Sometimes books can be dangerous. 

I have a few friends who recommend and loan books to me, and one of my friends is always spot on about the books I will like.  

I usually ask my friend something like “Is this book going to ruin my life for a while?” What I mean by that is, am I actually going to be able to focus on anything until I finish this book?

I can remember being on the couch with my own copies of the “Sally, Dick and Jane” books that my cousins had given me.  I was tickled that I had the same reading books in my house that we had at school, and therefore I tried to read ahead. This helped me be somewhat of a first grade celebrity, knowing what was going to happen in the books we had yet to read.  

Being also a big mouth, I liked to flaunt my knowledge, and I’m sure it was to the chagrin of my classmates.

There were times I tried to read ahead, and I would spell a word and ask my mother to tell me what it was. I’m sure after umpteen times this was annoying, but she told me anyway. This was helpful for me, and my reading and spelling grades were pretty good.  I had a  grasp of phonics back then, and have always placed great importance on kids being able to “sound out words.”  

Since then, I’ve had a lifelong love of reading.  It never occurred to me there might be books that would appeal to me more than others. When our second grade teacher began reading the “Little House on the Prairie” books to us, we wanted to read every one of them.  She somehow got a hold of several copies of the books, and we even signed up on a waiting list to borrow them.  

There we were, fairly new readers, reading chapter books in second grade.

One day, I kid you not, a group of both boys and girls were out on the playground reading from the “Little House” books.  These were kids from all walks of life:  the bookworms, the ones who didn’t like to get dirty, and the group I was a part of – the filthy guys who liked to build car tracks in the gravel and drive matchbox cars around. 

Yet there we all were, brought together by Laura Ingalls Wilder because our teacher had gotten us excited about the stories.

“Those are girl books,” said a big, burly third grade boy one day while we were all gathered on a concrete pad near the water fountains. “Why are you guys reading girl books?”

Some boys stopped reading those books that very day. I did not. I’ll bet the boys who stopped reading them in public somehow kept reading in the privacy of their own homes.

I still thought about those days when I read books like “The Notebook” or “The Help” later in life.  I wanted to see what all the hype was about. 

There were times I picked up a book that had been widely acclaimed and rolled my eyes at some saccharine love story or romantic muck. Still, I gave some of those a shot.

Don’t count me out yet, fellas. I found a good manly genre to read eventually, and today, my main “go-to” in the summer months is a good, hearty book on American history. I currently have about 12 books stacked up, ready for me to crack them open. The books that I’ve sort of stuck back, thinking I’d have more time “when I retired.” 

Well, here I am.

In addition, I have a whole shelf of biographies I also want to read.  

Even with the stack of 12, I recently found a few books in a bookstore that sound intriguing, so I made notes in the notes section of my phone on the titles and authors.  These include books on John Quincy Adams and a pretty juicy looking one called “Presidential Misconduct.”

Perhaps one that might trump one of my “stacked” books is one titled “What If?” in which the author speculates what would happen if certain events in history had never occurred.  

Ahhh. Summer.