Scarcely am I back to blogging regularly and it’s already time to make my 20 Books of Summer list – always one of the highlights of the blogging year! (I actually started working on this on a sunny day during my break because it felt like such a lovely springtime activity). Cathy’s sign-up post is here if you’re curious about 20 Books of Summer, but I think most people know how it works by now. As ever, I am going to rely on my Kindle/Audible/Borrowbox backlog for this list – I’ll be on holiday for a couple of weeks at the start of August, but I will be doing a lot of walking, so I won’t want to be lugging physical books around with me. Well, I will probably want to – but experience has taught me that it’s a bad idea.
The Three Musketeers is, of course, an enormous novel, but I’m hoping that since it’s an adventure story it will be a real page turner! I’ve tried to include some novellas, mysteries, and other adventure stories amongst my list, with the aim of making it through those a bit more quickly.
Classics Club
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Passing – Nella Larsen
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder – James de Mille
The Princess and the Goblin – George MacDonald
Audiobooks
The Distant Hours – Kate Morton
The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science – Seb Falk
The Killings at Badger’s Drift – Caroline Graham
Miscellaneous
Sankofa – Chibundu Onuzo
Hotel du Lac – Anita Brookner
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
The Happy Return – CS Forester (DNF)
A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War – Patricia Fara
Manannan’s Cloak: An Anthology of Manx Literature – selected and translated by Robert Corteen Carswell
The Bandit Queens – Parini Shroff
Kindle backlog
The Old Lie – Claire Coleman
Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir
Future Crimes: Mysteries and Detection through Time and Space – edited by Mike Ashley
The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite – Laura Freeman
Murder in Mesopotamia – Agatha Christie (NB: My joy at finding an Agatha Christie I have not yet read lingering at the back of my kindle is unmatched. I really thought I’d read them all by now – and by all accounts this is a banger!)
Babbacombe’s – Susan Scarlett
Well, I’m now very much in the mood to get started! With the single exception of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder – which I’ve tried to read three times, and will bump from my Classics Club list for some HG Wells if I fail again this summer – I’m looking forward to all these books. I feel like I’ve got a good selection here to sustain me through whichever reading mood takes me, and now I just want it to be 1st June already. Looking forward to reading through everyone else’s lists!
louloureads 
Great list! I have very happy memories of reading my Mum’s copy of Hotel Du Lac when I was about seventeen! Good luck and happy reading x
Thank you! I’m really looking forward to it.
The Surprising Story of Medieval Science sounds like it might be a horror story. Bloodletting and limb sawing, and whatnot. I can’t wait to read Vonnegut together! I talked to my mom, and she’s going to read it, too. Are you available to meet June 11?
Yes, I am! Looking forward to reading it with you.
I think the point of The Light Ages is that it’s a counter to that idea. Obviously that stuff was going on, but it was also the era where the modern university appeared for the first time, and where the experimental method began to appear, and so on. I’m really looking forward to listening to it!
Cool, I’ll send you a calendar invite when I get back home from vacation.
Great selection! I’ve enjoyed the handful of them that I’ve read, especially Passing and Slaughterhouse Five (which is quite devastating in places so maybe not a holiday read!). Christie of course – how wonderful to find an unread one! It’s years since I read that one, but I remember enjoying it! It’s also years since I read Badger’s Drift, which I also enjoyed but be prepared for the tone being quite different from the TV series – darker. Have fun!
Thanks! I’m looking forward to them. And thanks for the heads up about Slaughterhouse Five – I will try to read that before I leave for my trip. (I’m intending for my holiday reading to be mostly murder mysteries and, since I’ll be on the Isle of Man, the Manx anthology – nothing too deep!)
Looks like a good list! I am going to try again this summer though I may only do 15 books.
Yes, hopefully it will be a good list! Looking forward to seeing your list too!
lovely list!
Thanks!
Great mix of titles! I look forward to hearing your thoughts about the Coleman. Passing is a fascinating story. I haven’t read a Brookner in ages, but she is always delightful too. Happy summer and happy reading!
All three authors are new to me, so I’m excited to give them a try! I am particularly looking forward to the Coleman, as I haven’t read any really good science fiction in ages.
I’ll be interested to hear what you think of Sankofa. We were thinking of reading it in our book club
I really loved Welcome to Lagos, so I have high hopes!
I love the way you organized this! I totally should do some from my Kindle backlog!
Thanks! Yes, I always do it – it’s so easy to accidentally build up a very long Kindle TBR.
LOL, I do have an extensive back list on my Kindle!