There was a time in America when summer reading was only for the “leisure class,” those who had the financial means to skip work, travel, and relax at a summer resort. Before the turn of the 20th century, the book publishing business struggled through the summer season, as an article in an 1886 edition of Publishers Weekly noted:
Booksellers should remember that while summer is usually a dull time, the sales of light literature, etc., can be pushed to make a successful business even in this season. The classes who travel are of course those who have money to spend even in dull times.
Making an appearance in the publication’s summer catalogue that year was H.G. Well’s Time Machine, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Poor People (written back in 1844-45 but not published in English until 1894) and Leo Tolstoy’s Master and Man. Books were selling for around one dollar.
Summer as a season unto itself, dedicated to the idealized pursuit of reading, is hardly new. In 1776, the philosopher David Hume (who wrote A Treatise of Human Nature) wrote to his nephew David Home suggesting a summer regimen that included both reading and exercise:
You will now enter on a Course of Summer Reading, and Exercise, which you will intermingle properly together. I cou’d wish to see you mix the volumes of Taste and Imagination with more serious reading; and that sometimes Terence and Virgil and Cicero, together with Xenophon, Demosthenes, Homer and Lucian (for you must not forget your Greek) should occupy your Leizure together with Voet, Vinnius, and Grotius. I did not observe you to be very fond of the Poets, and surely one may pass through Life, though not so agreeably, without such Companions.
A. Jones in his essay, “Summer Reading,” published in The Union Magazine in 1847, divided the calendar year into two class “winter study” and “summer reading”:
By summer reading we mean generally to express agreeable, pleasant, intellectual entertainment, to be derived from light, graceful, and interesting writers. It is true, that with most readers this summer reading extends over the whole year.
The debate over the importance of light versus deep reading—and the benefits of each—is unlikely to proclaim a victor any time soon. Schools across the country grapple today and every year with whether students should pursue easy, breezy books over the summer months, or be required to undertake a solitary, powerful, and challenging text. For Jones, the commandment for summer reading was simple: “Give us easy reading—not to be confounded with that which is easily written”:
On this sultry, close day, who would take up Locke, or Hobbes; Milton’s prose, or even his poetry. No, we want something gossamer-light, the syllabub, not the pieces de résistance of literature. Even fine poetry of the more elevated description is too high. No tragedy for hot weather. . . . Nothing that requires much thought or attention: nothing that deeply affects the heart. Banish sentiment, banish imagination. . . . Swift’s saturnine humor is not the thing, nor the biting wit of the satirist; but the gay writers generally. Yet as a class of books, none appear to me better fitted for this season than lively and sensible travels, especially in the South and East; the regions of the Tropics and the Orient. Eastern travels always read best in summer: the season is in consonance with the text.
While summer continues to be a less profitable season for book sales even centuries later, the question of access to books during the summer (or any season for that matter) has changed over time—and for the better. Books are no longer the sole province of the moneyed elites.
The advent of the public library system in the 1800s began to eliminate this class barrier to “summer reading.” With over 2,500 libraries built with Andrew Carnegie’s money between 1883 and 1929, greater access to books was possible for members of the non-leisure class. Today, technology has increased access to digital copies of books, making it possible to read on break time, at lunch time, or while commuting.
We can no longer say it is only the elites who hold—and hold the knowledge contained in—books. In 2015, 63% of adults in America owned smartphones—holding the key to apps that permit book borrowing and book reading. The number of children with similar technology in their pockets has also increased across all households.
Ultimately, it’s our kids who most regularly confront the official summer reading list. Regardless of the type or density of the books selected, or whether they read them on pixels or paper, the single greatest determinant in student summer reading is whether or not parents make it a priority. Do parents take their children to the library, look at or print out the school recommended reading list, purchase books, or show their children that there is a “time to read” in each day and week? Summer reading season is upon us; let’s make sure we give our kids the encouragement (and, occasionally, the firm push) they need to embrace good books.
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