Summer Reading
Amanda’s Weekly Zen, (whose site I found via Pages Turned) put out a summer reading challenge. It’s too late to sign up (I missed it, too) but there’s a forum to talk about summer reading challenges. You set your own challenge, and then post about what you’re reading and what progress you’re making.
Initially, I thought I wasn’t interested in a summer challenge, since I already have my fifty book goal for the year, of which I want at least 25% to be books I’ve owned for over a year but haven’t yet read. (Is that as overly complicated to understand as it was to write?) But when I thought about what I WANTED to read, I was able to clarify a reading project that’s been bubbling for a while, but which I’ve tried to dismiss, since it would involve way more library books than sitting-on-the-shelf-at-home books. Once it broke into my consciousnes, though, I could no longer deny it. I want to do a young-adult centered reading program for the summer. I want to read some of the classics that I missed the first time ’round. As both a fan and a writer of YA fiction, I think it’s remiss of me not to have read The Chocolate War, for example. I also want to read some of the more recently released YA titles that I’ve put off this year in my attempt to be less of a slave to the libarary reserve system when I have so many deserving books that I’ve purchased but not yet read.
I have a couple YA titles on my home shelves, both unread and to re-read, so I think this can fit into my overall challenge for the year. I’ll have to detour a few times since I belong to a book group, but overall, I’d like to make my summer challenge YA-centric.
Also, a reading group hosted by Bookworm (also found at Pages Turned) caught my interest. There’s going to be a discussion of the late Muriel Sparks’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at the end of this month, as well as discussion of her other works. I very much enjoyed The Driver’s Seat last year, so I may add this to the summer list as well.