This Week’s Attitude

It’s summertime and the reading is easy — with apologies to composer George Gershwin. While almost all the interest — and the bulk of sales — in current leisure reading are for the latest Harry Potter tale, which reportedly sold a record-breaking number of copies on the first day of publication, there’s a bevy of new books to savor and classics to revisit for poolside, bedside and beach reading this summer.

For the younger set — as well as assorted adults — the fifth entry in the Harry Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," published June 21, recently made its debut with an astounding first day sales of FIVE MILLION COPIES! (More than five times the first week sales of Hillary Clinton’s best selling book.) And despite the presumed publicity machine behind the book, it seems to have generated its own momentum in this age of mega-marketing.

British author J.K. Rowling seems to have revised the rules of writing for children, as she’s attracted no less than two generations to the Potter series, which is expected to have two more sequels before she puts the character to rest in a few years. The New York Times recently praised Rowling citing her "bravura storytelling skills and tirelessly imaginative imagination."

The enthusiasm for Harry Potter is fantastic, but I wonder if half the youths who savor his magical world are half as enthusiastic about the required reading assignments they get during the school year.

Fans had to wait three years for the fifth in the Harry Potter series and it apparently was worth the wait. There have been reports of some voracious readers burning the midnight oil, as well as flashlights under covers, well into the night.

One friend told me she was astonished when her teenage son asked her one evening if he could go to his room to read! What’s gotten into today’s youth? Don’t they want to surf the Internet, chat with friends, or download the latest music on their computers? Or talk on a cell phone? Play a video game? Or watch television?

Noooo, they want to read Harry Potter! Well, three cheers for them, especially if it spurs their interest in books not on mandatory reading lists.

Some adults are excited about Oprah Winfrey’s revival of her popular book club. The talk show diva recently selected John Steinbeck’s "East of Eden," the first selection of her regenerated book club, which quickly revived sales of the 51-year-old novel, a symbolic recreation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel woven into a history of California’s Salinas Valley from Civil War through World War I.

And speaking of summertime reading, the summer after my bar mitzvah, I immersed myself in Leon Uris’ epic tale of the founding of Israel, "Exodus," published just a decade after Israel became a state. The novel was translated into dozens of languages and secretly distributed in several communist countries. (The fine movie adaptation, starring Paul New-man, only covered a portion of the large-scale saga.) I recall paying a mere 95 cents for the Bantam paperback, which has since increased eightfold.

It was the first book I’d ever bought on my own. It is a story of a spirited people, many of whom survived the Holocaust, who, with their heads and hearts held high, managed to create a thriving agrarian economy in the midst of a desert and surrounded by enemies.

The 78-year-old best-selling author, who died on June 21, also penned a few Hollywood screenplays and authored more than a dozen nonfiction and fiction books, including my favorites "QB VII," "Trinity" and "Topaz."

A compelling storyteller, Uris chronicled 20th century Jewish and Irish history in several of his encyclopedic narratives. It is estimated over 150 million of his books have been sold worldwide.

I’ve got a pile of books — fiction and non-fiction — waiting to satisfy my reading cravings, from the latest John F. Kennedy biography, "An Unfinished Life" to Danny Goldberg’s insightful "Dispatches from the Culture Wars—How The Left Lost Teen Spirit," a hardback on how the Democratic Party has recently faltered, to a novel about the CIA titled "The Company," plus a backlog of Stephen King and John Grisham thrillers.

There’s nothing like a good story to pique readers’ interests and capture the imagination, regardless of age or season. You just have to book time for a good book.