An ode to summer reading challenges
Thank you, librarians
When I was 13, my family lived about 10 miles outside of a very small town, population 800 or so. Our country farmhouse was big-ish, old-ish (1905), and usually calm, shadowy, quiet. You couldn’t see another house in any direction, even from the upstairs windows, just sighing fields of green or golden wheat, islands of scrubby sagebrush and volcanic rock in between, two-track dirt roads, and a long windbreak of ancient trees. It was a lonely place, but also subtly beautiful. Captivating and creatively nourishing. I forever daydreamed stories.
Ours trips into town weren’t frequent, but they nearly always included a stop at the library. Now, this library was tiny, like everything else about our little town, but as soon as I stepped over the threshold, my world expanded. The empty fields and muted sameness of home fell away, teasing my imagination with limitless possibility: new people, colors, places, sounds, ideas, whole worlds both familiar and staggering in their strangeness. I didn’t even have to crack open a cover for my heart to leap with anticipation at what I might find within. An illustration or a title, a teaser on the back, beckoning me forward. Higher up. Deeper in. Books are just like that.
In the late spring of the first year we lived there, the year I was 13, the library announced their upcoming summer reading challenge. They handed me a card with little white squares for stamping all the different books I would read over the next few weeks, and enticing descriptions of the rewards I could look forward to if I earned a stamp for every box. After all these years, I can’t remember even one of them. The rewards, that is. I don’t think I really cared what they were, honestly, even then. I was there for the books. For the adventures just around the next corner. For the pride of seeing those boxes steadily fill up with an arbitrary, blotched ink pattern.
For some reason, it was the free promotional bookmark that I’ll never forget. An illustration that looked like a reproduction of something from Edward Gorey, all feverish linework and deep shadows. It depicted a room with soaring bookshelves and a spiral staircase, someone lounging with a cat and a book on a low sofa under a tall, narrow window. An idealized version of what every booklover is eternally on the hunt for: a pretty, peaceful, mysterious setting in which to swaddle oneself in story.
Our farmhouse didn’t have the floor-to-ceiling windows and bookcases, but it had the quiet, the saggy couches, and the caress of a summer breeze through the curtains, a meadowlark singing in the yard.
As an adult, I sometimes worry about that 13 year-old kid. Get out of the house, put the book down for a few minutes, go talk to people, I want to say. It’s not healthy to be so isolated. To live so much inside places built of words and ideas instead of trees and bodies and dirt and other touchable things.
But the library had a summer reading challenge. Even in that faded little town, a town young people tended to leave the minute they had the independence and means to do so, our lovely librarians took the trouble to weave magic, to make a plan, create materials, organize events, to invite us into possibility. Their commitment to sharing knowledge and wisdom and the power of stories pulled me and others into town from every direction, gathered us young people into that humble space around a noble purpose, and threw open the windows of my small life to show me just how big and terrifying and wonderful and true the ‘touchable’ world could be.