"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces... "Some weather!... Hot!... Hot!... Hot!... Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it...?" --F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
"Beach read" is the operative term for all discussions about summer reading list season, which unofficially begins on Fourth of July weekend. But many of us were landlocked when we were young and associate hot weather reading with cheap, sun-drenched folding chairs scattered across the lawn. These were our summer reading thrones, upon which we draped our lazy bodies and buried sunburned noses in irresistible books.
For the Guardian last week, author Tim Lott chose his "top 10 summers in fiction," observing that in an ideal summer, the "world is a place of slow motion, of repose, of transcendence, of sex. Water is there too, in every imagined summer--cooling, rejuvenating, the capturer of light.... And at the edges, the darkness." 
I like his picks, especially L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, Michael Frayn's Skios and, for personal reasons, The Great Gatsby, which he calls "this most perfect novel... Set in 1922, like all great summer novels it creates an atmosphere of heat and water and mystery."
Gatsby was my first "summer book," the one that decades later still intensely evokes a specific moment in time. I read it in 1968 because it was on a required pre-semester reading list for the college I'd be attending. In the novel, Nick Carraway has "the familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer." He observes, with what would prove to be ill-fated "beach books" optimism: "There was so much to read, for one thing." I was 18; he was speaking to me.
"Get outdoors!" our mothers would collectively yell when we were young, and outdoors we'd go to claim reading space on the weathered, transient furniture of summer. Now, as we enter another long, lazy Fourth of July weekend, I find myself wondering: What was your first summer book? --Robert Gray, contributing editor
