by L.A. Mood Comics and Games

By Dan Brown

The summer of 2026 has officially begun. 

And I can’t wait for the best part.

No, not drinking a frosty beer on a sunny patio. Not driving up to Grand Bend for long weekends.

Not even the freedom of wearing shorts and Hawaiian shirts.

I mean the truly greatest part, better than any of those pleasures.

Summer reading.

I’m not talking about beach reading, but about the feeling of satisfaction you get from crossing off titles on your summer reading list.

If you’ve never heard of such a list before, let me catch you up.

I got the idea from my Grade 13 English teacher, Evan Pike, who taught at the old Strathroy District Collegiate Institute. Our paths crossed in the mid-1980s when I was a snotty teen.

Pike would often refer to reading lists. He would mention a book in one of our class discussions and ask me (or a classmate) if I had ever read that particular volume. 

“No,” would come the answer.

“Add that to your summer reading list,” he would respond, not in a joking way.

For him, I’m guessing, this wasn’t a theoretical thing. My bet is that when he was in school, either as a kid or later in life, my mentor was actually assigned books to read over the warmer months by his teachers. You gotta remember, he was old-school. Pike came of age when they were still teaching Latin in high school.

I think the first time I had a summer reading list, maybe in the 1990s, I wasn’t even really aware of it. I just started reading novels by Ernest Hemingway then and by August I had gone through every tattered title I could find in places like City Lights Bookshop or the Coldstream Library.

It may have been when the next summer arrived that I said to myself, “Well, what am I going to read now?” I had picked up the idea taking English in my last year of high school and it was growing into a conscious habit.

Fast-forward to today, and at this point I’m older than Pike was when he taught us. And each time my favourite season rolls around, I make a scratchy list on a yellow Post-It with a black Sharpie of the titles that will comprise my latest reading project.

One summer it was Terry Brooks, the fantasy author.

Another it was all the books I’d been read at storytime at Valleyview Elementary School, so Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Charlotte’s Web and Where the Red Fern Grows and so on (and yes, as an adult I cried at the tear-jerker endings that moved me so much when I was a boy).

One year it was books by the sci-fi author John Morressy. He’s so obscure, he barely has a Wikipedia page. I may be his only fan. But that didn’t stop me from devouring his written work.

And so the summers went.

Now it’s become a personal tradition. Pike is long gone, but summer reading still makes sense to me – if you have some extra time, the pressure of work is off, why not use the hiatus to enrich your brain? I don’t even get summers off, like my old teacher did, so I make the time.

I like to think he would be pleased that his reading advice to me has outlived him.

You may be wondering what I’m reading right now. Even before June 21, I had been going through a number of biographies and memoir.

Now it’s time to kick the summer reading into high gear.

I’m currently working my way through Lives of the Stoics, a collection of mini-bios of philosophers, and I’ve got a stack of books on the table beside my bed – like a collection of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, as well as Andre Agassi’s much-praised life story. I finished cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet’s Look Ma, No Hands in the spring to get an early start.

So what about you? What will you be reading in the weeks before fall arrives?

If you’re new to the concept, take some time to think about the titles you’ve been meaning to catch up on. Perhaps there are important books from your past you want to re-read. It’s all good. When you’re done pondering, draw up a list, then get started.

Would love to hear all about what you’re reading in the comments!

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.