ON SUMMER READING

Summer, more than any other season of the year, is when we most read. Booksellers know this, and if you had just been to your friendly neighborhood bookstore, you would have noticed a tableful of classics greeting you up front with a flag that says Summer Reading.

Reading in summer probably quickens the pace of the laid-back moments, or maybe the narrative somewhat cools us off, I don't know, but somehow there are certain writers whose stories connect us to own summer milieu. Take William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, and their Southern yarns bring me to the summer of my own childhood, in my dad's native province, on a carabao back, by the river, at the foot of the mountain; the stories hit the task more than twofold - they make me think back, they make me think ahead, and they make me think about everything else in between.

This summer I have already lined up my own readings. (I have armed myself, too, with a new wisdom from Virginia Woolf to try to become the author, his co-worker and accomplice, rather than his dictator, which will bring unto me something far more definite than a hope that fiction shall be true, that poetry shall be false, that biography shall be flattering, and that history shall enforce my own prejudices.)

And so I will read the following, some old ones, hopefully so, with a fresh pair of eyes:

- Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
- Winesburg, Ohio (Sherwood Anderson)
- Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying
Circumnavigation of the Globe (Lauren Bergreen)
- Nazi Literature in Americas (Roberto Bolanos)

And if I may ask, in all summer warmth: Is your own reading list ready?