I plead guilty to the charges of inconsistency, fickleness and caprice.

But before you pass sentence, I hope you’ll allow me to explain the mitigating circumstances that have led me, against my better judgement, to join this year’s #20booksofsummer.

At the start of the year I made a rule: 2020 would be a year free of reading challenges that involved reading from a list of books. I went on the record to explain that while I love making lists, I’m a lost cause when it comes to actually reading from those lists. The minute the list is done, my interest wanes. And then those books become almost the very last books on earth I want to read….

For five months I have not deviated from my rule. But (there’s always a but isn’t there?) then came the beginning of June and another round of #20booksofsummer.

Now this event, hosted every year by Cathy at 746books.com. is one of the reading highlights of the year. I love it so much I’ve taken part for several years even though I’ve never managed to actually complete the challenge. Last year was the closest I got with 13 books read from my list.

Imagine then the pain over the last few days of seeing the reading plans of many other bloggers, knowing that I wouldn’t be joining them. My resolution began to crumble to the extent I even began making a list. But I gave myself a good talking to and ditched the whole thing.

Yet here I am on day one of #20booksofsummer 2020. How come you wonder?

I blame Lizzy, the blogger behind lizzysiddal.com. When she posted her plans for #20booksofsummer. I saw that she had identified categories of books rather than specific titles, because, like me, she doesn’t do well reading from lists.

love the #20booksofsummer challenge

And that became the moment where I realised there was a way for me to join #20booksofsummer but still keep true to my 2020 ‘no lists’ rule. It means manipulating the rules somewhat. Some unkind people might call that cheating. I like to think of it as being creative!.

So here we have my non-list list for summer 2020. It’s based on categories which I think gives me plenty of freedom about what I choose to read.

I’m aiming to read 15 books within four categories:

• Wales
• Review copies
• World of literature
• Non Fiction

Wales

At a rough count I have around 30 books written by authors either indigenous to Wales or who have made their home here. That gives me more than enough scope to read four or five books in this category. That could include West, a highly rated novella by Carys Davies,; two novels from the independent women’s press Honno (A Hundred  Tiny Threads by Judith Barrow, and Wild Spinning Girls by Carol Lovekin), or to vary the genre, The Innocent Wife , a debut thriller by Amy Lloyd.

Review Copies

My list of unread books obtained via NetGalley is now at an embarrassing level so I’m going to use #20booksofsummer to make some inroads into the backlog. Options include (but are not limited to): The Vanishing Sky by an award winning German author, L. Annette Binder and a new Virago Classics edition of They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell which is a portrait of an ordinary American family struck by the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

World of Literature

I’m 10 books away from completing my World of Literature project. The idea behind that was to broaden my reading horizons by exploring authors from countries further afield than my usual fare of British/American literature. I have some titles remaining from the Asympote Book Club subscription that I hope to get around to plus some titles by authors from Somalia and Indonesia.

Non Fiction

My final category gives me a chance to dig into the pile of non fiction books I’ve acquired over several years. There are some memoirs like In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park and Forty Autumns, a history of a German family separated by the Berlin Wall. Will this be the year I finally get around to reading one of the Roman history books by Mary Beard I bought on a whim?

Watch this space and you’ll find out if I have any more success reading categories than I do reading from lists…..