Best Beach / Summer Vacation Read

My best summer read didn't take place at a beach, but on the university's outdoor swimming pool deck. I spent the mornings in intensive Spanish classes (two semesters in 6 weeks), nights memorizing and drilling Spanish irregular verbs, grammar and prepositions.  The middle afternoon, after a bout at the gym, it was swimming time, under the golden sun and turquoise sky of New Mexico.

That summer I read for the first time, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  In-between long takes of Kostya Lev's meditations, Anna's dresses, Kitty's disappointment,

Stiva and Dolly's marital ups and downs, the most exciting horse race ever written, haymaking, babies born and brothers dying -- I'd leap into the pool to cool off and swim some laps.

 It smells faintly still of my coconut-hibiscus scented tanning oil.

Anna's rise to passion and fall to suicide lasted the whole summer.

When I finished the novel, the Spanish course was finished and it was time to pack, leaving behind this paradise to New York, and a life that not only would not be centered around a university, but where winter mattered, and except for him, I knew not a soul.

That summer I was also madly, passionately in love, and living with him!

There were many adventures, felicities and infelicities, in many places, still ahead for him and me, including break-ups and separations. Then, we got married.  The adventures -- and the marriage -- are still works in progress.