Despite everything I’ve ever loved about reading and hated about camping, I find myself wanting to sign up for Michelle H. Martin and Rachelle D. Washington’s Camp Read-a-Rama, a summer camp “for children ages four to eleven [that] uses children’s books as the springboard for all other camp activities, including songs, chants, games, field trips, and explorations.” (see page 54). Doesn’t it sound like fun? Maybe I could be a CIT.

Like Regina Hayes, whom Leonard S. Marcus interviews on page 12, “I was one of those kids to whom people would always say, ‘Get your head out of a book!’ I didn’t really go outside and play…” As a kid, the thing I valued most about reading was being able to do it by myself, indoors and away from the terrors of bugs and other children, and in the first grade I learned how. Easy readers, of which we recommend some of the best, starting on page 29 of this issue, were my key. I know that I regularly horrify my Nambe Pueblo activist colleague Debbie Reese with my nostalgia for Betty Baker and Arnold Lobel’s Little Runner of the Longhouse, but it was the first book I owned, a prize from first grade, and anytime or place I wanted to, I could and did read it. I rejoiced even then in my independence and newfound ability to be alone — at least in my imagination — on demand. Librarians and teachers, please always remember to honor this need for solitude in young readers.

But one of my touchstones at the Horn Book remains Christine Heppermann’s July/August 2000 Horn Book essay “Too Much of a Good Thing?,” in which she wonders if a kid could spend too much time with her nose in a book, actively resisting efforts to make her do something else. “I do feel as though I missed out on things, as if I may have traded real life experiences for literary ones.” Would it kill you to go outdoors? (Well, it felt like it might; I don’t know the exact connection between being a reading child and a fearful child, but there’s a significant enough overlap, anecdotally at least, to warrant attention!)

What does a reading camp designed, as Martin and Washington state, to combat “summer slide” offer to kids who view summer vacation as a chance to read even more? Let’s be honest: you couldn’t have dragged little Roger to Read-a-Rama, but it would have been good for him. Sunshine, playmates, exercises in physical dexterity — probably optimistic but nonetheless salutary. And in such a context where reading is king and, importantly, strictly recreational, kids for whom books are everything might find themselves unfamiliarly feeling on top. And if not? I note with gratitude that Read-a-Rama includes a “reading tent,” where one, presumably, could retreat when it all becomes too much. I have already pitched it in my heart.

From the March/April 2018 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.