20 Books of Summer 2024

It’s that time of year again, when I sign up for Cathy’s challenge. It’s very relaxed: pick a number of books to read and review between 1 June and 1 September. Every year I spend a long time carefully selecting 20 titles (possibly the bit that is most fun), then inevitably fail to get through them and review about half of those I do read… I do love choosing though, and I’m feeling quite excited and positive about my choices. At the end of this challenge I should have gained a fair amount of shelf space, assuming I rehome a few once they have been read! (see pic below).

1. Calcutta by Amit Chaudhuri: a non-fiction account of living in Calcutta in 2009-11. I loved Chaudhuri’s 2022 book ‘Sojourn’ and am keen to catch up on more of his work, and bought a second-hand copy of this book earlier in May. (305 pages.)
2. Love’s Work by Gillian Rose: a classic work of memoir, recently republished by Penguin, which I bought in April. (95 pages.)
3. Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux: a short book by the French writer, published by Fitzcarraldo and requested from the library, documenting a two-year affair with a married man. (Just 48 pages, hurray!)
4. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert: I bought this years ago second-hand and it’s clagging up my shelves. Expecting to find it quite irritating, but who knows! (334 pages.)
5. Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman: subtitled ‘A Life in a New Language’ this book was a much-wanted present bought from my wish list a couple of years ago, which I still haven’t got to. Hoffman moved from Poland to the USA at the age of 13 in 1959. (280 pages.)
6. National Dish by Anya von Bremzen: the final work of non-fiction on my list, from the library and subtitled ‘Around the World in Search of Food, History and the Meaning of Home’. (310 pages.)
7. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: the book of the moment, I’m hoping for enjoyable time-travel nonsense, though I’m slightly alarmed by the Times newspaper’s description of its “extreme whimsy”. (350 pages.)
8. The Kellerby Code by Jonny Sweet: another archetypal ‘summer read’, from the library, which has been described as “a dastardly romp for fans of Saltburn and The Talented Mr Ripley”. (370 pages.)
9. The New Life by Tom Crewe: another library loan, a much-lauded 2023 debut novel about gay men and illicit romance in the Victorian era. (368 pages.)
10. On Beauty by Zadie Smith: a 2006 novel that has been on my TBR for a very long time – I own a chunky hardback second-hand copy. (450 pages.)
11. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura: psychological lit fic that I borrowed from the library after reading another blogger’s review. Amazon says: “An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the international court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home”. (225 pages.)
12. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray: a 2023 Booker contender and an An Post Irish book of the year. Tragicomic and “purely pleasurable” says the Observer. Though I’m put off by the fact that he wrote ‘Skippy Dies’, which I was not a big fan of. (A chunkster of 642 pages.)
13. The Reader by Bernard Schlink: the international bestseller and modern classic. (220 pages.)
14. Friend of my Youth by Amit Chaudhuri: “a novelist called Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay”, where he is unable to locate a childhood friend. (164 pages.)
15. Garden by the Sea by Merce Rodereda: a Spanish novel set over six summers in a seaside villa in the 1920s. (202 pages.)
16. White Tiger by Aravind Adiga: an Indian novel that won the Booker in 2008 – and I’ve had it unread on my Kindle since 2011. (292 pages.)
17. Serious Men by Manu Joseph: another Indian novel that has languished unread on my Kindle – this one for ‘only’ 3 years though. Winner of the Asian Literary Prize and shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. (321 pages.)
18. The Lover by Marguerite Duras: a classic short work of French literature (84 pages).
19. My Friends by Hisham Matar: a 2024 release, from the library, on three friends living in political exile, by the famed author. (456 pages.)
20. The Details by Ia Genberg: I don’t know much about this Swedish book, except that it was in contention for this year’s International Booker. And is fairly short! (156 pages.)

Total: 5,672 pages, which works out at 61 pages a day (quite a lot for me). Plus those 20 reviews: I’m aiming for a steady pace of one book review every four to five days, with seven in June, six in July and seven in August. Looking forward to following other people’s progress.