LOWER EAST SIDE — A Lower East Side teen was honored for hitting it out of the park when it came to summer reading.
Susan Ng, 16, tore through 348 books and other library materials in the month of August alone and was honored for her literary efforts at Yankee Stadium alongside star center fielder Curtis Granderson last week.
Ng, who hit the books after spending July at a program at Stony Brook, was thrilled to meet the Yankee slugger on Aug. 25, the night the team broke a baseball record with three grand slams in a single game.
"He was really nice and cool and he made history in that game," said Ng, who wants to be a physical therapist and is entering her junior year at Bronx High School of Science.
Granderson is the editor of a children's book, All That You Can Be, which he donated to school libraries in Michigan in 2009.
Ng said she went to the Seward Park Library on East Broadway several times a week over the summer to replenish her stock of summer reading books.
She logged on to Summerreading.org, where city students in all five-boroughs can create an avatar and profile and log the books they have read.
"I didn't even know there were prizes. I just joined up because I read so its doing something I enjoy anyway, so why not sign up," Ng said.
The longest book she read, she said, was between 300 and 400 pages, while the shortest was 100 to 200 pages. Among the tomes she breezed through was the "Manga" comic series, "Hip Hop High School" and the "How to Marry a Millionaire Vampire" set by Kerrelyn Sparks.
Jack Martin, a New York Public Library staffer who headed the program, said the city's summer reading initiative is part of a nation-wide annual push to keep students prepared for the start of school in September.
"The goal of the program is to "incentivize [kids] to read over the summer so they can start school prepared to in the fall," Martin said.
The top winners won a trip to the baseball game but others won backpacks, stickers and other prizes, he added.
Other standouts from Manhattan included Ng's close friend Devlynn Chen, 16, of the Lower East Side, with 154 and Christian Rosario, 8, from the West Village, with 264.
Rosario was honored last year at the age of 7 for reading 60 books.
The top readers from each borough were brought to the game to meet Granderson, who signed baseballs and posed for photos.
Some 300,000 people participated in the program, according to the library.
