Summer Reading Goals: #bookaday and #bigbooksummer and #20booksofsummer20

Having a goal, having a focus centers me, especially during difficult times. You may be different, and that's perfectly okay. But if you'd like some focus for your reading life during this summer, I encourage you to join me in a couple of summer reading challenges. 

Every summer for over ten years, the Book Whisperer, Donalyn Miller, has hosted the #bookaday challenge. It's a public commitment to read or share a book each day over the long summer break. Of course, this summer it's a little different. As Miller writes, "If you asked me three months ago what I would do if the world was canceled and I was forced to stay at home, I would have said, 'Read a ton of books!' I am the Book Whisperer, after all. Currently, I am reading too many newspapers and not enough happy endings. My vast experience reading dystopias isn’t helping me right now because this is how they all start."

What are the guidelines for #bookaday?

• You set your own start and end dates.
• Read one book per day. This is an average, so if you take a week to read Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Virtue and Vengeance or Libba Bray’s The King of Crows (both fabulous on audio), you can balance it out with some picture books or early readers.
• Any book in any format qualifies: picture books, nonfiction, professional books, audio books, graphic novels, poetry anthologies, or fiction—children, young adult, or adult titles.
• Keep a list of the books you read and share them often via a social networking sites like Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Use the #bookaday hashtag to find other participants and share your recommendations. Titles or covers will do.
• If you don’t feel like reading a book a day is the right reading goal for you, share a book every day—read with a child or family member, give away a book to someone who needs it, or buy a book from an independent bookstore if you can.

To find out more, check out this post at The Nerdy Book Club.

Think trying to read a book a day is a crazy idea? Maggie Galehouse of the Houston Chronicle offers tips here.

Sue Jackson of Book By Book is asking us to go big this summer with her Big Book Summer Reading Challenge. Sue has offered this challenge for the last nine years. The challenge culminates in a Big Book Giveaway. 

What are the rules for the Big Book Summer Reading Challenge?

• Anything 400 pages or more qualifies as a big book.
• The challenge will run from Memorial Day weekend (starting May 22 this year) through Labor Day weekend (Labor Day is September 7 this year).
• Choose one or two or however many big books you want as your goal. Wait, did you get that?  You only need to read 1 book with 400+ pages this summer to participate! (though you are welcome to read more, if you want).
• Sign up on the first links list at Book by Book so others can visit.
• If you have a blog, write a post to kick things off: you can list the exact big books you plan to read or just publish your intent to participate, but be sure to include the Big Book Summer Challenge pic above, with a link back to Book by Book. It's fine to kick-off your Big Book Summer as part of another post.
• Write a post to wrap up at the end, listing the big books you read during the summer.
• You can write progress posts if you want to and/or reviews of the big books you've read ... but you don't have to! There is a separate links list below for big book reviews, progress update posts, and wrap-up posts.

To sign up for the challenge, add your link here.

So, what am I hoping to read this summer? I can easily read a book a day anyway; so far, by day 147 of 2020, I have read 183 books. But I will attempt to post something about a book each day of this summer to satisfy the #bookaday guidelines.

As for the #bigbooksummer challenge, I have eleven books on my Classics Club list that are 400 pages or more:

Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter	Porter, Katherine Anne	1965	Fiction	512 pages
Decameron, The	Boccaccio, Giovanni	1353	Short stories	554 pages
FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry	Stavans, Ilan, ed.	2011	Poetry	726 pages
Mary Barton	Gaskell, Elizabeth	1848	Novel	464 pages
Of Human Bondage	Maugham, W. Somerset	1915	Novel	658 pages
Selected Stories of O. Henry	Henry, O.	1922	Short stories	544 pages
Tin Drum, The	Grass, Gunter	1959	Novel	576 pages
Tom Brown's Schooldays	Hughes, Thomas	1857	Children's	420 pages
War and Peace	Tolstoy, Leo	1869	Fiction	1229 pages
Wives and Daughters	Gaskell, Elizabeth	1864	Fiction	583 pages

How about one more? Why not?

Cathy at 746 Books offers the 20 Books of Summer Challenge for 2020. Look how easy this is:

One summer.

Three months.

93 Days.

20 books.

Are you in?

Post a sign up list and be sure to share your progress with #20booksofsummer20.

And if twenty books sounds too daunting, she offers fifteen and ten book challenges also.

I shall plan to serendipitously read this summer from the stacks under my bed and from whatever comes in at my library.