This week the school bell rang for the last time. Our kids cleared out their desks and came home with a back pack full of notes, math books and graded science papers that had been lining the inside of their lockers for the better part of the year. It’s summer vacation and they’re excited about camping, flying across the country to see their grandparents, and making creature feature movies.

Summer is in full swing. The nights are short and warm. The grass is green. It all makes me a little nostalgic for the summers of my childhood.

I never considered myself a big reader as a kid, or at least that wasn’t how I would have defined myself. But I can’t help remembering long, lazy summer days in Ontario cottage country, sitting by the lake, with no TV, no computer, no “devices,” just reading.

On some days the book didn’t even matter. It was casual reading. No pressure. No essay on symbolism due the next morning. No pop quiz to prove I’d gotten through the assigned chapters.

It started with Archie I think, and the gang at Riverdale. We could pick those up at the supermarket when we went into town.

I used to read the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books like a total coward. I’d stick a finger in the page at every decision point so I could go back if I didn’t like the outcome. As a kid I went through those by the pile. Along those lines there were also the “Micro Adventure” books written in second person. They had little computer programs in BASIC that you could type out on a Commodore 64. Well… someone could. I was stuck at the cottage. No computer.

My sister had the foresight to actually pack books for our trips the cottage. Her stash of books wasn’t necessarily the first pile I went for, but I got through my share of Nancy Drew, the Babysitters Club and maybe the occasional Sweet Valley Twins. We don’t talk about Flowers in the Attic.

One summer we went camping up and of course, it snowed in July. It’s funny the details you remember about a trip like that… shampoo frozen in its bottle, a station wagon that wouldn’t start, and leaches in the lake. That trip I picked up my first horror book from the campground general store… from one those squeaky metal turning displays. I stayed up past midnight, tucked into my sleeping bag, reading by flashlight as my breath fogged up in front of me about a kid who had the power of astral projection.

As I got older, I started reading magazines. I had so many Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines I should have had a subscription to each. Of course, I was also an avid reader of Inside Kung Fu, because there was short period in my life where I was planning a career as, you know, a ninja.

One summer, I picked up a book on the Bermuda Triangle by complete serendipity. It was probably an old library discard, but my mom told me I could pick any book I wanted at a community sale and somehow that one ended up in my hand. It was full of pseudo science and crackpot theories, but below the surface it carried a message that resonated deeply with me… that there was more to the world than what they taught us in school. Ultimately that book led to later popular, but more mainstream science books like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

Reading popular science books as a kid helped me find my way to a career in physics.

My first summer in the reserves, I remember reading Stephen King’s The Stand, it was book I kept in my barracks box for those rare moments when we had some down time and I probably should have been shining my boots.

One summer in university, I picked up Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. That book was one of the more influential books on me as a writer because on one hand it was like reaching into that anime world of power armor soldiers, but at the same time it showed how pew pew kerplewie stories could carry substantially deeper messages.

Another summer, over a decade ago now, but it doesn’t feel like it, I got into Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series. That was a summer of long walks pushing strollers around our city parks with my new family. One of the lessons I got from those books was how to carry a much larger arc through multiple books. It wasn’t like I hadn’t taken that summer lesson before, from Tolkein, or Jordan, or Sanderson, but that was the summer and the series where it resonated.

In the end, there’s tremendous value in reading. Casual summer reading, those books that you dust off from the closet and pull out just to pass a rainy afternoon, or to relax before you go to bed, can lead to unimaginable places.