It has been a great experience joining in with Cathy for 20 Books of Summer and something I hope to do other years, whether I blog about it or not! I’ve loved reading about other people’s experiences too and have found many new book blogs I love and lots of very promising book recommendations.

I knew I would read 20 books this summer, but I wondered whether I’d be able to read 20 specific books that I had chosen ahead of time. Often when I plan to read something that means I particularly won’t read it. So that made it a really good challenge and full of interest, and I have persevered through some books I would ordinarily have gotten overwhelmed by and set aside. I would really have missed out, because the books I’ve read have been by and large phenomenal! I think this is going to be my best reading year ever.

We didn’t finish our school year till near the end of July, and then our family has been sick most of August (just a really bad virus – but not that virus) – so I decided several weeks ago that despite having started this challenge June 1st, I would consider summer to end on September 22. So here’s where I am:

So much goodness on this shelf, it does my soul good just to look at it and remember how amazing so many of these books have been! Of the 16 I’ve read, there were 11 non-fiction and 5 fiction. I think that’s quite a bit more non-fiction than I normally read, which is part of what made it a good challenge! I don’t know how to decide which ones were the very best because they were all so different and I enjoyed them all so much, but for different reasons and in different ways. East West Street and How the Word is Passed are probably the two I’d be most likely to recommend to others because those are the two that I think my friends would be most likely to love. Of the 16, the ones I’m most likely to read again are probably Meditations, CleverLands, and Hell of a Book – Meditations because it is full of much-needed wisdom for life; CleverLands because it’s extremely relevant to my occupation of educating my children at home, and also full of thought-provoking ideas; and Hell of a Book because I’m almost definitely going to read this with one of my book groups so I’ll want to read it again for that (and also, it was great!). The only one that already was a reread was Their Eyes Were Watching God (what a book!). I would reread any of these books, though, except perhaps Dancing Bears and the earlier chapters of Genius of Birds.

There were two books that I subbed in from my alternates stack. The original two that are missing here are The Temporary European and Seven Storey Mountain. I did not like Temporary European (or maybe I was just jealous!), and I still may read Seven Storey Mountain someday, but at the moment I didn’t want to read about him losing his mother when he was a young child. Also, it was really long. I subbed in Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes, which was pure delight from start to finish, and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky, which was also very good. I thought it was going to be a sort of quirky look at history, an exercise in seeing “a world in a grain of sand.” But as I learned, it isn’t really all that quirky to write (or read) an entire book about cod, because it genuinely is a very important topic that touches on so many more things than I could ever have imagined. It was also much more sad than I expected because, knowing nothing at all about cod going into the book, I was blindsided by the fact that it is a major instance of humanity’s tendency to take and take, and to find ever new and more efficient means of taking, as we assume nature will always replenish our depredations. The book was published in 1997 and I have about a dozen things I want to follow up on to find out what’s new on that topic since then.

I’m looking forward to reading those last four over the next few weeks, and I think I can definitely do it. They’re all pretty short and I’ve made a bit of a start on Color of Compromise.

Over the time period from June 1st till the end of August I also read 18 other books, half of which were mysteries and all of which were fiction! (And I read or finished reading several others aloud to my kids.) I suppose I restored my normal fiction/non-fiction balance by just reading a LOT this summer and reading lots of books that were short, page-turning, and undemanding. All together this is a lot more than I normally read, and it’s partly because I was too sick for part of August to do anything but read, or lie there listening to an audiobook. I am so thankful for books and for the fact that there’s always a book for every occasion, whether it’s 4:50 From Paddington to get you through the worst part of a really bad cold, or Proust’s The Prisoner to stretch your mind in new directions and leave you lost in amazement at all the things that literary language can do.