While summer won't officially arrive for another month or so, it's never too early to start thinking about what guilty yet exquisite reading pleasures you will include on your summer reading list. For bibliophiles, summer reading is kind of like a trip to Las Vegas: cheap, flashy, sex-filled and easily hidden from bosses and spouses. Best of all, there are no consequences. What happens during the summer reading season stays in the summer reading season. It is perfectly acceptable to burn through 15 Danielle Steel novels over a two-week period in August, then turn back to Thomas Pynchon after Labour Day. You will never be held intellectually responsible for your summer reading choices. It's one of the cardinal rules of bibliophile culture.
That said, I'd like to suggest some summer reading that will give you a powerful hit of nostalgic pleasure faster than a Kool Aid Jammer on a July afternoon. Remember Choose Your Own Adventure books? You know, those fantastically easy-to-read, participatory paperbacks that zipped off your school library shelves faster than the latest installation in the Babysitters' Club series? Teachers never used to allow Choose Your Own Adventure books to count for "official" assignments like novel studies or even silent reading time. But we loved them just the same, especially since they only took about twenty minutes to read. They took longer if you didn't catch on to what page number the "page of instant and horrible death" was in the particular book you were reading. You remember what I'm talking about: you'd proceed through three or four choices, your character's situation gradually becoming more dire, when suddenly you'd come to a page that said something like: "Turn to page 72 if you choose to run away from the lion. Turn to page 36 if you choose to confront the lion." If you chose to turn to page 36 you would read that you had suffered a terrible demise. After reading that, if you were a smart cookie, you knew that any time the book offered you the choice of turning to page 36, it would be wisest not to do so. Then it was never much longer before you successfully completed your character's mission.
If you have fond memories of Choose Your Own Adventure books like I do, you'll be happy to find out that the series' publisher (the creatively titled Chooseco corporation) rereleased many of the series classic titles this spring, including Abominable Snowman, Secret of the Ninja, Lost Jewels of the Nabooti and many more.
If you are one of the few and the proud who can say that you've read all 184 Choose Your Own Adventure books published between 1979 and 1998, then you can check out the new A Date with Destiny Adventure series, which are Choose Your Own Adventure-inspired books written for adults and include such titles as Night of a Thousand Boyfriends and Escape from Fire Island!
I'll have more summer reading suggestions in the weeks ahead. In the meantime, try pulling out one of these books on the bus on your next commute to work. It's not summer yet, but who cares? Have fun. Just beware of page 36.
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