It's Memorial Day, which means summer is due to arrive here in Seattle sometime in the next two to ten weeks. This is the time of year when you see a lot of sites promote their summer reading lists. We've never been especially into lists here at the Seattle Review of Books, but if you dig them, that's great. We're happy you'll soon have a lot of lists to choose from.

But the idea of summer reading has always been especially confusing. What, exactly, does summer entail? Is the summer when you're supposed to read "junk," whatever that means? Okay. But you can read light, fluffy romances or vapid thrillers whenever you want. That's the beauty of being an adult: you can read whatever kind of book you choose, whenever you choose. I know people who read classics in the summer because that's the only time of year when they can focus enough reading energy into, say, a Dostoevsky novel. That's okay. Some people only read collections of poetry in the summer because they're too easily distracted to keep their heads in a novel. That's okay, too.

So if you're looking for a summer reading list, we think you should check out our review page, where we have reviewed dozens of books of all sorts — novels, short stories, classics, comics, thrillers, sci-fi — over the last year. You'll find something there to read, no matter what a summer read means to you.