This week’s challenge from Booking Through Thursday:

Now that summer is here (in the northern hemisphere, anyway), what is the most “Summery” book you can think of? The one that captures the essence of summer for you?

(I’m not asking for you to list your ideal “beach reading,” you understand, but the book that you can read at any time of year but that evokes “summer.”)

I like the twist on this one.  It’s easy to think of things to read at the beach, but a little tougher to think of a book that evokes summer.  After looking over my bookshelf, I had to go with:

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Woolf’’s novel is set at the summer home of the Ramsey family.  The opening passage perfectly captures that childhood moment where you have to go to bed before it’s even dark outside.  Woolf’s writing always comes to mind when I think of summertime:

Mrs. Ramsay could not help exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.”

I also loved BooksPlease’s choice for a book that evokes summer, Nigella Lawson’s Forever Summer.  Along the same lines, I’d say that The Complete Book of Home Preserving certainly reminds me of summer.  I only can during the summer.  Standing in the kitchen, watching the steam billow out of my giant canning pot, I’m always reminded of summers at my grandparent’s house.  We’d all sit around the kitchen table, snapping green beans to help Grandma get ready to can them.  I’d love to listen in on all the grown-ups’ conversations.  While they snapped and gossiped and reminisced, I felt like I was one of the adults.  However, it always seemed like they’d shoo me out to play just when the conversation got good!

How about you?  What books evoke summer for you?

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