Screw Light Summer Reading

When I moved to Canada, I got to experience four seasons in one year. I grew up with one season with variants: Summer; when it was stinking hot. Then there was a brief period during the year when it was cooler and rained a bit (usually, not enough). Technically, winter.

Here in Alberta, you get four distinct seasons, and you can literally smell and feel the change between them from one day to the next. It’s fabulous.

Summer, though, lasts a mere heartbeat. As a result, people are apt to go slightly crazy during the summer season; the need to get out and soak up the sun, to squeeze in all the summer fun activities before the long days are gone, is an instinctive drive.

I’m sure it’s this form of seasonal silliness that created one of the phrases I most despise in the publishing world: light summer reading.

There’s all sorts of implications in that phrase that rile me.

Sometimes the phrase gets shortened down to summer reading, but the implications remain. The absence of “light” doesn’t take away the meaning, because when they hold up a book as an example of a good summer read, they’re not holding up the equivalent of A Tale of Two Cities, or a volume of Shakepeare or Tolstoy.

The phrase implies that it’s perfectly okay during summer to read light, frothy novels that you wouldn’t be seen dead reading at any other time of the year. By extension, they’re also implying that at any other time of the year you should be reading heavy-hitting, “serious” novels.

I’m sure the phrase is intended as a great marketing ploy to sell more novels, but what it really does is prove that the publishers themselves believe that fiction written purely to entertain the reader is somehow deficient, and shouldn’t be read unless you can justify it. “It’s summer, after all!”

Bullshit.

You should read what you want to read, when you want to read it. Period. Reading for entertainment is not a crime, and books should not be categorized as entertainment by anyone other than you, who wants to read them. If Kurt Vonnegut tickles your funny bone, then he’s your summer reading. He’s also your winter, spring and fall reading. If Nicholas Sparks does it for you, it’s his books that you should pick up when you want to read.

Don’t let the “summer reading” tag make you believe you’re inadequate because you’d actually rather read thrillers or romances (or whatever) throughout the year.

First appeared on Stories Rule! on July 13, 2008

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2008. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission, or without this copyright notice attached.