BTT ~ The Best Place After the Womb!

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.”)

Oddly, when I think of “summer reading” I think of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.  When I first really started reading books in earnest, I was in high school and part of an Honors Reading program.  The summer before my junior year, I was a camp counselor and took my copy of The Scarlet Letter with me.  I found this little hidden clearing that was just off a secondary trail, and I would slip into it and park my butt under a tree and read through my free time. 

To this day, this memory is my “happy place” that I go to in my mind whenever I’m stressed out.  It was such a relaxing place.  Quiet but for a gentle breeze blowing through the trees and the birds singing cheerfully.  Safe… no one ever found me in there, even when they were walking by on the trail and calling for me, they never saw the opening to the clearing.  The cheerful sunshine radiating down and warming me, while the shade of the tree kept me from being too hot or getting too much sun.  The book in my hand transporting me to another time and place.

What’s your best summer memory of reading?