Summer Reading

It’s Monday night, and that means Jen is volunteering at Cook’s Hospital. I look froward to her return and sharing an evening with her, but for now, I want to tell you about my summer reading plan, reader.

I think most people try and read very light fare in the summertime, on vacations and visits to the pool and such. I think that’s great, but for me Summer has long been the season for heavy reading. Summer is always a time (because of the climate where we live) that one spends a good deal of one’s time indoors. In addition, summer is the season of a bit lighter and less demanding work (for me) and thus lends itself to more mentally challenging diversions.

This practice of reading lengthier and more challenging works in the summer began several years ago, while I was still an undergraduate at Hardin-Simmons. I would visit my grandparents in Indiana for several weeks at a time, and this gave me the ability to read practically uninterrupted for each afternoon. I think my first couple of “long” works were Ron Chernow’s biographies of John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. These were great, but my most memorable (thus far) summer reading bacchanal were the three volumes in Caro’s biography of LBJ. If you’re curious, I wrote about that previously here:

Robert Caro and Lyndon Johnson

Well, as I wrote about in January, (here) I purchased the first three (chronologically) books in the Oxford History of the United States. I finished the first book The Glorious Cause earlier this year, but my goal this summer is to finish the next two, Empire of Liberty and What Hath God Wrought. So far, I am doing pretty well, and as a matter of fact, I am off to read for a bit now. What are you reading this summer? What is your perfect summertime book? Let me know in the comments!