Your Summer Reading Guide

I wrote last week about how finding something interesting to watch has been a challenge in recent months. In these moments, I turn to books. If we can agree that streaming options have been lackluster lately, we can also agree that there’s really no excuse for griping when neither you nor I have even scratched the surface of all the books we’ve been meaning to read. But why, then, am I not living my truth, the truth of being lost rapturously in multiple books at once? I have some ideas.

In December, I dropped out of a reading challenge I’d participated in for two years. The object was to read a book a week, each corresponding to a specific category, such as “a book featured in a celebrity book club” or “a book from a genre you normally avoid.”

The challenge was exactly what I needed in 2021: I had read two books in six months when a friend asked if I wanted in. I eagerly accepted, excited for some structure and incentive to increase my literary appetite. I loved having an assignment each week. I loved that I had access to a boisterous Facebook group in which participants — all friends and friends of friends who’d become a cozy family after many years — gathered to swap reviews and recommendations.

Some time in my second year, I got cocky. Now that I was regularly polishing off a book or two a week, why did I need assignments? I started to chafe at the categories. What if I wanted to read something that didn’t match up with any of them? Surely my own curiosity would be powerful enough to keep me reading at this clip! I’d probably read even more books if I were freed from the challenge’s confines, allowed to consume any title that struck my fancy, right?

You know where this is going. There are a lot of books out there. And I’ve started most of them. In order to finish books, I need a plan. I need a system, even a loose one, that keeps me binge-reading (why isn’t this a more popular term?), one book followed immediately by the next.

I’m considering frameworks for summer reading that will get me back on track and won’t feel too restrictive. Should I commit to reading only from my stacks, the books I aspirationally pile up on the night stand and the coffee table, intending always to read them next but never making any appreciable progress? Should I give myself a number of books to be completed by Labor Day and let my interests wander? Is this the summer I read all of Henry James, or only Nobel laureates in literature?