This will be the 3rd summer that I’ve made a Summer Reading List of books to read. It’s not an all-inclusive list, I always leave myself room to choose other books as well. This summer I’m leaving myself a lot of room to choose. I want to read a lot of books this summer, so I don’t want to limit myself by feeling like I have to stick to a list.

So I only chose four books for my list this year. They are classics, and they are books I’ve been meaning to read for quite a while.

I have from the start of Memorial Day weekend (Friday May 22) to the end of Labor Day (Monday September 7) to complete the goal. Here are the books:

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour and Introduction by J. D. Salinger
The Annotated Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

Summer Reading List

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I’m very happy with this list, and excited for these and all the other books waiting for me and the warm summer months to read them in. :)

What’s on your summer reading list?

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One of the main reasons I’m posting my summer reading recap so late, is that I’ve tried to post it several times and gave up because I realized how boring it is. At the beginning of the summer I set a goal of seven specific books to read this summer, and I ended up reading all of them. The books were:

Summer Reading Goals

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Emma by Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Night by Elie Wiesel
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

I think the reason I find this so boring to post about is that I already talked about all of these books in my monthly Polysyllabic Spree posts.

Anyway, I’m happy that I met my goal. I definitely learned my lesson from the summer of 2007, when I picked out 15 books and only read 6 of them. I’ve learned I’m not good about sticking to pre-set lists, especially over a long time frame.

Overall this summer, I read 32 books. Nice improvement from Summer 2007 (18 books). The books I read were:

1. Night by Elie Wiesel
2. When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
3. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
4. The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
5. The Penderwicks of Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall
6. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
7. Dancing Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
8. The Solitary Vice Against Reading by Mikita Brottman
9. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
10. American Bloomsbury Susan Cheever
11. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
12. Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
13. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
14. The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
15. Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi
16. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
17. Emma by Jane Austen
18. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
19. A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
20. The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler
21. Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
22. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
23. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
24. Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
25. New Moon by Stephenie Meyer
26. Bertie Wooster Sees It Through by P. G. Wodehouse
27. Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
28. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
29. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
30. Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger
31. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
32. How to Read Novels Like a Professor by Thomas Foster

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One of the things I anticipate most about summer, besides the start of Summer Fridays at work where we get out at 1, is making a Summer Reading List. I usually try to come up with a list of books I’ve been meaning to read for a long time, and make it a goal to read them over the summer.

Last year I learned my lesson about making too long of a list. I don’t like to stick to lists very well, so the list should be short enough to allow plenty of spontaneous reads over the summer.

This year I decided to go with a list of 7 books, half of what last year’s goal was. Last year I read only 6 books from that list, so even going with 7 might be too much. However, I think I picked books I’ll actually read this summer. We’ll see how this goes:

Summer Reading Goals

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Emma by Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Night by Elie Wiesel
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee

Some of these books will also help me with my 2008 reading goals (The Austens and the Vonnegut). I have until the end of Labor Day weekend in September, which is September 1st.

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Well, at the beginning of the summer I made a list of books I’d like to read over the summer.

As with most of my books to be read during a certain time period lists, I strayed well off the list most of the summer. I think next time I make a list (and perhaps I’ll make a Fall Reading List soon) I will keep it much shorter. I’ve realized that making a longer list leaves no room for impulse reads, which are inevitable for me.

The official dates of my summer reading list were from May 25 (start of Memorial day weekend) to September 3 (end of Labor day weekend).

Here’s how I did, completed books are crossed off:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (started, but have not finished yet)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut
Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut (finished on September 7)
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Issacson
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

42% finished.

Here are the other books I read this summer that were not on my list:
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl
Karma and Other Stories by Rishi Reddi
Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little by Peggy Gifford
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde
Uncommon Arrangements by Katie Roiphe

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