2022 Mid-year Review / A #20booksofsummer upgrade

I haven’t written monthly wrap-up posts this year simply because I prefer to spend my time on other things. Reading and reviewing for instance! So the half-year point is a good time to check on my overarching plan for the year. Am I on track?

My simple 3-point plan for 2022 was this.

Reduce purchases by sticking to an allowance of 1 purchase for every 3 books read or culled. While I’m currently one book over my allowance, this has resulted in my purchasing 13 books fewer in the first six months of 2022 than in 2021. (Best not look at the wishlist though!)

50% of my reading to come from the pre-2022 TBR. With the percentage standing at 66%, all is well in this respect. What about splitting my reading evenly between anglophone, (translated from) German, translated from other languages? I don’t consciously choose books to meet this objective, it usually works itself out on its own. If it doesn’t, so be it. Currently 52%:28%:20%.

Reduce reading target to 80 books to give me time to tackle a few chunksters (450+ pages) and more non-fiction. This is also going so well, perhaps I’ll reach my usual target of 100 anyway. 54 books completed including two mega-chunksters (A Place of Greater Safety, Of Human Bondage) and 5 works of non-fiction.

It would appear the plan is working. No need for any intervention.

Potential EIBF 2022 and #20booksofsummer reads

My 20 books of summer plan is much more volatile. Now that the Edinburgh International Book Festival programme is out, and quite a number of books that I want to read for it are on the shortish side, with a fair number in my pre-June 2022 TBR, I’m going to upgrade to the full 20 books of summer option. Below, however, is a complete list of books I’d like to read for the festival. 20 in total, listed in order of EIBF appearance. (With 600 events this year, EIBF will undoubtedly add even more to my wishlist.) Titles in brackets will either be purchased (as the asterisked titles have been since the release of the programme) or borrowed from the library. If I read any of these instead of the books pictured, they will count as usurpers, as strictly speaking they will be usurping books that were already in my TBR on 1.6.2022.

  • Never Did The Fire – Diamela Eltit (Read)
  • Catching The Fire – Daniel Hahn (Read)
  • (Sorrow and Bliss – Meg Mason)
  • (Barcelona Dreaming – Rupert Thomson)
  • The Fell – Sarah Moss
  • Trust – Domenica Starnone
  • The Promise – Damon Galgut (e-book)
  • Dark Neighbourhood – Vanessa Onwuemezi
  • Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan
  • Afterlives – Abdulrazak Gurnah
  • (A Narrow Door – Joanna Harris)
  • (The Eye of The Beholder – Margie Orford)
  • (Paper Cup – Karen Campbell)
  • (Latvona – Otessa Moshfegh)
  • (The Goldenacre * – Philip Miller)
  • (1979 * /1989 – Val McDermid)
  • (Cold Enough For Snow * – Jessica Au)
  • The Dance Tree – Kiran Millwood Hargrave
  • The Hand That First Held Mine – Maggie O’Farrell
  • (Unsettled Ground – Claire Fuller)