Girl Reading

Summer is a lawn and an umbrella, and books to read.  All the books you couldn’t get to all year.  Summer allows for trips to the bookstore, trips to the library, all in good weather.  This summer, I am tackling War & Peace again, only this time I plan to read all the war sections. So far Napoleon has made an appearance, and a favorite character who was single in one chapter appears in the next not only married, but with a marriage on the skids.  In between courses of the big tome, I happily read Emma Straub’s The Vacationers and Hanna Pylvainen’s We Sinners.  Before, it was Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, which made me sink into all thirty-eight episodes of “The Tudors,” a show which if not as intellectually compelling as Mantel, was colorfully addictive.  There are the books I didn’t make through last year, and the new ones I am placing in my mind’s reserve shelf.  Boundless summer, that has so much reading in it!