What We Read Every Summer

​There are certain books for us at Sacred Chickens that herald the arrival of summer every year. Here are some of the ones we always read! 

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For many people, books evoke certain feelings, emotions or memories. Some books you love so much that you could read them over and over again, like visiting an old friend. Some books are reminiscent of certain seasons, and since summer is upon us, here are the books that we at Sacred Chickens read every summer.

Julie 
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​For me nothing says summer like Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. When the strongest scented flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, and heat waves shimmer like magic, nothing seems more probable than a land of nonsense, totally without consequence, where a giant egg pay words to mean exactly what he wants them to mean and naughty children turn into pigs.

My second choice is Emily Dickinson. All her poetry feels like summer to me, rhymes as slanted as the late summer sun, as simple as a white cotton dress and a light breeze, but with summer’s living depth of deep green as well. 

Jarad ​
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​The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown- This, for me, is the quintessential summer book. I don’t read it so much for the ending, which was not that well done in my opinion, but for the rest of the book; a father who only communicates in Shakespeare,  descriptions of a childhood filled with books, it’s really a love letter to literature in some ways. It’s also a very calm book; there’s no murder, catastrophe, or tragedy in general, and I need calm coming out of final exams.

The Stand by Stephen King- this is one of my all-time favorite books, and I say that as someone who has very high standards in, well, everything. It’s over a thousand pages, and I usually don’t have time to give it the attention it deserves during the rest of the year- a book like that is meant to read when you can completely immerse yourself in it. 

Morty 
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​A dead man’s mind lightly turns to mysticism in the summer. Metaphysically speaking, summer and winter are both closer to eternity than spring and fall. Because summer is the arrival of the thing hoped for, the final flowering, it is the closest season of all to the forever. Notice how a late June day stretches in your mind to the length of the universe. So I reread Lilith and Phantastes by George McDonald each summer and mix in a bit of Novalis, whose writings make a good deal more sense from the nether side of life.