Warmer weather brings out the bookworm in me

By Jessica Webster Community Content Coordinator

Posted on Sun, May 23, 2010 : 6 a.m.

Give me a beach and a book and I couldn't be happier. Usually I have to do without the beach.

Photo by Flickr user indi.ca

For some people, warm weather means long bike rides, gardening or canoe trips down the Huron River. While I'm a happy participant in all of these activities, I have found myself yearning for something else as the mercury goes up. All I want to do is read.

Maybe it's the memory of all the summers I spent going up north with my parents. Every year we'd rent a secluded cottage on a sandy beach two hours north of Toronto. There was no TV, no radio, and only a mosquitoey pay phone across the road for communication with the outside world. I'd pack my Walkman, my swimsuit and a book for each day (with an additional five-book buffer in case any of the books I chose were stinkers) and I'd camp out on the beach or in the cottage for two weeks.

Grown-up life makes finding time to read more of a challenge. There are no more two-week vacations in the wilds of Ontario. There's work and swim practice and cooking meals and mowing the lawn. There are oil slicks to worry about and politicians to get mad at. Cakes to bake for school fundraisers. And those Bejeweled gems aren't going to sort themselves, you know.

Most of my reading these days happens at my son's bed time, and tends to run more toward Harry Potter and Encyclopedia Brown than anything on the New York Times bestseller list. But ever since the weather started showing signs of spring, I've made a pledge to take time away from TV and all my various electronic devices - BlackBerries and iPod Touches and laptops and netbooks - and indulge in some serious reading.

I've been working my way through the pile of books on the "you should feel guilty for not reading this" shelf on the bookcase in my bedroom. You know those books - the ones you pick up because someone recommended it or Maureen Corrigan gave it a glowing review on NPR. So far I've gotten mad at Mamah Cheney for leaving her family for Frank Lloyd Wright in Nancy Horan's "Loving Frank;" I've mourned lost young love in Ian McEwan's excellent "On Chesil Beach;" and I've celebrated the mystery of life and death in Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize winning first novel "Tinker."

I've got my next couple of books lined up. I had totally lost track of Walter Mosley in the last few years and was thrilled to discover that he has started a series with a new character. I'll miss Easy Rawlins, but am excited to meet Leonid Trotter McGill. Mosley's protagonists are always well-drawn, complicated characters, and on first glance "The Long Fall" promises to deliver more of the same.

When I finish up with Walter Mosley, I'm diving into science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler's "Kindred." I became aware of Butler when hot new singer Janelle MonÃ¡e claimed Butler as an influence on her music in a recent NPR interview. "Kindred" uses time travel to tell the story of slavery in the pre-Civil War American South.

After that, I'm wide open and looking for ideas. What's on your "must read" shelf? What books have you read and not been able to put down?