For a moment, I considered not writing this post. After all, there will be a quarterly wrap-up at the end of September that will cover the books I read during my recent stab at the 20 Books of Summer challenge, so what’s the point?
Well, the point is that I don’t just want to talk about the books I read, I also want to reflect on how my reading for and participation in this readathon went more generally. So, let’s start off with a quick review of my initial plan.
Here’s what I originally wanted to read:
- Mithu Sanyal – Identitti
- Claire Oshetzky – Chouette
- Amitav Ghosh – The Hungry Tide
Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass- James Joyce – Dubliners
Andrew Miller – Now We Shall Be Entirely Free- Tina Makereti – The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke
- Thomas de Quincey – Confessions of an English Opium Eater
- Natasha Pulley – The Kingdoms
- James Baldwin – Go, Tell it on the Mountain
- Pettina Gappah – Out of Darkness, Shining Light
H.P. Lovecraft – At the Mountains of Madness- Ursula K. Le Guin – The Dispossessed*
- Julia Armfield – Our Wives under the Sea (library)
- Brandon Taylor – Real Life (library)
And here’s what I ended up reading:
- Stephen King – Revival (library)
- H.P. Lovecraft – At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror
- Virginia Woolf – The Voyage Out (started in April)
- Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
- William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Lyrical Ballads (library)
- Andrew Miller – Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
- Louise Glück – Winter Recipes from the Collective (library)
- Colin Dexter – The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (audio)
As it turns out, my prediction that I might not stick to my original list was correct, as was my assumption that fifteen books might be a bit much considering my usual reading pace.
However, I didn’t completely divert from my original plan. I did pick just under half of my finished books from my tentative TBR – those were all books that I really wanted to get to sooner rather than later, after all – even though there was also a lot of spontaneous shuffling going on, especially with regards to my library reads. The reason for that wasn’t even so much that I had to return books before I could get to them; it was more that my mood reading got in the way, as per usual. I read about twenty pages of Real Life and really wasn’t feeling it, while Revival turned out to be a spontaneous pick that I liked much more than expected. Oh, and there’s also the fact that I did vaguely try to match my August reads to the Orilium Readathon prompts (with mixed success) and thus had to deviate from my original plan a bit. Overall, though, I did keep my mood reading in check enough to make sure that I was prioritizing my long-term TBR and not starting too many different books at the same time. (I try to stick to two or three, usually in different formats or as a fiction/non-fiction split.)
What I’m even more proud of, though, is the fact that I reviewed all the books I read since early June, and with no gaps and no out-of-order posting, either. That is a marked improvement compared to the last two years I’ve been participating in the 20 Books of Summer challenge.
In fact, there is only one book that falls in the June-August period where the review is still outstanding – Colin Dexter’s The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn – but I’m not sure I have much to say about that one. As I said when I read (or rather listened to) the first two instalment in the Inspector Morse series (here and here), I like these books as solid mysteries that hit all the right beats of entertaining detective fiction, but they are very of their time and the sexism is off-putting and tedious to pull apart in a review. So, no promises that I’ll still get to that one.
However, and here is the ‘but’ of this post: This wouldn’t be a reflection if I didn’t come up with at least one thing that I struggle with and want to improve on, and in my case that is replying to comments both here and on Instagram. I haven’t figured out what the exact issue is – it’s not that I forget that I have comments to reply to – so coming up with a strategy hasn’t been super successful yet. Just trust me when I say that I genuinely enjoy getting comments (and getting into conversation through them), I’m just terrible at maintaining focus and replying in a timely manner.
I have three more books that I started in August but didn’t finish in time for the readathon – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the 1831 edition, Tina Makereti’s The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, and Louise Glück’s Averno – so expect reviews for these soon-ish (I hope).