There are two kinds of books: can we at least agree on that? School books and summer books, and the books of summer are those of the first order — ever since those childhood summers when we read purely for pleasure, and summer seemed an endless sea of time which even the horizon could not contain. Do you still remember them: those summer books that you stepped into as if each were a vessel you had booked passage on, setting sail for some exotic port of call?

Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island is one of the all-time, unbeatable books of summer as far as this avid reader is concerned — Civil War prisoners in a daring escape by hot-air balloon, swept out to sea by a tremendous storm and shipwrecked on a deserted island where they do more than merely survive, managing to create a near-perfect microcosm of civilization using only their Yankee ingenuity and the materials at hand. Or how about Jack London’s fabulous The Star Rover as another example of a mesmerizing yarn? A prisoner in San Quentin, unjustly jailed, is strapped into a canvas straightjacket by guards in an attempt to break his spirit. Instead he learns how to enter into a kind of trance state, and by so doing discovers that he can “astral travel” through an amazing assortment of his past lives. Still vivid to me, even today.

For years our family’s summer vacation was spent in a simple wooden cabin on one of the southern Gulf Islands, and one of the rituals surrounding our annual exodus was that crucial “last trip” to the local library to stock up on summer books before we left. I entered that library with the same intensity of purpose that a Bedouin brings to the final oasis before braving the dreaded Nefud. Realizing that I would be stuck with my selections for the duration, I was systematic, meticulous and thorough, scanning the shelves methodically from A to Z. I seem to remember that there was no loan limit for children then, and that I would carry home a dozen thick volumes; or even more. The cabin we rented had one inside bedroom where my parents slept, and an unwalled covered porch along two sides that had been furnished with a few pieces of faded furniture, and a selection of sagging bunks for us four kids. As eldest child I usually got first choice of the bunk beds, and “settled in” by arranging my precious stack of books close at hand beside the bed. I can still remember the pleasure of waking up in the dim light of those fresh summer mornings, looking past the railing and up through the maple trees to try and gauge when the sky would provide sufficient light to read.

In one of this summer’s books I found the following passage which proves that books of the other sort — those often dreary “books of school” — can also be transformative for some. The First Man is Albert Camus’s unfinished final novel, the manuscript of which was discovered “amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed its author” in 1960. Even in its unfinished state the book is wonderful. There is much in it that I found moving, and it is clear that Camus was writing from his heart as much as from his head. The story is largely autobiographical, describing the childhood of Jacques, a young boy who grows up in poverty in Algeria, his father one of the many conscripts who had been sent to fight and die for France in World War I. An early section of the book is set in present day, as the adult Jacques/Camus visits a man whom he had revered when he was just a boy. M. Bernard was the elementary school teacher who had seen some spark of promise in him, and had been instrumental in convincing Jacques’s mother to allow him to attend the lycée, and thus eventually escape. He remembers how this teacher used to read to them:

The texts were always those used in France. And these children, who knew only the sirocco, the dust, the short torrential cloudbursts, the sand of the beaches, and the sea in flames under the sun, would assiduously read — accenting the commas and the periods — stories that to them were mythical, where children in hoods and mufflers, their feet in wooden shoes, would come home dragging bundles of sticks along snowy paths until they saw the snow-covered roof of the house where the smoking chimney told them the pea soup was cooking in the hearth. For Jacques, these stories were as exotic as they could possibly be. He dreamed about them, filled his compositions with descriptions of a world he had never seen, and was forever questioning his grandmother about a snowfall lasting one hour that had taken place in the Algiers area twenty years earlier. For him these stories were part of the powerful poetry of school, which was nourished also by the smell of varnished rulers and pen cases; the delicious taste of the strap on his satchel that he would chew on at length while laboring over his lessons; the sharp bitter smell of purple ink, especially when his time came to fill the inkwells from a huge dark bottle with a cork through which a bent glass tube had been pushed, and Jacques would happily sniff the opening of the tube; the soft feel of the smooth glossy pages in certain books, which also gave off the good smell of print and glue; and, finally, on rainy days, the smell of wet wool that emanated from the wool coats at the back of the classroom and seemed to be a harbinger of that Garden of Eden where children in wooden shoes and woolen hoods ran through the snow to their warm homes.