Happy first day of summer! June 21st is the Northern Solstice.

You read and loved 7 Reasons Why We Love Summer, so here are 5 additional reasons to love the hottest season of the year.

5. Summer reading

If you’ve got even an ounce of intelligence running through your veins, you’re able to find a curiosity for reading somewhere deep inside of you.

Young people think “summer reading” and envision long lists of books pushed on us by schools, that we don’t really bother with until the week before school starts back up. Even then, many students skip the whole process and head straight for SparkNotes.

But summer reading can and should be something more, something better. We can fill our free time at home visiting another country, another world, another dimension in another person’s body, the hours passing by as if they were minutes.

In my personal experience, I slowly dropped the habit of reading early in high school, and could never really find the time to pick up a book ever since.

Exhausted with academic and extracurricular priorities, I finally picked the summer after graduation (here and now!) to pick up a book. The instant I did, my appetite for words came back. I hope for others it doesn’t have to take four years.

Curate a list, and go one by one. That’s normally how it works, isn’t it? Word by word, page by page, book by book. Reading is like alcoholism: it’s difficult to stop once you’ve started.

On this blog I’ll be narrating my literary travels by “reviewing” (reflecting and commenting) on my reads. Hope you’ll follow along!

4. Summertime produce

With the progress that technology has thus far made, you can technically experience the taste of any fruit or vegetable throughout the year, in many forms: frozen, canned, or dried. But can you really enjoy it?

Do you look forward to overpriced pink watermelons in February, or sour frozen blackberries? The answer is no.

Yes, there are vegetables and fruits abundant in other seasons to which we really look forward, but summer is especially exciting, given all of the different manipulations and recipes we create for them.

Watermelon turns into ice pops turns into slushies turns into salads.

Cucumber turns into a chilled soup turns into raita turns into cocktails.

Peaches turn into cobbler turns into a grilled fruit salad turns into milkshakes.

3. Music festivals

Would you rather shiver in the numbing cold to your favorite artists congregated on an outdoor stage, or gather in an indoor space, where the roof shouldn’t have to contain you? Nah, summertime is the ideal time for most music festivals to take place, which you’ll find to be overwhelmingly true.

Music festivals: the time to spend a few days absorbing the talents of your favorite musicians performing live, the time to make a fashion statement, the time to lie on blankets in the sun and nearly drown in your own sweat and filth.

Some of my favorites:

Electric Daisy

Mad Decent

TomorrowWorld

Lollapalooza

2. Time to experiment

Your summer is a blank canvas of time which you ultimately decide to paint. Larger decisions may dictate that it fills up with summer camp, internships, summer school, and the like. The truth is, however, that there are constantly pockets of free time, as limitless as they ever will be.

It is in these pockets that you may find the time to experiment on many things, yourself included.

Whether it be in the form of a new hair color, or a new lifestyle choice, summer is the season to try and see if something might go anywhere. We can start to change ourselves from the inside out

If the experiment fails, it’s just back to the drawing board, but the difference lies in the uninterrupted planning and execution, that lets you focus on the experiment at hand.

1. Time to address what you’ve been putting off

You know, that novel you’ve always wanted to write? That huge DIY project that was always pushed to the corner of your mind, replaced by the impending English paper? The book everyone recommended but you always put off reading?

THERE’S NO EXCUSE TO IGNORE IT ANYMORE.

IT’S NOW OR NEVER.

Summertime, reportedly, is the time to succeed. You’ll disappear for three months or so and come back a different person, and we should all take advantage of it, and try to exceed in something, or master a skill, or intentionally further our lives in some way, shape or form.

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— DP