Back in June, I decided to do the “Twenty Books of Summer” challenge with 746 Books. I wrapped my summer challenge up on Sunday, September 12, which is a few days later than I originally planned because I had one book I still wanted to finish and count for summer. There are no summer reading challenge police so I’ll just go with that random date, even though I’d planned on starting my autumn reading challenge on September 7, the Tuesday after Labor Day. Plus it took me a few days to write my reviews of the last three books. 

Tomorrow I will post my plans for fall reading, but I wanted to wrap up how my summer reading went, just to give myself the feeling of being done. Here’s how it went:

My goal was to read twenty books, with full accompanying skepticism that I would actually accomplish that. I am proud of the fact that I read thirteen books, listed here with my rating (you can click on the link in each book’s title if you want to read my review).

The Bookshop of Second Chances by Jackie Fraser   **.5
Burn by Patrick Ness  **.5
Burning Roses by S. L. Huang. ****
The Great Godden by Meg Rosoff   **.5
The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs by Tristan Gooley   ***.5
The One Hundred Years of Margot and Lenni by Marianne Cronin ****
Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn   ****
The Sisters Grimm by Mena van Praag
The Star-Crossed Lovers of Tuscany by Lori Nelson Spielman ***.5
The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin   *****
Summer Days and Summer Nights: 12 Love Stories edited by Stephanie Perkins
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood   ***.5
The World that We Knew by Alice Hoffman   ****

The overarching goal of the challenge was to read books that were already on your TBR by picking out specific titles. I kind of failed at reading many books from my list. You can click HERE to see the original list, but here are TWO (lol) books I did read from it:

Sharks in the Time of Saviors
The Stone Sky

What I learned from this challenge: I was surprised at how it motivated me to keep reading. I loved the feeling of the number of books I’d read getting larger and all of the book reviews existing on my blog. I’m certain I couldn’t have read 13 books in roughly three months if I wasn’t recuperating from foot surgery for almost all of that time, but regardless, I still feel a sense of accomplishment. I am the first to confess that I check out and/or buy far more books than I actually finish. I’m not sure if all readers do this or if it’s just my voraciously bibliophiliac self. Sometimes I’ll have as many as ten books checked out (ok, sometimes even more) and I end up reading the first 15 pages and then abandoning. Not because I don’t like the book, really (or at least not very often), but because my Squirrel! brain thinks “oh, that’s nice but what about this book?” Finishing so many books in a season helped me remember that I can stick with an entire novel, even at the expense of not having time to read all the other novels I want, and just how satisfying it is.

I’m glad I did this challenge!