.

After June 25, I'll be done with my summer class, so I can finally get around to doing some of my piles of reading--yay!! And, on the warm sunny weekend days, I'm going to head over to the apartment complex's pool and read while I bake in the sun.

I remember spending one summer in my teens reading through every Agatha Christie novel the library had. And another one reading all the Ian Fleming.

Our summer house had a loft where the kids all slept, and I can even now summon up the smell of the dusty red blanket I had on my bed, where I would read for hours.

I was never a reader of great volume. I had the tendency, if I really liked a book, to linger, to sink into it, to follow plot points and details with embroidery of my own. What in tv are spinoffs. Or, you know, fanfic, except not necessarily written down.

I'd do a run of authors and blitz through a dozen Christies or (in my teens) MacDonalds, MacInnes, McLean. But I'd have to stop when the plots all strung together in one supernovel. I read South by Java Head once every winter, and H.M.S. Ulysses every winter--to combat the current weather. I spent an entire summer on Exodus and Mila 18, just living in those places in my head.

My life wasn't bad or difficult, I have no idea why I needed so badly to escape it.

how abysmal I was in grammar. I have never been good with identifying the parts of sentences, though I can write a kick-ass one.

I have trouble naming parts of speech, but after a two-week segment on diagramming, which I hated at the outset but have since learned to love and appreciate, I can construct and break down a complex sentence, show you how it works or why it doesn't. It even helped with the thorny punctuation problem. Diagramming was sort of a Rosetta stone for me.

I remember diagramming ... but another thing I've found that helped me with constructing sentences was studying other languages, especially German. And then there was college, where all freshmen were required to take a class in which they'd have to turn in a two-page paper ever week. Univerally loathed, but it sure did teach you how to write competently, if not well.

Summer reading - every summer we'd spend a week or two at the beach and we'd pack a big bag of books. One almost ritual was rereading the entire Hobbit/Lord of the Rings cycle every year.