Jeannette Walls' best-selling memoir, “The Glass Castle,” is now a feature film

The Thread

What are you reading? And where?


I live in Wisconsin, at the crest of a hill that slopes down to a lush valley, right to the doorstep of a cider-red farmhouse with a white silo.

The view is both soothing and absorbing in any season, but the green stillness of summer is the perfect backdrop for a great book.

I set up a lawn chair at the edge of our patio and tune into the sounds and rhythms of that landscape. I might hear barn swallows or a red hawk calling from distant branches. I can watch bees busy at work in the clover that flourishes in our unkempt lawn.

I dally and drift and dream into the pages of someone else’s world.

Novelist Luanne Rice has talked about trips to the sea with her mother and sister, and watching her mother slip into a beach chair and open a book.

“Of all the life lessons she taught me,” she writes, “that is one of my favorites: to take time at a place I love, restore my spirit with books and the beach.”

So, whether you go lakeside to a weathered wooden dock or a shaded cabin porch, or you just plop onto a bench in the city, I’d love to know where you do your best summer reading.

Tweet me @KerriMPR and, better yet, snap a picture and send it to me.

Let’s make these waning weeks of summer some of our most fulfilling reading moments all year.

-K.M.

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