MISQUAH — The library’s summer reading program reached full stride this week, and with it the now-annual problem of Brynn Solberg, the fourth-grader who has cleared the program’s highest animal tier — “eagles” — in three weeks flat, leaving librarian Ruth Aune to invent a new rank above it, on short notice and out of nothing, for the second summer in a row.

Aune created the animal-tier system in 2003 and, for two decades, watched it work exactly as a tier system is supposed to: most children reached a comfortable middle rung — “foxes,” “deer” — somewhere around the fair, collected a certificate, and spent the rest of August at the lake, as God and summer intended. The system assumed a normal child. Then came Solberg, who has read, by the library’s careful count, forty-one books since the first of June, and who treats each new tier she’s handed less as an achievement to enjoy than as a personal insult to be answered by Friday. “I built a ladder for normal children,” Aune said, from behind the desk where she now keeps a marker and a stack of blank laminate for exactly this. “She is not a normal child. She is a reading emergency, and I mean that with my whole heart and with love.”

The new top rank will “probably be loons,” Aune said, “because they’re ours, because they outrank an eagle in this county if nowhere else, and because I cannot think of a single other animal a fourth-grader from this lake would accept as higher than an eagle.” Enrollment stands at thirty-three this summer, up from the high twenties, a bump Aune attributes partly to the program’s reputation and partly, candidly, to “people wanting a seat for the show — there are parents signing up kids who don’t much like reading just to be in the building when she clears the next one.” Her standing professional request — that the children, and one child in particular, pace themselves and enjoy the summer — was issued again this week, received with a polite nod, and ignored again this week, precisely and exactly on schedule, as it is issued and ignored every single week of every single June.