Catching up on Classics (and lots more!) discussion

It's the first of the month again and many of us map out a plan for our TBR lists. Are you pulling out the "summer reading" or working on a challenge? Do you have a new interest to research? Let us know so we can find more books to add to our TBR lists.

June Goals

To finish up my challenge buffet this month, I'll be reading two books for the decade challenge and a "V" author for A-Z Authors. In addition, I'll continue chipping away at the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge and the Fantasy Bingo challenge from Reddit.

Challenge Books
✔️Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
✔️Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
✔️Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Non-challenge Books
✔️Proust: The Guermantes Way (1920)
✔️Roethke: "Open House" (1941) from The Collected Poems
✔️O'Hara: Lunch Poems (1964)
✔️Dickey: Buckdancer's Choice (1965)
✔️Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
✔️Weis/Hickman: "Dragons of Winter Night" (1985), from Dragonlance Chronicles
✔️VanderMeer: Annihilation (2014)
✔️Cooper: A Little Familiar (2015)
✔️Pratchett: The Shepherd's Crown (2015)
✔️Seuss: Four-Legged Girl: Poems (2015)
✔️Rutkoski: The Midnight Lie (2020)
✔️Griffith: Spear (2022)
✔️Smith: Companion Piece (2022)
✔️Serra: A Toast to St. Martirià (2023)
✔️Gefter: Cocktails with George and Martha (2024)
✔️Atkins: Flower (2025)
✔️Douglas: The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive (2025)
✔️Preciado: Dysphoria Mundi (2025)
✔️DuPlessis: The Complete Drafts (2025)

And maybe...
✔️L'Engle: A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
✔️McNally: Love! Valor! Compassion! and A Perfect Ganesh (1995)
Wodehouse: Tales of Wrykyn and Elsewhere (1997) <-- Read in July
✔️McCarthy: The Road (2006)
✔️Murnane: Barley Patch (2009)
✔️Fry: Mythos: The Greek Myths Reimagined (2017)
Moore: Make Your Way Home: Stories (2025) <-- Started, finish in July


Challenges Completed This Month
Challenge #5a - Decade Challenge - 6/7/25
Challenge #17 - A-Z Author Challenge - 6/18/25

Here in the Southern Hemisphere it is winter. I am going to read Lord of the Rings. And complete the latest Stephen King book, Never Flinch. Also Will start on Gone With the Wind after I finish LOTR. Pretty sure LOTR will be completely read by the middle of the month.

No prizes for guessing which two books are rereads and which book is a first timer.

June

Honoré de Balzac:
1842, Albert Savarus
1830, La Vendetta

Ola Hansson:
1887, Sensitiva amorosa

Félicité de Genlis:
c.1800, La femme auteur

Germaine de Staël:
c.1786, Trois nouvelles

Claire de Duras:
1823, Réflexion et prières

Maria Zalambani:
[1911-1920], Tatiana Rosenthal

Ludovica Koch:
[1813-1823] La poesia di E.J. Stagnelius

Jonas Lie:
1870, Den Fremsynte

Ludvig Holberg:
1741, Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum

Hómēros, Giacomo Casanova:
[c.750 bce], Dell'Iliade di Omero, 1775-1778

Edith Södergran:
1916-1925, Poesie

Hómēros, Franco Ferrari:
... [c.750 bce], Iliás, 2018

June--how did this happen?! Well, it's looking to be a good reading month. :-)

Continuing--Will Finish
Paradise by Toni Morrison (challenge)
A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen (Austen focus)

For Sure Reads
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (group read)
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (summer group read)

Hopefullys
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (challenge)
The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells by Andrew Sean Greer (challenge)
Autumn by Ali Smith (Pride)

Maybes
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (group read)
Jane Austen: A Life by Carol Shields (Austen focus)

June means a lot of travel for work and less time than usual to read. This is what I go for:

Currently reading
Images of women in literature (short story collection, including The Story of an Hour)
Erindring om kærligheden (old&new challenge, reading my shelf)
The Wedding People (audio)

To read
Mazeltov (goodreads challenge)
The Silent Patient (ongoing birthyear challenge, reading my shelf)
The Daughter of Time (Alan Grant series challenge)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (pulitzer challenge)
En djævelsk plan
Dommen og andre fortællinger (collection of short stories by Franz Kafka, including A Hunger Artist)
Historie (audio)
Boghandlerens hemmelighed
This Rebel Heart (audio)
De uønskedes paradis
Ungdomsforsøg
Sidste billede (Roderick Alleyn series challenge)
Blomsterdalen (Nordic Prize for Literature)
The Call (old&new challenge)
Fear of Flying (reading my shelf)
Sunrise on the Reaping
Tatoveret torso (reading my shelf)
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
The Night Watchman (audio, pulitzer challenge)
De måske egnede (golden laureate challenge) - started
Magt
The Queer Feet: A Father Brown Mystery (audio)
This Is the Night They Come for You (reading my shelf)
Turbo Twenty-Three

Lots of continued reading this month. This isn't going to put much of a dent in my 72-book goal for the year (which I'm surprisingly far behind on). Oh well, I'm enjoying the reads.

Start and finish
✯ Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

Start, but not finish
✯ Circe by Madeline Miller

Continue and finish
✯ Challenger
✯ The Age of Innocence

Continue, but not finish
✯ Greater Gotham
✯ Combee
✯ The Race Beat
✯ The White Mosque (might finish it in June, but probably early July)
✯ White Trash
✯ Justice
✯ Slither
✯ After Virtue
✯ Reaganland
✯ Red Widow

Finishing
Kaputt Curzio Malaparte ****
Sylvia's Lovers Elizabeth Gaskell ****
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death Jean-Dominique Bauby ****
The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger ****
The Shadow of the Wind Carlos Ruiz Zafón ***
The Emigrants W.G. Sebald ****
The Expert of Subtle RevisionsKirsten Menger-Anderson ***
Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw ****
Childhood’s End Arthur C. Clarke ***
Darktown Thomas Mullen ****
Lamb In His Bosom Caroline Miller ****
In a Lonely Place Dorothy B. Hughes ****
New and Selected Poems Marie Howe ****
Pink Lady: Poems Denise Duhamel ****
The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong ****
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible Rabih Alameddine ****
Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane ****
Serena Ron Rash ****
The Boy from the Sea Garrett Carr
The Book of Records Madeleine Thien
The Names Florence Knapp ***
Eugene Onegin Alexander Pushkin ****
Great Black Hope Rob Franklin ***

shorts:
A Lost Opportunity Leo Tolstoy
Zero Hour Ray Bradbury ***

Continuing:
The Stories of John Cheever John Cheever
The Night Alphabet Joelle Taylor *****
The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780 Rick Atkinson
Women Who Run With the Wolves Clarissa Pinkola Estés
A Fable William Faulkner

That's it for me this month. Pushing everything else forward.

Kathleen wrote: "June--how did this happen?! Well, it's looking to be a good reading month. :-)

Continuing--Will Finish
Paradise by Toni Morrison (challenge)
[book:A Truth Universally Ack..."



Exactly. How is it June already!

My modest expectations are

Zero Hour by Ray Bradbury
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Fun with grandchildren is my primary goal this month.

So for the end of June wrap-up I will talk about my "Ray Bradbury Plan". When reading some Bradbury this month, I went onto Youtube to listen to some of the speeches he has given over the years. In one speech he said that each night before he went to bed he read "widely and eclectically". His goal was to read one poem, one essay, and one short story each night before bed.

I am not as disciplined as Mr. Bradbury, but I did try to implement the idea. I read many poems that I am not going to list. I picked up our old Norton's Anthology of Literature for that.

I also read

The Reincarnate by Ray Bradbury (2005) from the collection A Pleasure to Burn: Fahrenheit 451 Stories (2010) June 3, 2025 3*

The Fireman by Ray Bradbury (1951) 5* June 5, 2025

The Efficacy Of Prayer: The Advent Papers by C.S. Lewis (1959) 4*

Zero Hour by Ray Bradbury (1947) June 8, 2025 4*

The Long Rain by Ray Bradbury (1950) June 9, 2025 4*

Reflections on the Psalms by C.S. Lewis (1958) 8 out of 12 of the essays.

And the first 3 selections in Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener.

I am not as varied as the plan would want, but it was interesting to read the poetry and focus on essays.

I’m kind of in a reading slump. I read:
— A Man of Property by John Galsworthy - 4⭐️
— Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict - 5⭐️
And I am in the middle of Gilead by Marylynne Robinson.

My June reading in 2025 ran on three tracks, guided by a personal challenge:

Black African novels Batouala by René Maran (1921), Things Fall Apart by Chinua Acebe (1959) and Tselane by Jacqueline Louw Van Wijk (1961). Next year I will read several more Black African novels.

English novels introducing me to the works of Elizabeth Gaskell, with Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848), and George Eliot, with Middlemarch (1872). I very much look forward to reading more Gaskell and Eliot next year.

Novels of Algeria: The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949) and three novels by Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942), A Happy Death (1971) and The First Man (1994). I have a few more Camus books to read; beyond his existentialist concerns there is a great sense of hope in his books. I may or may not read more of Bowles's works; his books are extremely pessimistic and cruel.

Also on my challenge, continued reading of Italo Calvino, The Watcher and Other Stories (1952-1963), which anthologizes three novellas, "The Watcher," "Smog" and "The Argentine Ant."

Two non-challenge random pick-ups in June were Life among the Lutherans by Garrison Keillor (2009), and Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life by Byron Katie (2003), a pioneering self-help book.

June was a very "productive" month!

Tim wrote: "My June reading in 2025 ran on three tracks, guided by a personal challenge:

Black African novels Batouala by René Maran (1921), Things Fall Apart by Chinua Acebe (1959)..."

Thanks for posting Tim. You do have a varied and prolific list. I like how you are organizing by locations. At the end of 2022 I was reviewing my reading habits when I realized that I had read a surprisingly small number of British authors. The last two years I have deliberately worked to change that and added 21 new authors to my "read" list. Being deliberate can bring positive results.