Summer must be near. The temperature is rising, the kids at school are getting restless, and my To-Be-Read pile is growing.
The first two signs are fairly obvious, but it’s taken me a while to catch on to the third. Apparently as summer approaches, I collect books. I don’t think about it, but I seem to do it every year. I stack newly-borrowed, bought or stolen books around me at my desk, as I work on whatever I desperately need to get done now, and sometimes in procrastination-moments I rearrange them. The stacking methods are varied. They may start organized by the laws of physics (so they don’t fall) but other times they are stacked by which I have to give up first (library books and loaners on top) or in the order I want to read them, or in the order I think I should read them…
I’m not a collector of “beach reads.” That’s a pretty good way to turn me off a book, actually, due to my own definition of a beach read. If I’m at the beach I want to be at the beach. And if it’s a book not-engrossing enough that it would let me enjoy the beach if I were at the beach, then it’s not good enough for, say, a hot Tucson afternoon when the humidity is winning the battle with the swamp cooler and the library is closed and all the other places with air conditioning cost money I don’t have…
Yeah, no.  That’s when I need a book to take me away, and the book in question had better be up to the task, or in some other way important to me. So stacked to my right at this moment are John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation, Jim Butcher’s Storm Front, First Spanish Reader, The Fire in Fiction (set for a reread), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wold Disney World, and Free $ For College for Dummies.
So yeah. I work part-time or not at all in the summer. The downside to this is that I don’t get paid if I don’t work. The upside is I have time to read books. Lots and lots of books! Scads of books! Fountains of books! So many books–*ahem*
So the stockpiling has begun, and will continue.
How about you? Are you prepping for summer? How?