SUMMER READING LIST

The module portion of my Masters is over! It's a bittersweet feeling for many reasons, but it does mean that I no longer have academic reading lists longer than my arms to get through each week, so this summer I can finally get back into reading for fun regularly!

I'm putting myself on a strict budget this summer because I don't want to be working too much while I'm writing my dissertation, and that means I'm going to be (mostly) limiting myself to books that I already own but haven't gotten around to reading yet. Fortunately, I have twelve of those with me in York, so this summer I'm determined to get round to all of them!





I love short stories, and I love sci-fi, but for some reason, I've never put the two together. Ken Lui has been on my radar for a while, as I've been hearing a lot about his Dandelion Dynasty series. His short story collection The Paper Menagerie will be a good indicator of whether I want to dive into a full-length work of his.

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower is something I've been hearing a lot about recently and has been longlisted for this year's Women's Prize. I've been raring to pick it up for ages, and finally have the free time to get stuck in.

I'm a massive fan of Margaret Atwood so of course her latest, Hag-Seed, is on the list. It's an update on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' and I always look forward to seeing how Atwood reworks classics. Our Young Man by Edmund White is a novel about a modern-day Dorian Gray and was recommended to me by a good friend of mine, Phoebe, so I'm feeling very guilty that I haven't gotten round to it yet. Stephen King's memoir/writing guide On Writing is a reread for me. I read in my first year of undergraduate studies and it's high time I refresh my memory.

I read through a fairly sizeable chunk of the 2017 Man Booker longlist (no, I didn't the read the Paul Auster one, that thing is the size of my head!) but somehow I missed out on Ali Smith's Autumn, which everyone but me has read already, and of course I somehow didn't read the winner! Lincoln in the Bardo is George Saunder's first novel after a long successful career as a short story writer and I can't wait to see how he tackles the longer form.

I'm a sucker for fairytale retellings, and Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth and The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden both sound just my cup of tea, with the former being based on Rapunzel, and the latter on Russian folklore. I read a little of this a while ago and enjoyed it, I just got too busy to carry on. Arden's novel is also the first in a series, the second of which has just come out. So if I love it, I might break my buying ban for the second!

I've also decided to finally read more by Daphne Du Maurier. With 'Rebecca' and 'Frenchman's Creek' under my belt, I really want to open up Jamaica Inn and just let Du Maurier's fabulous writing sweep me away again. I received Frans De Vaal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?* some time ago when I was working for Waterstones, and just haven't gotten round to it, but its a subject I find fascinating so I can't wait to find out more.

Finally, I have just reached the halfway mark on Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, and it is exquisite. A weird little fabulist novel in which a polar bear has to flee Russia because the memoirs she's writing are getting her into trouble with the government, I know it sounds truly insane but it's great so far and I can't wait to share more about it.

I realise that I'm looking at a fairly big pile of books, and that I'm working and writing a dissertation this summer. However, this list is really what I'm looking to read from May up until the start of September, so that averages out at about three books a month which is more than doable, and there a few new releases planned (the third in Becky Chamber's Wayfarer series is due out this summer and I am SO excited!!!!) so I will probably make a few purchases on top of these books to keep me going.

Thank you for reading! And let me know what you think of any of these books, and what you'll be reading this summer.