Taxonomy of the ultimate summer read

A brand new paperback and an endless day...this is my ode to summer reading

When I was a kid the King County Library system had a summer reading challenge. I don’t even remember what the prizes were—it was the thrill of the chase for me, not the end point. Getting a whole stack of books just for me to read over the long summer days was absolutely incredible to my tiny mind.

Later when I got older and we would be visiting my mom’s family in Ohio, I would bike from our cottage on Lake Erie to the local library in Ashtabula, trawling the shelves for the perfect books for rainy, stormy days, or sunny, quiet mornings on the second-floor couch overlooking the lake. I remember absolutely devouring books on those trips, which still could not have lasted more than two or three weeks, but felt like a perfect eternity.

Or I’d scour the shelves of the bedrooms and hallways for slightly damp paperbacks and my mom’s old favorites from her teen years. Those books lived at the lake, residing in the house year-round, and therefore had a worn and slightly mildewed scent (much to my mom’s horror and disgust). There were pulpy biographies (this was how I learned about Princess Di and probably kicked off my skepticism of the English monarchy), classics (Franny and Zooey, some F. Scott Fitzergerald), picture books, and of course a smattering of abandoned paperbacks.

A selection of Prismatic readers' summer snaps