This challenge was previously hosted by Cathy of 746 books and has now been taken on by AnnaBookBel and Emma of Words and Peace. If you don’t want to read 20 books you can opt for 15 or 10 instead. It’s a flexible challenge to suit yourself!
The #20BooksofSummer2025 challenge runs from Sunday June 1st to Sunday August 31st
The first rule of 20 Books is that there are no real rules, other than signing up for 10, 15 or 20 books and trying to read from your TBR.
Pick your list in advance, or nominate a bookcase to read from, or pick at whim from your TBR.
If you do pick a list, you can change it at any time – swap books in/out.
Don’t get panicked at not reaching your target.
Just enjoy a summer of great reading and make a bit of space on your shelves!
In the past I don’t think I’ve ever managed to read the lists I’ve compiled because I just can’t stick to reading from a list – as soon as a book is on a list my desire to read it just dies. So, this year I’m not making a list first, but I shall be reading from my TBRs and the books on my Netgalley Shelf.
These are just some of my TBR shelves – the books are double stacked:
When Benet was about fourteen, she and her mother had been alone in a train carriage – and Mopsa had tried to stab her with a carving knife. It has been some time since Benet had seen her psychologically disturbed mother. So when Mopsa arrives at the airport looking drab and colourless in a dowdy grey suit, Benet tries not to hate her. But when the tragic death of a child begins a chain of deception, kidnap and murder in which three women are pushed to psychological extremes, family ties are strained to the absolute limit…
The Tree of Hands by Ruth Rendell is one of my TBRs. It’s a book I bought nine years ago from Barter Books in Alnwick. I don’t know why I haven’t read it before now as it is really good – one of the best books I’ve read this year, and one of her best standalone books. I read it this year as one of my 20 Books of Summer.
Why I enjoyed it so much is that it thoroughly gripped me and made me want to read on and on. It’s a psychological thriller, full of suspense, with several twists and turns that made me unsure how it would end. I was delighted by the final twist!
Benet’s son, James aged four dies from croup whilst in hospital soon after Mopsa, her mother with a history of mental illness, comes to visit. Meanwhile Carol, a young widow with three kids, two of them in care, is living nearby with Barry, her younger boyfriend. He adores her but she doesn’t want to marry him, content for him to do all the housework and look after Jason her two year old son when he is not being looked after by babysitters. The trouble starts when Mopsa kidnaps Jason and brings him back to Benet as a replacement for James.
The tree of hands in the title is taken from the collage on the hospital playroom wall:
On the white paper base sheet had been drawn a tree with a straight brown trunk and branches and twigs, and all over the tree, on the branches, nestling among the twigs, protruding like fungus from the trunk, were paper hands. All were exactly the same shape, presumably cut out by individual children using a template of an open hand with the fingers spread slightly apart. (page 46)
Benet found them horrible, as though the hands were begging for relief, or freedom, or oblivion. She thought there was a mad quality about them, ‘all the hands upraised, supplicating, praying.’ And she fell forward in a faint when the doctor told her James had died.
This is a dark and disturbing book about what happens to Jason, Benet, Carol and Barry. It’s well written and I could easily visualise the characters and the setting. It’s emotionally challenging and it both fascinated and horrified me in equal measure. It won the CWA Silver Dagger Award in 1984, an award given annually by the Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom since 1960 for the best crime novel of the year.
NB I’m currently reading Rendell’s The Girl Next Door because I enjoyed The Tree of Hands so much.
The 20 Books of Summer challenge, hosted by Cathy over at 746Books, came to an end today. You could choose to read 20, 15 or 10 books from your TBR shelves and this year I went for the 20 book challenge. I nearly made it, reading 19 books and currently reading book 20.
The books listed below shown in italics are books I’ve read but not reviewed, those shown in bold link to my reviews:
This has been on my TBR list for several years, so I thought it was about time I read it. It was written in 1898, but not published until 1916, one of the short stories in Xingu and Other Stories, set in a working class neighbourhood in New York.
In the days when New York’s traffic moved at the pace of the drooping horse-car, when society applauded Christine Nilsson at the Academy of music and basked in the sunsets of the Hudson River School on the walls of the National Academy of Design, an inconspicuous shop with a single show-window was intimately and favourably known to the feminine population of the quarter bordering on Stuyvesant Square.
It was a very small shop in a shabby basement, in a side-street already doomed to decline; and from the miscellaneous display behind the window-pane and the brevity of the sign surmounting it (merely ‘Bunner Sisters’ in blotchy gold on a black background) it would have been difficult for the uninitiated to guess the precise nature of the business carried on within. (page 1)
As the title indicates it’s about two sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, who have a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles. The sisters, both unmarried, have fallen on hard times.They meet Herbert Ramy, a German immigrant who also has a small shop, when Ann Eliza buys a clock from him as a birthday present for Evalina.
This is a sad tale, very readable and very descriptive. The characters are memorable, well drawn and are clearly distinguishable. Their lives are mainly filled with daily routine. But there’s a growing sense of foreboding and mystery, especially surrounding Ramy. As he gradually becomes an important part of their lives, the sadness becomes overwhelming, eventually turning into tragedy.
Random House UK| 22 August 2024 | 335 pages|e-book |Review copy| 2*
Description:
Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town, and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But one theft leads to another, including the disappearance of a valuable Turner from Burton Makepeace, home to Lady Milton and her family. Once a magnificent country house, Burton Makepeace has now partially been converted into a hotel, hosting Murder Mystery weekends. As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery; one that pays homage to the masters of the genre―from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers.
My thoughts:
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson begins so well I thought that I was in for a treat. But sadly, as I read on I was disappointed. I was looking forward to reading more about Jackson Brodie, but he only has a minor role. It is amusing in parts. But there are so many other characters, and the story became far too long winded, the narrative jumping around from one set of characters to another, and then another, which made it confusing. The ending was just pure farce, which I’ve never liked, pushing it into the absurd.
Looking back at some of Kate Atkinson’s other books I’ve read I see I had the same reaction to her previous book, Shrines of Gaiety. My favourite books by her are Life After Life and A God in Ruins, both of which I loved.
My thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my review copy.
The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …
17
which for me is How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 22 September 2024.
Synopsis from Goodreads
A poignant coming-of-age novel set in a Welsh mining town, Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley is a paean to a more innocent age, published in Penguin Modern Classics
Growing up in a mining community in rural South Wales, Huw Morgan is taught many harsh lessons – at the kitchen table, at Chapel and around the pit-head. Looking back on the hardships of his early life, where difficult days are faced with courage but the valleys swell with the sound of Welsh voices, it becomes clear that there is nowhere so green as the landscape of his own memory. An immediate bestseller on publication in 1939, How Green Was My Valley quickly became one of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century. Poetic and nostalgic, it is an elegy to a lost world.
This is good as How Green Was My Valley is also on my 20 Books of Summer list. I’m looking forward to reading it. It’s been on my To Be Read list for so long!
Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?
BooksPlease 