Ah, summer vacation! Sleeping late. Sand in your shoes. The summer reading list, writ large, but set aside until June kicks in.

My book report days are over, but I still linger in front of the summer reading display at a book store, checking to see which literary efforts made the cut, what novels remain on the list from my day or shine as new offerings, those with enough moxie to grab the attention of the iPod crowd.

The one bow to learning space in my small town high school was the library. It was the only place where breathing was easy when opened windows kept the heat at bay. It was a room of strange echoes. We called those whispery sounds, "The book ghosts."

The librarian, Gus Adams, should have studied ballet. He moved like a dancer, balancing books down one arm as he returned them to shelves. He looked like Ichabod Crane, skinny, with a long face, a prominent Adam's apple and eyebrows, reaching his hair line when he was displeased.

Mr. Adams was a mystery. Nobody knew why he ended up in a small Southern town when he was an easy fit for city life, symphony concerts and the theater.

When he wasn't checking out books, he was reading them, leaning against the wall, keeping an eye on restless students who didn't know Shakespeare from Steinbeck. The football players thought he was prissy and whispered about his wrists, as thin as a girl's, but they judged everybody because they had no idea who they were, not yet.

Those boys were growing so fast, the idea of a man, content to stand still and read, made them itch to get out of the room, run down the hall and punch somebody on the arm.

Mr. Adams compiled his own summer reading list. He typed it, tacked it on the library door and promised extra credit to students who read five books over the summer and wrote about them.

The star quarterback and company and the band students had summer practices ahead. The cheerleaders planned to meet to perfect their cartwheels, but the not-quite-yet swans and the gangly boys, signed on to read Mr. Adams' summer book selections.

I waited until the last week of school to add my name. I didn't want to be called a "teacher's pet," but there wasn't a beach trip in my vacation future and walking to the local library, (the coolest place in town), to check out books was an escape from the sameness of summer days in a small place.

Mr. Adams nudged us to read about the proper lives of Jane Austen's heroines and the river calling to "Huckleberry Finn." He dared us to feel sorry for ourselves by including "The Grapes of Wrath" on his list.

Thinking back, I wonder how it would have been if author J.K. Rowling had been more than a gleam in her mother's eye. Her "Harry Potter" books would have claimed hours of June through August days when not a breath of air stirred.

The summer reading list of today is a mix of books Mr. Adams knew well: Pearl Buck's, "The Good Earth," "Moby Dick," Harper Lee's, "To Kill a Mockingbird," but there are also offerings time denied him like Ernest Gaines' "A Lesson Before Dying."

Seeing books on the reading list, lined up spine to spine, conjures up generations of a family, some novels like city cousins, staid and proper, others as adventurous as pioneer ancestors, and, of course, a renegade or two, none taking truer aim than J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye."

For students, books compete with television, movies, text messaging, cell phones and video games, yet the summer reading list is not to be denied. A procession of good teachers, (thank you, Mr. Adams,) has kept it alive and well. What better legacy than to value reading as a rite of summer?

Judy Elliott is an award-winning columnist from Marietta.