ummer has many rewards. For me, it's the occasion for reading. Catching up on Jane Austen or the latest spy thriller or bestseller. Summer with its carefree ways, its sunny disposition moves me to read like a demon. Perhaps I'm not alone. There are many like myself who are summer readers. We're all possessed by the urge to read Moby Dick. We can't help ourselves. We stand at the mercy of our rejuvenated reading habits.

Indeed, each new day holds for us the temptation to drop by the public library. We find ourselves there more often. We feel at home there. For many of us, it's our summer cottage. A little house in the country, trimmed with ivy and honeysuckle. A white picket fence. The front gate and its squeaky charm. And on the lawn, daisies, nature's matchless bookmarks glimmer in the morning light. Wrens chirp in the trees. And cicadas hum like barbershop quartets.

Libraries are our summer cottages. A little house in the country, trimmed with ivy and honeysuckle. Inside, there's not much closet or cupboard space. Which isn't a complaint. It's just the way libraries are built. And we wouldn't have it any other way. We wouldn't change this quaint summer cottage. We're happy as junebugs when we pass through the door. Here, where the Dewey decimal system rules with an iron hand and a heart of stone. Where quiet is king, where Gutenberg's children sit at the information desk and with voices soft as rain disclose the unknowable, where atop waist-high wooden altars unabridged dictionaries perch opened for business, where literature kisses the air, turns it sweet. Pours out its heart. The cup passed round for centuries reaches our lips. We drink and know time stands still in libraries.

All the more reason that we find ourselves there. We're summer readers. Crazy about books. We like nothing better than to stick our noses in books. It's second nature to us. The first page gurgles like a brook. The clear, cool, sparkling effervescence of words tickle our noses the way champagne bubbles do. At any moment we might feel a tingling in the brain, and billions of neurons roused by the reveille, buzz around like fireflies in a jelly jar enlightening us. And suddenly, oh, mirabile dictu, we are who we were born to be. As though the words in books were stars to wish upon. And perhaps they are.

And is it possible, without trespassing beyond the bounds of credulity, that we turn to books because they most resemble ourselves? Splendidly wrought, charming works of art tinged with genius and a touch of nobility? Chockfull of heroics? Comic masterpieces? Horror tales which rival Edgar Allan Poe? Profoundly compassionate parables? Or delightful yarns? Bedtime stories? Or impossible to solve mysteries? Or philosophical chronicles? Or pointless, dull dime novels? Sentimental, foolhardy? The vapid meanderings of a lunatic's pen set going like a runaway clock in a watchtower? The gimmicky rubbish of a hack? One of many tranche de vie?

Can our lives be described as juicy pageturners with brilliant plots? A cunning de Maupassant short story? An Aesop's fable? A gothic romance novel? A suspense thriller? An adventure story? Or the blustery self-pitying of an vainglorious novice?

Or sad tearjerkers in which the reader upon finishing withdraws a handkerchief to fight off an attack of the sniffles. Our stories all heartbreakers. A blend of the ordinary and the miraculous. We need books to tell us the things only books can say. We don't want books to end. But they always do. It's something they do quite well. The ending always takes us by surprise, and we feel at that moment a sense of falling. Having foolishly let go that part of ourselves which keeps us in the world. A part of ourselves which we hid so carefully, yet reveals itself immediately upon opening a book.

© Ernest Slyman