Read.

Totally forgot that I intended to record my reading on here, so a little catch up is due today. There's something to be said about summer reading anyways. You can't force it. I know that every year I buy a ton of books towards the end of the school year, ready to dig in and read, but the school year takes some time to slip away. Stress doesn't exit the body when the classroom door is closed and locked. I always have some time of decompression, and some time being a "magazine slut," but then, at some point each summer, the manic reading begins.

I normally take a book to the beach and make pretty good headway on it there. Sometimes the reading bug bites while on that vacation, but this year was a little slow. It wasn't the book, The Castaways, either, it was just me. In fact, if I could recommend a book highly, an author actually, for good juicy "beachreads," it would be Elin Hilderbrand. She writes, almost exclusively, books set on Nantucket. Last year I read A Summer Affair, the year before was Barefoot, which was probably my favorite, and this year it was The Castaways. Her books have the perfect blend of pace, intrigue, exotic setting, tangled relationships....they are like Cheetos for me, once I get into them, forget it, there goes the whole bag, well book, well, you get it right? Last night, while totally exhausted, I ended up staying up until 1 am just so I could finish The Castaways. That's summer reading to me, late, late nights, with the breeze cooling, bugs humming at the window screens, and peepers peeping in the trees...an occational voice traveling across Little Sodus Bay, and me, curled up in a chair, but off in another world all together.

Speaking of another world, next on the docket for me, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman, a memoir of her post college backpacking trip through China in 1986...take me away!