summer reading: middle grade love

Last week, I posed the question on Facebook and Twitter: “What did ‘summer reading’ mean to you as a kid?” I had several wonderful responses, including Juliette’s vivid tweet: “It meant sittin’ in the passenger seat of Dad’s Oldsmobile, eating Cheez-its and devouring a Beverly Cleary book from the library.”

I didn’t meet Juliette till we were in college, but when I read that, I could smell the Cheez-Its and feel the scratchy upholstery under my bare legs. And I suddenly saw, in colorful detail, the bright paperbacks of Beezus and Ramona, Ramona and her Father, Ramona and Her Mother, and all the other Cleary books I read and reread during the summers.

For me, summer reading was an extension of the reading obsession I nursed during the year – but it often meant a different kind of book. I was always a fast reader and set the school record (twice) for points gained in the Accelerated Reader program, and some of the books I loved were hefty classics for a kid (I first read Little Women at age seven, The Swiss Family Robinson – unabridged! – at about 10). Of course, those long books were worth lots of points, and I read as many as possible, between homework and volleyball practice and jumping on my friend Allison’s trampoline after school.

But I wasn’t a snobby reader – I also loved a lot of the stuff aimed at kids my age. Summer meant time to stock up on the American Girl books (all five series then in existence); the Baby-Sitters Club series (including the fat Super Specials); Nancy Drew; Trixie Belden; the Bobbsey Twins; the Boxcar Children; the Mandie books (mysteries with a Christian twist); Paula Danziger books like Earth to Matthew and Remember Me to Harold Square; books about the Melendys and the Moffats; the B is for Betsy series by Carolyn Haywood; and a fair dose of Lois Lowry and Judy Blume (not to mention anything by L.M. Montgomery and Maud Hart Lovelace).

I read and reread these books in the hot Texas summers (fitting them in around our frequent trips to the pool). I read them sprawled across my bed, curled up on the couch in the living room, on long car trips to visit my grandparents in Missouri and Ohio (though sometimes Mom made me put them aside to play with my sister, who has never quite understood my obsession with books, then or now).

Some of these books have been (rightly) canonized as young adult classics, or classics for all ages; others, not so much, but they were still fun to read. And there’s enormous satisfaction in finishing an entire series of books (though I swear the creators of Nancy Drew and some of those other series did their best to make that impossible). I’ve forgotten a lot of the plotlines and some of the characters’ names, but I remember the delicious feeling of opening up a book (even if it was just a library paperback) and sinking into a new story filled with characters I loved.

It’s your turn. What did summer reading mean to you as a kid?

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