When Did Summer Reading Get So BORING?!

My summer reading is boring! Has been for years, unfortunately.

Titles like "The World is Flat," "Who Moved My Cheese?," and "First Break All The Rules," as well as the latest corporate IT process manuals and HR policy documents, have made up my summer reading list - recommended by senior management, of course - for most of my adult life.

It wasn't always like that, though. Not back in the early 1960s, when my summer reading list was made up of titles from the Riverview Memorial Elementary School Library summer program. The library was just a few blocks walk from my house on Hinton and I was a daily visitor.

I'd like to say that was where I first discovered classics by Faulkner, Hemingway and Henry. But that would be a lie.

My taste ran to titles almost nobody heard of, and probably fewer remember - "Big Mutt," by John H. Reese, and "Utah Lion," by James Ralph Johnson; as well as any "Hardy Boys" adventure, and all six "Power Boys" adventures (bet you don't remember those brothers!).

Summer reading was fun back then. Every cover I opened led me on a new adventure, and every page fueled my imagination. I devoured summer books with the same appetite - and almost the same speed - as Popsicles from the Good Humor man; sometimes getting literary "brain freeze" from the excitement.

I miss that. Somehow all this "meaningful" summer reading I've been doing is, ultimately, meaningless. Enough!

Today, I'm dusting off my copy of "The Call of the Wild," grabbing a Popsicle from the freezer, and heading to the back porch for some good, old-fashioned summer fun!