Henry James once opined that the two most beautiful words in the English language are "summer afternoon." I would like to edit James — alas, who wouldn't? — and bestow the most felicitous phrase award upon the words "summer reading."



They instantly conjure up images of long, lazy days spent deep inside the spell of enchanting stories.



For students, though, summer reading is serious business. Students at many schools are assigned great gobs of written material over which they must clamber between June and September. Consequently the items on those lists generally bear no relation to the "beach reading" so beloved by working adults, the gloriously thick, vapid novels to which we gravitate when we find ourselves temporarily unmolested by email, cell calls and hectoring memos from bosses.



Beach reading is fun. Books on summer reading lists, however, are not fun. They are not intended to be fun. They are intended to be earnest and improving.



I've sometimes suspected, in fact, that a passionate dislike of reading — some students regard it as a punishment right up there with being grounded on prom night — originates in summer reading lists.



Consider the case of my 18-year-old friend.



He's a rising senior at a suburban high school. I don't want to tell you his name or identify the school, because I'd be singling out his teachers and embarrassing him. Let's call him Bill.



He recently griped to me about the reading he's been assigned to complete this summer. Give me titles, I insisted.



He did. And I was horrified. I was outraged. If I'd had the energy — it's summer, mind you, and a certain languor creeps into the limbs — I would've jumped up and organized an official protest.



What was on Bill's reading list that so incensed me?



"Rabbit, Run," for starters. I appreciate the considerable merits of John Updike's 1960 novel. It is beautifully written. But it concerns a grown man's struggle to come to terms with his fading youth and boring marriage.



An 18-year-old boy typically is not married. His youth has not yet faded. Life is still an adventure; it has yet to sour and grow stale.



Why assign "Rabbit, Run" to Bill and his cohorts? A decade from now, sure. But now?



I can hear the howls of protest: Reading, you say, is about stretching yourself, about escaping your own skin. And I agree — sort of. Dealing with reluctant student readers, however, is like cooking for picky eaters: You don't haul out the escargot, first thing. You start with hot dogs and mac and cheese, and work your way up to duck a l'Orange. Or maybe you stay with hot dogs. Nothing wrong with hot dogs.



I dearly wish that every student could receive a personalized summer reading list. For most, I would include more genre fiction, such as science fiction and mysteries, as well as more nonfiction. Bill's love of soccer, for instance, makes him an ideal reader for a book such as the lively, audacious "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization" (2004) by Franklin Foer.



What other books would I require Bill to read? "So Long, See You Tomorrow" (1980) by the late Illinois native William Maxwell, is a small, polished gem of a novel about a young man's awareness that other people may be quietly enduring momentous sorrow. "There is a limit, surely, to what one can demand of one's adolescent self," the narrator muses, adding that he hoped a troubled friend "could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing."



I wish more students were required to read Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" (1950) and fewer were required to read "The Great Gatsby" (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The latter is a staple of summer reading lists. I have nothing against it — but there are so many novels that deserve a chance to be read by fledgling readers. Jay Gatsby has had his hour on the stage.



I'd avoid picks from the so-called young adult genre and include books that feature a young adult's perspective as a natural part of the story — not as an angle generated by a marketing department. I believe Bill and his friends would love "A Death in the Family" (1957) by James Agee. "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee," the narrator begins, "in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child." What teenager wouldn't nod knowingly at that sentence?



Updike isn't entirely banished. I'd just skip "Rabbit, Run" and ask Bill to read "A&P," Updike's affecting 1961 short story about a gallant young man and the day he learns that the world can't match his romantic expectations of it, that life — sadly — is slightly more complicated than a soccer game on a summer afternoon.



jikeller@tribune.com



Twitter @litkell