Ibi Zoboi quickly situates her readers in Detroit, through Fabiola’s view of American Street. And Zoboi’s 2017 novel feels particularly timely as Fabiola arrives in the United States with her mother, but continues her journey alone—after her mother is detained by immigration authorities.

Fabiola stays in her mother’s sister’s house on American Street (with her cousins, too) and she longs for her mother to join them all. Meanwhile, she adjusts to life in Detroit. It’s very different from Haiti, and Zoboi makes you want to help her adjust, help her settle into another kind of home.

“I pull back the curtains and this little slice of Detroit opens up to me—an empty paved road and small houses with only a narrow space separating one from the other.”

This is my cross-border reading with Rachel, who’s celebrating American Independence Day today. (She reviews it here. Pre-project.) It’s nicer weather than we had for Canada Day on July 1st, and I have the day off today, too, enjoying a long weekend.

Soon I’ll be reading magazines and newspapers outside, under the sun umbrella. Playing a little more with the Canada Day puzzle from the Globe & Mail. (I only managed the first 100 clues on the holiday.)

Mr BIP is out buying lemons right now, so our lemonade glasses can sweat and leave rings on the table while we read. (But it’s only 24 degrees: no complaints.

Here’s a glimpse of part of my summer stack, but I’m standing at one end of the bridge looking across, without having done any reading yet. And already these ideas for summer reading are out-of-hand. It’s usually my slowest reading season because humidity knocks me flat, so it’s ridiculous to have so many big ideas now.

But I’m loving the idea of reading some favourite children’s series. Look, Rachel: it’s Yotsuba&! Series’ reading reminds me of summers past, when I could inhale book-after-book on a hot afternoon, drinking Koolaid and absent-mindedly scratching mosquito bites. It’s summer when the Yotsuba&! series opens, but it’s the serial element that’s drawing me back to her antics.

I’ve also got some outdoor-inspired fiction, including Theresa Kishkan’s The Weight of the Heart, set in the west-coast landscape (which pays homage to Ethel Wilson’s fiction, and I spotted a reference to Sheila Watson too). And Emma has recommended Peter Heller’s fiction repeatedly, so I’ve borrowed a copy of The River, which seems appropriately summery and pageturnery.

For moments when flipping pages is more fun than reading them, I have options including many illustrations, like a picture book by Melanie Florence and Karlene Harvey, Kaiah’s Garden. And Margaret E. Derry’s Killarney Memoir: Summers over a Century.

And I treated myself to a duology of Michel Rabagliati’s series of Paul graphic novels: Formule Vacances! I’ve read Paul’s Summer Job, which is from 2002, but I haven’t read Paul in the North (2015). So, part re-read and part fresh-read.

These are in French, but there aren’t many words on a page. I love that there are little puzzles at the end of each section, as though you can imagine being stuck in the backseat of a car on a family vacation with a pencil and a puzzle. (This scene courtesy of fiction, not real-life experience.)

There’s part of me that also looks at the summer as an opportunity to read not something lighter and warmer but something thinky and bulky. So I’ve finally started Miguel De Palol’s The Garden of Seven Twilights (in translation by Adrian Nathan West).

It’s on my #ShelfofMexico (but it’s actually Spanish-language, not Mexican fiction). It reminds me of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch (/waves to Reese) so far, but the chapters are longer and the cast of characters seems to have real heft.

Also a hefty volume, I started reading Margaret Walker’s Jubilee on Juneteenth, which was inspired by her great-grandmother (she’s Vyry in the novel). It’s nearly as long as De Palol’s novel but a more conventional and engaging story, a family saga moving through American history.

The 50th-anniversary edition I’m reading has an introduction by Nikki Giovanni, which I’m looking forward to reading, but I’ve avoided it for now, convinced it’s full of spoilery bits! This reminds me of reading through the Jalna books through one summer too. Family sagas somehow feel summery to me (even without a Juneteenth element).

I also have a hot-weather setting in Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild, chosen because of the cover but set in Nevada. My core temperature rises just thinking about the desert. And I have a cold-weather back-up in case that soon overwhelms.

And a horror novel, because I spent a few summers reading Stephen King voraciously. I thought about reading one of his, to more clearly draw the link to summers past, but then chose The Haunting of Room 904 instead, by Erika T. Wurth.

My first summer King was his collection of short stories, Night Shift, and I loved it, even though I wasn’t really into short stories at that time. But it’s Holly that is tempting me this summer. I might succumb to that temptation yet: this is only a portion of the books I’ve been contemplating for summer. And it doesn’t include any of the books I’m reading for other reasons right now, which might fit better with other summer options as the weeks shift.

One solidly lodged book in my stack, though, is Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows with a lovely summer passage:

Oneendless summertime evenings, on cool and generous summertime evenings, let us speak kindly of the red bat, the homely little bat with the smushed face and the hairless infants clinging to her fur by teeth and thumbs and feet. In daylight, she dangles one-footed from a tree branch, masquerading as a dead leaf. At nightfall she unfolds her canny wings and skitters to her work in the sky, circling under the streetlights, clearing the air of moths whose larvae eat our trees, sweeping up all the biting, stinging creatures we swat at in the dark.

And what about you: what’s in your stack today? And are you reading seasonally, whether that’s summer or winter for you right now?