Summer has always been my favorite time to catch up on reading.

For some people, books go with rainy days, but in Seattle, where I grew up, most days were rainy (and most days had books). Reading books in the sun was a fleeting treat, like chasing the ice cream truck. The blinding glare off the white pages and the heat that goes to your head and leaves you dizzy when you finally put down your book and rise from your lawn chair--they enhance the feeling that you’ve been in another world and are making a slight dimensional shift as you come back to our own.