Moon Women

Essay on Summer Reading

To me, summer is a season for simple pleasures. The long, slow, light-filled days are perfect for getting everything done with big chunks of time and daylight still left over for reading. When my chores are done, I go out on the screen porch and sit in my rocker, put my feet up, take a moment to bask in the beauty of green trees and birdsong and bee hum surrounding me, and then I open a book and disappear for a while. There are few things to match the satisfaction of finding a book I love so much and get so involved in that I’m torn between a desire to race through and see what happens next, and a need to limit myself to a few pages a day to make the book last longer. Usually I find a happy balance between the two, reading slowly and savoring, for long hours at a time, the supreme pleasure of a good book. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough and The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy are books that affected me so strongly that I have vivid memories not only of the books themselves but of the experience of reading them. Summer is also when I love to visit with some of my favorite Southern authors, writers who create wonderful, warm, real, and quirky communities. Fancy Strut by Lee Smith, Tending to Virginia by Jill McCorkle, Clay’s Quilt by Silas House, She Flew the Coop by Michael Lee West and Night Ride Home by Vicki Covington are novels so evocative of inviting Southern places and people that I want to jump into the pages and live there a while. And on many a coming lazy summer afternoon, that’s exactly what I intend to do.—Pamela Duncan