On a sweltering afternoon in late June, outside a secondary school somewhere in French-speaking Switzerland, a line of teenagers stood awkwardly in unaccustomed formalwear. Some of the young women wobbled on heels too high; one young man was unaware that the shop label still flapped from the waist of his new trousers. This was graduation day, a moment when, as one grandmother observed, the frock coat briefly makes the monk. The students, for all their self-consciousness, understood they were passing through a quiet ritual into adulthood. Inside the hall, however, the spell often broke. Many teachers had not troubled to dress for the occasion, citing the heat or simply forgetting to care. Speeches were a lottery: a few dignified and carefully wrought, others rattled off with the aid of artificial intelligence, or even replaced by a shrug of the shoulders and the words “I haven’t prepared anything.” In the worst cases, an adult took the microphone to linger on classroom pranks with no hint of disapproval, turning a rite of passage into something that felt slightly shabby.

This uneasy tension between the ceremonial and the casual is a miniature of how summer itself has changed. For much of the twentieth century, the long holiday was defined by what one left behind. The Gulf News remembers an era when vacations began not with a boarding pass but with the final chaotic day of school, and then unspooled for weeks with no screens, no schedules, no pressure to respond. Canvas holdalls were stuffed with pillows and basic medicines; a tennis ball, a Ludo board, a deck of cards counted as a full entertainment system. On the train, children watched the fields slide past while the ticket collector moved through the compartment and tea vendors called out, their voices mingling with the whistle and the slow drag of steam—a collective rhythm that belonged to everyone in the carriage. In the United States, the visual record is even starker: early-1900s photographs show children whose summer was not a vacation at all but a season of farm or factory labour. Once child-labour laws took hold, leisure rushed in, and with it came stickball in the streets, improvised slip-and-slides made of tarpaulin and soap, and playgrounds of scalding metal slides that no safety codes would permit today.

Against that backdrop, the modern summer reading list is both a relic and a lifeline. Each year, newspapers in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Zurich and beyond publish selections designed to fill a holiday that, for many, is now fragmented by notifications. The books themselves often seem to understand the longing: this season’s recommendations include a novel about a woman who imagines herself a leopard to reclaim her power after an assault, another about a man floating alone in the Gulf of Mexico measuring his thoughts against the sea, and a historical fantasy in which a “tradwife” influencer wakes up in 1855. Non-fiction offerings propose a slower form of attention—one author asks what we lose when a language dies, another suggests that money is a shared fiction we have willed into existence. The lists have become a small annual institution, a pact that somewhere between the airport lounge and the beach towel there will be a stretch of unbroken quiet.

This is, after all, what the book promises: a holiday from oneself. As a Swiss newspaper notes, reading allows us to climb out of our own stories and let someone else’s life seed ours. A German music producer, asked for a summer recommendation, watches his daughter race through a handbook on screen-time limits and then report back that adults might need it more urgently. Her verdict is a gentle nudge; it captures the sense that while the world has fitted itself into a pocket, the harder task—still—is to empty the mind. In an old photograph, a child in knickerbockers bowls a wooden hoop down a dirt lane, a game that has rolled, in one form or another, from the 1600s to the modern hula hoop. The hoop does not connect to anything. It simply runs, and the trick is to keep it upright for the sheer pleasure of watching it go.