my summer reading pool…

In coming up with my strategy for choosing a summer book pool, I may have had the dumbest idea in the history of my brain. (Yeah, okay, it’s not even close to the dumbest idea I’ve concocted, but many of said dumber ideas are best not shared.) Anyway, I decided to choose my book pool for summer by choosing one book from each shelf on each of my bookcases. Now it should not have taken a genius to realize this was going to lead to a terribly unwieldy pile of books. But yeah. Sooo, we’re just going to look at it from the angle of having lots of options.

If I calculated correctly, unofficial summer, running from Memorial Day to Labor Day, spans 99 days. I always tend to think I’m going to get tons and tons read during the summer…and I’m always wrong. My tbr takedown goal of 13 books a month off my physical tbr pile is extremely unlikely to happen, but I’ll call that my goal anyway. So a total of approximately 39 books total.

The pool:

This is one place where I broke the one-book-per-shelf rule. On two of my comics shelves, I pulled all of what I have from a series instead of a single volume.

The non-fiction pool. Rather eclectic, which makes sense because I organize my non-fiction shelves by largely by genre.

Only a few kids/YA books ended up in the mix, which I find odd as in the past I’ve gravitated towards younger reads, along with thrillers, during the summer.

Short stories.

Some genre fiction.

And other fiction.

And finally, a few that don’t fit the one-book-per-shelf rule. The top two library books I currently have out, and the bottom two books that I’m already reading.

Bottom line: I’ve got loads and loads of awesome-sounding books to choose from. HAPPY SUMMER READING!

*****

• Desperation by Stephen King
• Pandemic by Sonia Shah
• If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan
• My Brother’s Husband by Gengoroh Tagame
• An Untamed Heart by Roxane Gay
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
• The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat
• Wolves of the Crescent Moon by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed
• A Heart of Stone by Renate Dorrestein
• Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller
• Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
• Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
• See No Evil by Eleanor Taylor Bland
• Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett
• Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
• Secrets by Nuruddin Farah
• Adulthood Rites by Octavia Butler
• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
• Curtain by Agatha Christie
• A Grave Talent by Laurie R. King
• Matchup edited by Lee Child
• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
• Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat
• Food & Spirits by Beth Brant
• Hunger by Lan Samantha Chang
• A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
• It’s A Funny Kind of Story by Ned Vizinni
• When Dad Killed Mom by Julian Lester
• The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Threads from the Web of Life: Stories in Natural History by Stephen Daubert
• Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay
• The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
• Love Poems by Nikki Giovanni
• In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America by Laurie Edwards
• The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan
• Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil by Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas
• 100 Heartbeats: The Race to Save Earth’s Most Endangered Species by Jeff Corwin
• Saturday is for Funerals by Unity Dow and Max Essex
• Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution by Laurie Penny
• Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
• The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang
• Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul by Edward Humes
• Unbowed: A Memoir by  Wangari Maathai
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions of Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
• The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
• An Obsession With Butterflies: Our Long Love Affair With A Singular Insect by Sharman Apt Russell
• The Naturally Clean Home: 150 Super-Easy Herbal Formulas for Green Cleaning by Karyn Siegel-Maier
• Lazarus Volume 1 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark
• Lazarus Volume 2 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark
• Lazarus Volume 3 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark
• Lazarus Volume 4 by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark
• Nylon Road by Parshu Bashi
• Hot Gimmick Volume 1 by Miki Aihara
• Hot Gimmick Volume 2 by Miki Aihara
• Hot Gimmick Volume 3 by Miki Aihara