Are you booked this summer?

Like classroom May altars loaded with lilacs and graduation ribbons worn by eighth-graders, she appeared close to the end of every school year at St. Cajetan's grammar school. Her gray hair was pulled back into a bun, which held a well-sharpened, yellow #2 pencil. Her rumpled gray suit always looked uncomfortably warm, even for an often slow-to-come Midwestern spring.

Her end-of-the-school-year message was forever the same: "Summer is a great time to read." The summer reading program she heralded always had incentives: some years, certificates; other years, prizes. In the autumn, this same librarian from the Walker Branch of the Chicago Public Library returned to award whatever trinkets were promised to the students who successfully participated that summer. She was but one of a vast array of memorable personalities populating my school world of early 1950s Chicago.

Madame Librarian was right, of course. Summertime and reading go together like surf and sand, coffee and bagels, scotch and soda. For your summer '98 reading, let me suggest a few pleasers. If you are looking for the really big book, try David Halberstam's The Children (Random House, 1998), the story of some of the people involved in this country's civil-rights struggles in the 1960s. This reader was fascinated by the intimate link between this movement and its undergirding theology incubated in black seminaries and Southern schools of theology.

A robust strain of Canadian fiction struts its way into contemporary letters. Guy Vanderhaeghe's novel The Englishman's Boy (Picador, 1997) tells the powerful story of the Cypress Hills Massacre and glimpses into the romance of cinematic art and the reality of early Hollywood. Adventurous readers might try Robert Kroetsch's novel The Studhorse Man (Random House, 1988), a surreal picture of Western Canadian spirit.

Since memoir is certainly the genre of choice today, think about reading a few of them this summer. Margot Adler's Heretic's Heart (Beacon, 1997) and James Carroll's An American Requiem (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), two memoirs that center on the famed and inflamed decade of the '60s, offer unique perspectives. And if you are interested in learning more about memoir as spiritual expression and sacred text, you may even want to check out The Wisdom of Memoir (St. Mary's Press, 1997) written by your humble columnist for U.S. CATHOLIC.

Kathleen Norris has a new book out, Amazing Grace (Putnam, 1998). Subtitled "A Vocabulary of Faith," this volume examines some of the many and varied specifically religious words we often mouth but don't reflect on seriously. If you haven't yet read her earlier book Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), do so.

I do not have a #2 pencil in my hair. Nor do I have any certificates or prizes to entice you into summertime reading. But I am in total solidarity with Madame Librarian from my childhood: summer is a great time to read. Now that you have a few recommendations from me, please send me your summer reading suggestions.

Peter Gilmour ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.