#20booksofsummer24 – Round-up!

I’ve signed up to Cathy’s annual ‘20 Books of Summer‘ challenge every year since 2016. Although you can pick your level of 10, 15 or 20 books – I’ve always aimed for the full 20, but only achieved it three times – in 2022, 2021 and this year. This year I even reached twenty books with over two weeks to go, so I kept on, reaching 24, and including review copies I read 36 in total.

Rather than pick a set of 20 books, as Cathy allows cheating, I just specify that all the books I read will be in my TBR piles already back at the start of the year, so not the shiny new ones, and I will go to my bedside bookcase and adjacent piles first; book group choices are also included. I have always found that setting myself which books to read, makes me lose interest in reading them instantly – I have enough deadlines for blog tours, review copies and book group that I need (almost) complete freedom to choose books by whim for myself. The TBR and bedside bookcase priorities are enough.

At the moment, I still have some reviews to write, but here are the books I read, comprising just short of 7000 pages (average 301) for the 24:

The Best (all rating 9-10/10):

• The Skeleton Key by Erin Kelly – Review. A Psychological drama, family secrets – and yes skeletons. Fabulously twisty.
• Rememberings by Sinéad O’Connor – Review Read on the anniversary of her death – poignant – a true voice.
• This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone – Review – A genre-defying yet prizewinning SF&F romance – written in letters.
• Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper – Review – Superb thriller of PR, #MeToo and the Hollywood machine
• Nothing is Lost by Cloé Mehdi – Review – State of the nation French novel. A very hard read.
• Joe Country by Mick Herron –  Review – Slow Horses #6 – What’s not to like
• Table for Two by Amor Towles – Shiny Review – Short stories and a novel told in Towles’ trademark light touch yet weighty style.
• The Bullet that Missed by Richard Osman – Review – Thursday Murder Club #3 – more fun and murder for our quartet of mature sleuths.

TheJolly Good Reads (7.5-8.5/10)

• The Trial by Rob Rinder –Review – Debut legal thriller from the fave TV lawyer
• The Rook by Daniel O’Malley – Review – SF & Urban Fantasy chunkster
• Boxes by Pascal Garnier – Review – Dealing with grief & moving to the country
• Kala by Colin Walsh – Shiny Review – Super literary thriller – another great Irish debut.
• The Winter War by Philip Teir – Review – Finnish novel of a disintegrating marriage.
• A Luminous Republic by Andrés Barba – Review – Another unsettling novella from the Spanish author.
• Kids Run the Show by Delphine de Vigan – Review – The effects of social media overload on a family. Lots to think about.
• Animal Farm by George Orwell – (book group re-read) – still hits the mark!
• The Librarianist by Patrick Dewitt – A chance encounter inspires flashbacks to a life lived.
• Wild Houses by Colin Barrett – Booker longlisted Irish debut – good but not that good I thought.
• The Edge by James Smythe – 3rd in his Anomaly quartet – it’s getting closer!
• Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling – Eco-dystopia set in Canada’s north. Interesting.

The Not Quite Living Up to Expectations (7/10 and below)

• Black Dogs by Ian McEwan – Review (book group re-read) It may be the author’s fave, but it wasn’t mine.
• How to be Nowhere by Tim MacGabhann – Review – Lackluster sequel to his superb Mexican thriller debut.
• Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh – Review – So frustrating!
• Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight –  Review – An off-campus novel written as a love letter from an obsessive to their supervisor.

Did you take part in 20 Books of Summer? How did you do?