Jessica Day George

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Summer Reading 2014


GUESS WHAT?!

THAT'S RIGHT!  IT'S TIME!

It's time for Auntie Jessy's Summer Reading Challenge!

YAY!

But first off I want to thank all of you who contributed to our Indiegogo campaign for ALTERED PERCEPTIONS!  Thanks to you, we were able to raise $110,000 for our friend Robison Wells, which will ease the burden of debt on him and his sweet family!  We even went over our goal, and were able to give that extra money to the dear Sara M. Eden, a fine historical fiction writer and gracious woman who suffers greatly from depression and rheumatoid arthritis.  So thank you all for your help, and for putting up with my constant blogging, tweeting, and talking about the campaign.

And now on to Summer Reading!

For those of you who are just joining us here on the blog, every June I challenge myself to read a gross ton of books during the summer, and then I post my results in September.  You are welcome to put your summer reading goals in the comments, and let us know your results in the fall!

This summer I'd like to read sixty books.  Will I?  Let's see!

I always say the summer reading term is from Memorial Day to Labor Day, so I'm off to a rip-roaring start with four books already under my belt:

PEYTON PLACE - Grace Metalious
MIDWINTERBLOOD - Marcus Sedgwick
THE CHAPEL WARS - Lindsey Leavitt
FARTHING - Jo Walton
WORDS OF RADIANCE - Brandon Sanderson

Admittedly, I did start reading WORDS OF RADIANCE long before Memorial Day, due to its incredible longness.

Other books I'm hoping to read this summer include THE ROSIE PROJECT, and GIDGET, just to name a couple.  I'm very curious about GIDGET.  I grew up watching the Gidget movies and the TV show starring Sally Field, about the cheerful, somewhat air-headed surfer girl and her boyfriend Moondoggy.  I just discovered this last year that it was originally a book, and based on the author's own daughter and her friends.  It sounds like a fun summer read.  As does THE ROSIE PROJECT, SEARCHING FOR SKY, MY REAL CHILDREN, AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, and a number of other delightful books that I have on my Goodreads to-read shelf.  I just got back from BEA as well, and am loaded to the gills with new books . . . I feel like I'm surrounded by scrumptious chocolates of many different types, whichever shall I eat first?!