20 Books of Summer 2024

I completed 20 Books of Summer, in fact I probably read getting on for 30 books in that time, but a few of them were for young adults so they were fairly quick reads. Only about half of the books that I read were on my original list. With requested books coming from the library I had to concentrate on those ones. I had an unusual fail when I got to about half way through Maugham’s Cakes and Ale as the chapters went back to the beginning and there was no sign of the last half of the book – so annoying!  My copy of the book is about 50 years old, it’s not the first time that I’ve had a problem like that. One of my old books has two halves of entirely different books in it. I thought it would be easy to get another copy of Cakes and Ale from the library, and it should have been but so far it hasn’t arrived.

So these are the books that I read and managed to review:

1. The Wrench by Primo Levi (for The Classics Club)

2. The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory

3. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

4. Post After Post-Mortem by E.C.R. Lorac

5. The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean

6. Gideon Ahoy by William Mayne

7. Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud

8. Dissolution by C.J. Sansom

9. The Secrets of Blythswood Square by Sara Sheridan

10. Where the World Ends by Geraldine McCaughrean

11. Mayland Hall by Doreen Wallace

12. The Little Bookroom by Eleanor Farjeon

13. The Runaway Summer by Nina Bawden

14. Making It Up by Penelope Lively

15. The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar

16. Five Children on the Western Front by Kate Saunders

17. Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

18. The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

19. The Hemlock Cure by Joanne Burn

20. The Fall of Kelvin Walker by Alasdair Gray

Looking back it seems like a lot longer than three months since I read some of them. Five were by authors that I hadn’t read before:  William Mayne, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Doreen Wallace, Esther Freud and Yasunari Kawabata. I would probably read more books by all of those ones. The only author that I will probably avoid in the future is Philippa Gregory as her grip on known historical facts is poor, possibly deliberately so. When an author writes about Mary, Queen of Scots having black hair you have to wonder about them and all the other details within the books.

Anyway, June was a very wet month this year and July and August weren’t an awful lot better, I’m glad that I had plenty of books to keep me busy.

Thank you Cathy @ She Reads Novels for hosting this again.

4 thoughts on “20 Books of Summer 2024

  1. I feel the same way about the books I read for the 20 Books of Summer. It is hard to remember the ones from June and July. I have finished 18 books and have two left: The White Lioness by Henning Mankell and The Wind in the Willows by Grahame. One of my twenty books was the book that followed Dissolution by Sansom. I liked it a lot.

    • tracybham,
      I’m really looking forward to getting on with the rest of that series. I’ll be interested to know what you think of the Henning Mankell book. I read The Wind in the Willows for the first time as an adult too, I hope you enjoy it.

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