The Indefinable Allure of a Summer Reading Program
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #188. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Interfacing in the millennium.
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It’s happening again. The birds are chirping. The flowers are blooming. The tornados are siren-ing. Horrifying Missouri spring is making way for horrifying Missouri summer. Once again, I have been seduced by the indefinable allure of a summer reading list.
I’ve got all my excuses. Decision making is hard these days, people, none of us have executive function. I want to get out of my comfort zone. I need help to prioritize reading over other hobbies. I want an activity I can do with my other overambitious book nerd friends. The particular Summer Reading Bingo card I got is actually pretty cute and adventurous. All of this being said, the fact is that if a summer reading program hadn’t presented itself to me, I would have gone looking for it anyway, because I am a sucker for this shit.
I’ve got friends who have complicated relationships with these kinds of lists. They’ll make them, tempted by 25 in 25 or a reading challenge or a summer reading list, and then end up avoiding said lists pathologically. The act of writing it down, committing in some sense, makes them significantly less likely to actually want to read the book: in fact, it usually has the opposite effect, and they end up circling the lists they make like wary dogs, not sure if the books they themselves chose are friend or foe.
This is not the effect lists have on me. For me, lists evoke a kind of primal competitiveness that might not actually be the best thing to encourage. I approach them like I approach collectibles in games: aggressively and personally. A bingo card is not there so that you can get bingo, it is there so you can black it out in the most unnecessarily complicated manner possible (in this circumstance: no doubling up). If you did the math and realized that means I’m supposed to be reading 25 books between June and August, well, it just be like that sometimes. I know I am capable of this task because 1) I am a quick reader, and 2) being unnecessarily stubborn about unimportant things is a load-bearing part of my personality.
That being said, I’m finding the specificity of it genuinely interesting. My goal this year has been to read more books I already own, so the biggest thing that this lil bingo card is doing is making me look at my existing library a different way. One of the squares is a biography: okay, how many biographies do I own that I haven’t read? (I’ve got Robert Caro’s monstrosity The Power Broker, as well as a two-volume Elvis biography that I only bought because the spines look cool.) Another is to reread a book I loved as a kid. Did I like any of those enough to keep them around? (My all-time favorite, yes: The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud). How many of my books are over 300 pages? How many are under 150? Do I own the first book in any series I haven’t read? (I’m series allergic, so only a few. Now might not be the time for Lord of the Rings.) The time restriction is making me look again at my comics, a small Mignola-heavy collection that isn’t normally on my radar, and at the novellas I only own because I collect the author.
I am also, if I will be honest, thankful for the restrictions and time crunch of it. Trying to read your way through your own book collection is like trying to make lunch with a full fridge: how is there still nothing to eat??? Theoretically these are all books I bought because I wanted to read them. Some variant of myself, chronologically displaced, invested some amount of money in making these objects take up an inch-odd of space on my shelves. If making myself actually get around to reading them means that I have to stoke my competitive spirit and follow some prompts, well, we do what we must. The goal is to read some books. And I will do it. And I will win.
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Maddi Chilton is an internet artifact from St. Louis, Missouri. Follow her on Bluesky.
