My reading has been all over the place this year – I read nearly as many pages in February as I did in March and April put together – so committing to a reading challenge is arguably a daft idea. But I can never resist Cathy’s call for 20 Books of Summer, and this year is no different!
20 Books of Summer is an annual challenge hosted by the lovely Cathy of 746 Books. The idea is to take a chunk out of your TBR by reading and reviewing as much as you can over the summer, with goals of 10, 15 or 20 books. I like it because it’s a casual, supportive challenge – you can switch your goal (and your declared TBR) at any point – so I don’t get stressed about it, I can just set a target and have fun.
I’ve never managed to read (let alone review) 20 books in a summer as I always end up having a reading slump and/or get diverted by rereads. Given my reading has been all over the place through spring, I’m going to set what out to be a totally manageable target of reading 15 this year – and if I only review 10 of them, I’ll consider myself to have done well.
While I’m a bit shy of TBRs at the moment because I’m bouncing off books like a pinball, I have a few things that will be guiding my reading. Firstly, there are some ARCs that demand my eyes:
I have a lot more ARCs on my list at the moment, so I may well declare for ARC August and try to get it under control, but first I’ve got my heart set on a Dominion of the Fallen reread. I would like to start from the beginning – and finally read The House of Sundering Flame – as a lead-in to the July release of new novella Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders by Aliette de Bodard.
It’s also past time I kicked off my self-imposed Contrition of a Bad SF Fan backlist reading challenge. I’ll consider anything over 2 years old a candidate for Throwback Thursday, but as this challenge was intended to push me into reading more female-authored classics, I set the cut-off at a minimum of 10 years old (and preferably older). I’ll be happy if I can read one qualifying book per month for this challenge, and I’m not going to specify what those three titles will be. I have a stack to choose from, so this gets to be a mood-led or #BookSpin pick.
Last but not least, there will be our Subjective Chaos finalists. Having made such woeful progress in my reading this year, it looks likely that I’ll only be nominating in the fantasy and novella categories, so the final round will contribute at least 6 titles to my reading list (if not more, depending on which series go through). I have no idea what they’ll be yet! However, given the strength of our shortlists this year, I’m looking forward to this enormously.
What will you be reading this summer?
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