The school year is winding down (19 days left, but who’s counting?), and along with never going back to secondary teaching again, I’m excited about the shift in my reading availability. Rather than 10 minutes a day if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to read for long stretches and plan to turn my attention to some hefty books. First up is my long-anticipated summer classic: Dickens’s David Copperfield. I plan to chase that with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, a modern take on the same story. I’ve heard only good things and I’m excited about the pairing. Also summer-queued: my first Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider.
I’m also planning to make my way slowly through Clare Harman’s All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything. It’s a look at Mansfield’s life through the lens of 10 of her stories (not necessarily the hits)—what was happening biographically in her brief and dramatic life as she wrote each. I’m intrigued by the structure and plan to read the correlating story before each chapter.
In other words, it’s high excitement for me this summer! Can you tell I don’t get out much?
As for “breezy beach reads,” I’ll likely download a work of fiction for my annual family road trip to Boise. It will be a bit of a treat because normally, I only ever listen to non-fiction on audio. Right now I’m in the midst of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century (and boy is that time period a doozy), so I can imagine I’ll be up for some lighter material. Any suggestions?
Have you made any summer reading plans? Let’s hear!
Cheers,
Lacy
Don’t forget the Three Women on a Boat by Anne Youngson😀