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Suggestions for your summer reading list

Growing up in a crowded house with a thousand siblings (well, nine, anyway), I was drawn, as a child, to stories about orphans and runaways. I would lie on my top bunk and block out the din by opening a book.

Growing up in a crowded house with a thousand siblings (well, nine, anyway), I was drawn, as a child, to stories about orphans and runaways. I would lie on my top bunk and block out the din by opening a book.

The right book, and I was transfixed, didn’t hear the telephone, didn’t hear the radio, didn’t hear the 11 other people in the house talking, coughing, laughing, slamming doors, getting ready for dinner, getting ready for bed.

Instead, I was hiding in a creepy old house in County Cork with the Gareth children in Noel Streatfeild’s The Magic Summer, or rummaging through the dump with Gertrude Chandler’s orphaned boxcar children, or wandering the Scottish Highlands with Kelpie, Sally Watson’s witch of the glen.

I wanted to be all of them, live all of their lives. And through books, I could.

As I grew, the books got more complex, took me farther afield. But always, they did what good books do: They transported me. They took me away from the noisy crowded house on the northern Minnesota tundra, and they dropped me in the middle of the Australian outback (Tracks by Robyn Davidson) or Russia (Anna Karenina) or New Orleans (A Confederacy of Dunces).

When I asked readers for recommendations of summer books that transport them, they replied in droves. Messages came in from all over the country, suggestions accompanied by mini-reviews, dotted with exclamation points and humming with enthusiasm. All of us, it seems, cherish a book that will whisk us away to another time and another place.

Lynne Day of Brooklyn Park, Minn., suggested A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. “Paris in the 1920s came alive for me, reading this book,” she wrote. “The cafes, streets, living quarters and people. If books were drinks, I’d say this gateway to Paris hit the spot.”

Mary Sharratt, herself the author of books that transport us (her latest is Daughters of the Witching Hill), wrote, “This summer I plan to escape to Renaissance Italy with the novels of Sarah Dunant. I’m actually working my way backward through her trilogy, starting with the masterful Sacred Hearts, which reveals the secret lives of Benedictine nuns in 16th-century Ferrara. I love the way she challenges our perceptions of women in this turbulent period of history.”

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series received a number of recommendations; her time-traveling books take readers to Scotland in two different centuries. “It takes me away to another country and its past,” said Anita Guillotel of Savage, Minn. “I love historical fiction, and this is one of the best.”

Curt Lund of Minneapolis recommends The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. The book “doesn’t transport me to a different time or place; rather it absolutely jogs my real time and place into an alternate reality,” he wrote. “I’m not a huge fan of fantasy, and this really isn’t, but I’ve never had a novel make something so far-fetched seem so feasible and so believable.”

Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses is the recommendation of Chuck Leddy of Boston. “An evocative summer journey through the natural beauty of Norway and into the fragile history of one man trying to reconstruct his past,” he wrote. “Petterson’s prose is a marvel.”

For some, time and place were less important than characters. “I strongly recommend A Taint in the Blood by the mystery writer Dana Stabenow,” wrote Brad Larson of St. Paul. “It’s not the plot details I remember but the fascinating characters, including Kate Shugak, a very capable heroine.”

Euan Kerr of Minneapolis sent his recommendations via Twitter. Pieced together, they read: Spanish Armada book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, by Neil Hanson. Hanson’s exploration of dysfunction in the royal houses of Europe is fascinating, particularly as the Armada changed history.

“The Avignon Quintet by Lawrence Durrell. Durrell’s five books delve into fascinating, uncomfortable period in pre- and post-war France. Books great alone — together, amazing!”

Some dug back to childhood favorites — the Lord of the Rings trilogy, A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

“I discovered A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ by Betty Smith the summer before sixth grade ,” wrote Nancy Pate of Orlando, Fla. “Francie Nolan was 10, like me, and reading a book on a balcony, while I was reading in a tree in my back yard. We seemed destined for each other.”