What are you going to read in the summer of 2018?

[Werner]

Paula recently invited people to share their summer reading plans here on Goodreads, but I realized that until now, we didn't have a thread for doing so. But I think it's a great idea, so we do now! I'd like to make it a feature that we do every year. Usually, I think of summer as June, July and August. But for this thread, we'll include May too, since the semester ends in early May and many members of the BC family scatter for summer vacation.

My summer reading will be bracketed by common reads in two groups this year. My Fans of British Writers group always does one in August (and what it will be depends on what the group picks --we haven't started brainstorming yet.) And in May, some of us in another group are joining together to read The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. In between, I plan to finish my reading of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales with The Prairie. Depending on how much time I have after that, I have my eyes on a few shorter books; I might be able to squeeze in one or two of them.

Some people listen to audio books in their car. When my wife Barb and I are traveling in the car together, though, I read aloud to her; and when we take road trips in the summer, we usually make good headway with our reading. Currently, we're finishing up Susan Page Davis' excellent Ladies Shooting Club trilogy with the second book, The Gunsmith's Gallantry (we read the third one first). We'll probably finish that one late in May, and we haven't decided yet what we plan to read after that; there are a variety of possibilities.

[Paula]

Thanks for the thread, Werner. Your summer reading plans sound wonderful! Mine are still up for debate because of my classes. I’ll let you know what I manage as I figure it out, LOL.

[Werner]

Sounds good, Paula! (We can figure that you're going to be reading a lot of history books this summer --and probably next summer, too. :-) )

[Ben]

I'll be reading 2 books for my internship: "Life's Healing Choices" by John Baker and "Changes that Heal" by Cloud and Townsend. In addition to these texts, I'll be finishing a book on "Speech Acts and the First Amendment" by Franklyn S. Haiman. Other readings are yet to be determined. Also, thank you for this thread! Concrete plans assist in execution (don't think French Revolution; think corporate America, though it may not be much better).

[Werner]

At the end of message 1, I noted that my wife and I hadn't decided on what we'd read together after finishing The Gunsmith's Gallantry (that read is still ongoing). But since then, we've agreed that the next two books of the A Murder in the Mountains series, Trial by Twelve and Guilt by Association by my Goodreads friend, Christian author and Appalachian native Heather Day Gilbert, will be the next titles up. (We read the series opener last year.)

The common read of The Mysteries of Udolpho has been postponed until July. Now that I've finished Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, I'm currently reading a debut novel by another Goodreads friend, Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt, Pride's Children: Purgatory, the opening installment of a projected trilogy. After that one, I'm hoping to squeeze in The Apocalypse Door by James D. Macdonald, which I've considered a must-read ever since it was published.