Summer Reading Recap.

Here's the short version:

I read 39 books.

I did not cover my Bingo card.

my final card - nine Bingos!

If you'd asked me back on May 25 what I thought this summer's reading might bring, I wouldn't have guessed either of those. I came really close on Bingo, but couldn't manage to read a literary journal cover to cover. As recently as last Friday, I was seriously thinking about spending a few hours with one, just to do it. But then I thought more about the breadth and quality of the rest of my summer reading and decided to finish up two books for the Read Harder challenge instead.

Here's the longer version of what I read:

24 books for Bingo (if you click on the image, it will take you to my Goodreads shelf where you can see more about the titles, how they fit the squares, and what I thought about them).

sorted by rating, date finished (most recent 5 star book is top left)

13 books for Read Harder (ditto about the image) and finished all the reading for that challenge (I still need to watch a movie based on one of the books to compare/contrast; that won't happen until Sara visits later this year). The image below is all 24 books I read for the challenge.

sorted by rating, date finished

Two other books - which turned out to be my least favorite books so far this year. I'm done talking about those!

Nine books landed on my 2016 Favorites shelf and one (Invisible Man) also on my All-time Favorites. I counted nine books as 5-stars, a whopping 24 as 4-stars, four as 3-stars and those two duds. I listened to 19 of the books and and read 20. 26 were fiction and 13 were non-fiction.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• The next book I'm going to choose for bookclub - The Last Painting of Sara de Vos.
• The book that rocked my world - Redefining Realness.
• The most beautifully written book about racism in America - Citizen: An American Lyric.
• The high-school classic I'm glad I finally read - The Outsiders (and of course Invisible Man).
• The best more recent book I'm glad I finally read - The Shipping News.
• The best geek-out book ever - A Short History of Nearly Everything.
• The book that made me wish I were traveling to Great Britain - The Road to Little Dribbling.
• ...and to Paris - Paris in Love.
• ...but not North Korea - This is Paradise!
• The book that made me want to read Shakespeare (and also very glad I'm not in 7th grade) - The Wednesday Wars.
• The best "real" book to share with a friend - Pax.

I'm grateful to all of you, many of whom are also my Goodreads friends, for your recommendations. It was a great summer of reading!

One final note about Bingo - if you played along (no matter how many Bingos you got), please be sure to share a blog post or a photo on Instagram (and tag me @mere2007).  I'm going to do a wrap up and draw for a prize later this month.