Creatively Speaking: Summer Reading

Thank you Maribeth Breen, Henry Carter Hull Library, for these photos of Lynnabeth Mays.

Those were the years of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and authors like Judy Blume, Roald Dahl, and Beverly Cleary. Back then, all the magic of the world was held within the pages of their books!

This could explain my penchant for all things fiction, especially in the summer, when my To Be Read (TBR) list still includes magical realism, fantasy, and young adult novels.

Speaking of TBR lists, earlier this year — in an effort to stop feeding the Amazon machine — I switched from Goodreads to StoryGraph to keep track of my reads and want-to-reads. It’s a nice, easy-to-use application that even has an annual reading challenge, which I’ve been doing on Goodreads since 2013 — old habits die hard, Mrs. Mays.

Have you heard of StoryGraph? Its a social cataloguing web platform for books that includes book profiles, reviews, and reader data. It was created by British software engineer Nadia Odunayo in 2019. Odunayo is kind of a rock star really, as StoryGraph currently has more than 3.5 million users! Watch an interview with her on the Today show, or sign up for StoryGraph here.

I’d share a link to my current StoryGraph Reading Challenge page, but I’m afraid I am woefully behind in my reading this year. Thirteen books behind, to be precise, and I doubt I’ll catch up. I blame it on 2025, which is giving wicked 2020 vibes, and my focus is following suit.

While my Books I’ve Read list is relatively short for the year, my TBR List keeps growing and growing. It’s at 526 books right now, which is 17 years’ worth of reading at my current pace.

I’m trying to weed out some of the older listings, like the dozen or so books I added in 2020 while researching how to become a hermit. A lot of those 526 are out-of-print, or notes to self, or other books by my favorite authors. Some come from reading quizzes that add “should books” to the list — as in “someday I really should read In Search of Lost Time” or “I really should read some Jane Austen.”

Try your hand at one of these quizzes and see how many books you add to your TBR list!

• 100 Best Books of All Time According to Reader’s Digest
• 100 Funniest Books
• BBC’s Top 100 Books You Need to Read Before You Die
• Smart Summer Reads

As for my own Summer Reading, I have a short stack of books in my literal TBR pile: The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells, The Staircase in the Woods, Chuck Wendig, Wake the Wild Creatures, Nova Ren Suma, Life Hacks for a Little Alien, Alice Franklin, The Postcard, Anne Berest, and Poetry Will Save Your Life, Jill Bialosky.

BONUS! Download a copy of the
Blackstone Library’s Adult Summer Reading Program

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