Where We Live: What are you waiting for? Read!

School is out, and as parents, we worry about brain drain. We fear that all that information teachers so lovingly crammed into our children’s heads over the past eight months is in danger of slipping out the other side if we’re not proactive.

To remedy that and to prepare them for the next school year, it’s common to give them a summer reading list — books to keep their little minds active and engaged over the next few months until school bells clang again.

But what about your little mind?

As an adult, what are YOU doing to keep your gray matter fully functioning? Are you reading?

I’m an obsessive reader; I read like it’s my job. In fact, I’m queen of the one-click button on Amazon, and I’ve got the credit card bills to prove it. I buy so many books, Jeff Bezos and I are on a first-name basis. (Not really, but we should be.)

My Kindle is so loaded with books that I’ve read and books that I’ve yet to read that I’m surprised it hasn’t cracked under the virtual weight of all those pages. And let’s not even talk about the stacks of books under my night table and on multiple bookshelves around my house and packed away in my dad’s garage.

If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’re a reader. Good for you. You care about what’s happening in your community and the world around you. But if you haven’t picked up a book since you flipped the tassel on your high school mortarboard, what are you waiting for?

There’s an entire world available at your fingertips. You can travel back in time, forward into the future, fall in love with an endless stream of book boyfriends, fight the bad guys, win the girl, dive to the bottom of the ocean or rocket into the stratosphere.

And that’s just fiction.

Grab a book and you’ll be able to learn how to change the oil in your pickup, rewire a lamp, go solar, create a compost heap, grow heirloom roses, decorate a three-tiered cake, bake a soufflé or butterfly a chicken.

You get the point.

Don’t have the cash, credit or room for all those books? (Me neither, but sadly that doesn’t usually stop me.) Head to the library.

Over the past few months, the Times News featured all nine of the libraries in our coverage area. We’ve introduced you to your local librarians and detailed all of the services these storehouses of knowledge and entertainment have to offer.

Each of our libraries have summer programs for our youngest readers, and many of them have book clubs for adults that allow you to read a book and then talk about what worked for you and what didn’t work.

So pick up a book and read. Stimulate those frontal lobes and use your head for more than a place to hang your hat. If you’re not sure what you’d like to read, talk to your librarian. They’ll have lots of recommendations. I promise.

Also make sure to check out the Family page on Mondays in the Times News starting soon, when each of our libraries will take turns submitting reviews on their favorite books.

Summer is just days away, and there’s no better time to escape — into a book.