WORLD on summer reading:

It’s June, when America tells itself to read something on the beach. Now, I don’t subscribe to this theory of reading. In An Experiment in Criticism, C.S. Lewis rips into those who read “to pass the time.” The idea of reading on planes and trains and beaches is the kind of reading where we want our mind distracted, rather than altered. The long and short of Lewis’s theory is that a book should be read so that it might change us, might link us up together more like we were before the fall. The whole idea of summer reading, in my experience, runs counter to the idea of literature as change agent. But then again, it’s still reading. And like my friends say about the Harry Potter books, at least they get people reading.