size=+2>By August, the summer sun has worn the sharpest
minds
dull. If summer were a weekend, August would be Sunday morning.
Wake up late, and start drinking early, it’s time for
brunch.

Sleepy intoxication should infect one’s
reading habits as
well. Esoteric tomes have no place in the tote bag. Leave them
behind. You won’t be able to understand what you read
anyway—the sun will have cooked your brain—and those
dense pages will clash with the soft zing of your mimosa.

What should you do? Consult the NY Times
summer-reading
book review? No, there you’ll find nothing but the same old
bosh they’ve been peddling throughout the year.

Go to the airport and grab the first book you see
with
raised gold lettering? Would that it were so.

These books should be excellent. In the abstract,
they
satisfy. They are without pretension, written to entertain, and
they relate wonderful moral predicaments and exciting stories. To
read one of them should be like reading Robinson Crusoe or
Sherlock Holmes. You should enter a new world, one you are
reluctant to leave. You should meet people different from
yourself. Those people should be engaged in some activity:
defending the Alamo, climbing the Khyber Pass, or hunting whales.

It is a disappointment I repeat with some
regularity,
hoping that I’ll some day pick up a book by the kind of
author who gets ads on television, and holler that at last,
I’ve found him: the writer who writes