Summer Reading

It's the sentence you're seeing everywhere: What will you read this summer?

This Sunday's New York Times Book Review has a wonderful article. They invited twelve authors to write briefly about their most memorable summer read. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/books/review/what-i-read-that-summer.html?src=me 

It was interesting to me how much of the readers' reminiscence went back to being children or young adults. I was reminded of the summer of 1960, between sixth and seventh grade, when I read Gone with the Wind, and Leon Uris' Exodus. Exodus had just been published in 1958, and the version we had at home was the newly printed paperback. They were both so engrossing, I barely came up for air. Reading all the time and being totally engrossed wasn't new for me even as a child, but it was astonishing to get caught up in two such intense stories, with love and family drama all wrapped up in war and politics. I haven't forgotten what it felt like to read those books that summer.