Last year sometime I created a list of my top ten anticipated releases of 2016, which wasn’t actually very conscious of many things coming out in the latter half. Nor was it conscious of literary fiction, in general. I decided to update the list based on things I’ve discovered since then. Until I made this list I didn’t realize how many good things are coming out, so I’m really excited!
Month: July 2016
Books I want to read by the end of summer
I decided quite quickly last year when I started this blog that having a strict TBR is not a good idea for me. This is for many reasons: constantly purchasing new books, adding to my gigantic Goodreads TBR, wanting to read books I’ve owned for a long time, being a mood reader, and also just the fact that I’ve been trying to read more genres.
However… there are some books that I would like to get to sooner than others, and so I thought I would make a list of them and explain why it is that I want to read them so much. I have a few weeks before the fall semester starts, which is what I consider to be the unofficial end of summer, summer being that period of unlimited, uninterrupted book-reading, in theory.
Man Booker longlist
Today the longlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced, and as with last year (and ever since I knew it was a thing) I’ll be reading at least some of the books and reviewing them here on the blog! I happened to have read one of them this week, and I quickly put five others on hold at the library, so I should be able to do this in the next few weeks. Plus, I’m on a rampage lately, reading a book every day or two (yay, month off!), so it shouldn’t take me too long to get through the ones that I have available to me now.
This is coming at a good time because I have been craving some more adult, literary fiction lately. Not adult in that sense, but in the, “hey, this book is full of grown-ups!” kind of way. Nothing against what I’ve been reading lately because it has been very entertaining, but it has been a lot of YA, middle grade, and summery reads.
Ten books that have made me want to…
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday is pretty interesting… ten books that have made me want to do or learn about something after reading them. I like that it isn’t “ten best books in X category”, because honestly that was getting a little old and I didn’t want to recycle anything. I took some liberties with the idea of “doing”, but hey, it’s a rather ambiguous verb.
Read-a-thon wrap-up
One week and two read-a-thons later, I am quite proud of the reading progress I have been able to make. All the reading happened, and although I hit some speed bumps mid-thon, the weekend more than made up for it.
Read-a-thon update
So it’s day four of my current read-a-thons, and I’m doing… ok. To be honest, the only reason that I am doing as well as I am is because I started my first book on Sunday night.
So far I have:
- Read 615 pages
- Finished 2 books (The Girl With All the Gifts and Anya’s Ghost)
- Completed 2 challenges
- Watched my book-to-movie adaptation (The BFG)
I think that’s pretty good, considering the amount of work I’ve had this week. It’s the last week of the summer class I’m teaching, which means final projects and grading. Some things have been changing for my upcoming job, and I had a dream that I walked into one of my classrooms and it had stadium seating (read: 200 students) instead of the regular 20-25 person classroom I should have, and I was just like… how the hell am I supposed to grade all these students’ papers?! Luckily it was just a dream. Suffice to say, work has been on my mind.
After tomorrow life should finally start to calm down and I can really get some momentum going for these two read-a-thons. Once I get more of this ever-elusive time, I’ll write down my reactions to the books I’ve read. (The Girl With All the Gifts? Whoa.) Next I’m going to read The BFG since I just saw the movie yesterday, and then I’ll have four more books to read by the end of the day Sunday! I think I can do it. I’m pretty sure. We’ll see.
Ten books set outside the U.S.
(I had some recent good/interesting job news, so expect a lot of exclamation marks in my life for the time being!!!)
This week it’s ten books that take place outside of the U.S., which honestly, having studied a lot of French literature, is pretty easy for me. The hard part is picking the best ones. I tried to throw some in there that I’ve never mentioned before. Here goes!
Read-A-Thons
This week there are two big read-a-thons going on – the Booktube-a-thon and 24-in-48. Now I don’t have a Booktube channel, but it’s not like the book police are going to come and tell me I’m not allowed to read this week. And plus, I’ve thought about making a channel, so the intent is there.
I decided to participate in both of these ‘thons because A) I’m going to read anyway, B) after Thursday I’ll have a month(ish) off, and C) I like the way that read-a-thon challenges make me create a TBR of books that I might have forgotten about otherwise (which is easy to do when your TBR is pushing 500 books).
Booktube-a-thon is July 18th-24th, and 24-in-48 is July 23rd and 24th. Here are the challenges for the Booktube-a-thon and the books I chose for them, which will overlap with the other ‘thon:
Favorite books from the first half of 2016
In my last post I went through how many books I’ve read, what genre, ratings, and how well I’ve done on my resolutions (or not). It’s also high time I look back on what I’ve read this year so far and decide which have been my favorite. This is especially helpful since I haven’t been writing about them much, and I don’t want to forget everything by the time I get to December!
I chose 6 books, one for each month. These are books that I have rated highly and still look back on fondly, even after months. I’ve been struggling lately with ratings and whether my initial reaction is more important than what I remember months and years later. I came down on the side of memory – what good is it to read a nice book that was thrilling, but ultimately forgettable? This means that I keep going back and down-grading books that I realize aren’t as great as I initially thought. Partly that comes from comparison, and partly from reflecting back on the whole experience and recognizing that one or two good aspects don’t make up for a load of defects, whatever they may have been.
Bookish resolutions?
Well it’s half-way through the year, which means that it’s time to review my New Year’s bookish resolutions, and do a little review of where I’m at so far.
Books, in other words 