Having a blast

Summer reading, had me a blast… The last two or three summers I’ve joined in with Cathy’s meme Twenty Books of Summer and, even if I’ve gone for a softer option like last year’s Ten Books, I’ve generally managed to complete a score of titles.

This year I’m again joining the ever expanding cohort of bloggers (who happen to be readers) participating in this event, and I’m going for a total of fifteen books. Here’s why.

I want to combine this meme with a couple of others — easy as it’s all about personal choice of reading — but also want to include some chunksters. This will mean a slower rate of consumption of course, but I hope that an average of five books a month (summer counts as between 1st June and the first day of September) will be manageable.

Lory is running a new meme, Summer in Other Languages, which with its three levels of commitment encourages bloggers to read works in foreign languages other than English or at least in translation. This also happens to tie in with my intermittent involvement with Gilion’s European Reading Challenge 2021. I’m considering Sapkowski’s Blood of the Elves as a possibility, also Machiavelli’s The Prince (on my Classics Club list) or Szerb’s The Queen’s Necklace.

From my list for Karen’s Back to the Classics Challenge 2021 I fancy a couple of those chunksters I mentioned earlier, The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. They’re both on my Classics Club list which — in theory at least — I’m hoping to complete by year’s end. Oh, and I nearly forgot to mention Gormenghast. And there’s also Moby Dick which I’ve yet to finish. Hmm.

Robertson Davies, born 28th August 1913

The last couple of summers, somewhere around the end of August, Lory has also been running a Robertson Davies Reading Week on her now mothballed site, Emerald City Book Review. Whether or not she runs it on her current site I intend to be reading the next instalment in this Canadian writer’s Salterton trilogy.

Regular readers know how much I avoid committing to plans set in concrete, especially where reading is concerned, but where these half dozen titles are concerned they won’t be the sum total of my literary consumption this coming season. I’ll be continuing my steady passage through The Lord of the Rings for Talking Tolkien, and attempting to add at least another non-European title to Reading All Around the World. Then there’ll also be short story collections in my self-imposed prompt The Library of Brief Narratives and also my 21 TBR Books in 2021 which I’m soon about to complete, if not finished already. And I’m sure I’ll be making a song and dance about Book Lover’s Day on August 9th even though for me — and perhaps you too — every day is a book lover’s day.

Carl Larsson, Woman lying on a bench, 1913

Now, what about you? Do you have plans, as I know a lot of you have, for summer reading? Have you given yourselves lots of wriggle room for mood changes and eventualities (such as Jazz Age June)? Do let me know!

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Today is the anniversary of our wedding — which took place literally a year and a day after we first met, fifty years before. We’re away for a few days (now that restrictions have been eased) but the next few blog posts have already been scheduled, though my replies to your comments may not be as immediate as I’d like them to be.

© C A Lovegrove