State of the TBR – July 2015

Well, here’s the TBR in all its glory. It hasn’t got that much smaller but it hasn’t got that much bigger. In fact, I only seem to have acquired two new books in June, which I didn’t manage to record anywhere, although I carefully took and saved a photo, so here are those two. I have a thing about sports biographies (as regular readers might have noticed), and who could resist the Hadfield book?

I’ve read or am reading a couple of books from my Kindle this month, and I’ve also picked at least one off the ancillary piles that hang around associating themselves with the TBR. Both of those choices have been partly inspired by the #20BooksOfSummer challenge I’m involved in, which just means picking 20 books you want to read by the start of September and reading and blogging about them. Nice to have such a simple challenge.

A quick progress report on the #20BooksOfSummer project while I’m here – of the eight books I nominated for my first tranche, I’ve read three (“Patricia Brent, Spinster” and “Oxford Guide to Plain English”, both reviewed here and “No Word from Winifred”, which will be reviewed next), and I’m currently reading “Years of Hope” on paper and “Clayhanger” on Kindle. I have to say that I have a new obsession to add to my George Eliot and Anthony Trollope ones, as I’m loving Arnold Bennett and want to read All The Books. I can thank my Reading the Century project for that, as I did go searching for a book for 1916 that I fancied, and found “These Twain”, which is third in the Clayhanger series. Hooray!

Next up when I’ve finished those are my next volumes in the “Forsyte Saga”, where I’ll be going on to Volume 6 (so a break next month before doing the final trilogy in September to November) and Robertson Davies’ Salterton Trilogy, which I decided to read month by month, too, in order to make it last. I also want to do another Trollope. The new Harper Lee is out soon, so Matthew and I are going to re-read “To Kill a Mockingbird” to build up for that (and that’s another one off #20BooksOfSummer, too).

Once those are all done, I’ll be chipping away at the TBR again. I do want to read the slightly terrifying “The Act of Reading” as it should be useful for my (poor, neglected) research, and I’m going to skip any Viragoes or Persephones I might reach (so ignore the last two on this pic for the moment), as August is traditionally All Virago All August month in the LibraryThing Virago Group, and I think I have enough of both scattered throughout the TBR to maintain a month’s reading!

That feels like a very prescribed reading pattern for this month when I look at it like that, all written down. Hm, wonder if I’ll go wild and pluck whatever I fancy off the shelves! I do have two weekend trips away, though, so that will hopefully give me plenty of reading time and allow me to get through the planned books and into the wonderful weirdities of the TBR!

Are you trapped in a net of challenges or reading free this summer? And hello to any fellow #20BooksOfSummer challengers who are reading!