Summer Reading Quotes

I remember devouring the entire Hardy Boys series over one summer, enthralled by their bravery and cleverness.

Late summer is perfect for classic mysteries - think of Raymond Chandler's hot Santa Anas and Agatha Christie's Mediterranean resorts - while big ambitious works of nonfiction are best approached in September and early October, when we still feel energetic and the grass no longer needs to be cut.

There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.

As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.

Sometimes the very best of all summer books is a blank notebook. Get one big enough, and you can practice sketching the lemon slice in your drink or the hot lifeguard on the beach or the vista down the hill from your cabin.

As a kid, I spent every summer bent over a stack of books, obsessively writing detailed reports on each one.

Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.

I would only read the novels that people classify as 'beach books' if I were being held prisoner and the only alternative was the 'Book of Mormon.'

It's the time of year when the literati give advice on what we should be reading on our summer holidays. These terrifying lists often leave me appalled at my own ignorance, but also suspicious about the pretension of their advocates.

I'd much prefer my books to shoes...In the summer I sometimes take walks without shoes but never without a novel.

Summer is my favorite time to read mysteries.

I have a hard time finding something that I really enjoy reading, but I read 'The Great Gatsby' every summer.

My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.

Life, as the signs in the liquor stores say, is too short to drink bad wine. And summer is too short to read bad books.

I was the kid who read a lot and who was academic, and who was more of an indoor person than an outdoor person. I would win the summer reading contest at the library.

Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.

Wilbur Smith's novels make terrific holiday reading.

Many people, I've noticed by informally polling friends, are prone to distinguishing a beach read by genre. Some people thought all thrillers are beach reads; others thought all romances are. Some people thought only mass market paperbacks are eligible for beach read standards.

Here's my definition of a great beach read - a fabulous story that sucks me in like a black hole and when it's over, it jettisons my bones across the galaxy with a hair on fire mission to convince everyone I know that they must read that book or they will die.

Whenever I am with a group of kids, I always ask them, 'How many of you know about the summer reading program at your library and how many of you know it's free?' Spreading that sort of message comes very naturally to me.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

The 'beach read' has become such a ubiquitous concept in contemporary literature that we assume it has always been around. In fact, the term only emerged in the 1990s, usually in book trade publications such as 'Booklist' and 'Publisher's Weekly.'

As a youth, I always did a good deal of reading in the summer months, having suffered since birth from an allergy to athletic activity.

I tend not to read fiction - I'll read one novel a year during the summer - but I do read a lot of nonfiction.

I myself love to read those Victorian novels which go on and on, and you don't read them in one sitting. You might read one over the course of a summer, but that isn't what I want to write.