Summer on the Last Page?

If you’re not quite ready to face the harsh realities of August: back-to-office looming, evening chills setting in, and a general sense of Summer ending – the Award Office would like to recomend a Michelle Pauli’s post in the Guardian: wonderfully descripitive of the endless summer day’s and the summer reads of childhood.  We quote:

“And that’s [endless time to read] what makes this time so precious, from the age of intense independent reading – say seven or eight – until your mid-teens, when summer jobs (and possibly, for the more socially adjusted book-nerd, an independent social life) start impinging. During this period, you possess both the time to read – those hours and hours to occupy before bedtime – and a certain open-mindedness, a freedom from any awareness of how books are labelled (Enid Blyton? Why not. The Three Investigators? Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew? Bring it on!). What does “genre” mean to a 10-year-old, after all? Let loose in the library as a child, I had no sense there were books I “should” have been reading – only that there were whole new worlds out there just waiting to be discovered by opening the pages of a novel.”