Summer Holiday Reading Plans

A Suitcase full of books

There are lots of posts at the moment about summer reading plans, not wanting to be left out I thought I would share what is on my holiday reading list this year.

I have been reading with much more intention this year. At the beginning of each month I have planned what I want to read and written the titles down in my diary/planner. I have an overflowing wicker basket of books sitting on our upstairs landing. It is filled with books I am yet to read but know I want to. These books are ones I have been given as gifts, books I have bought (mostly second hand) and a few which I have plucked from my shelves that I am yet to read. I also have a pile of books which were my Mum’s, which I plan to read. As a reader, there is little more exciting than choosing the next book, and sitting on the floor sifting through this basket and deciding which ones will make it onto my monthly plan is one of my great pleasures. It has worked well this year. Combining my monthly chosen books with my ongoing reading of some of the fiction series I am working my way through makes for varied reading.

I don’t read that many new releases and much of my reading is books that have been around for a while and often decades. I was recently listening to the author Coco Mellors (whose book covers are divine but I haven’t read either of them) being interviewed by Daisy Buchanan on her You’re booked podcast. She said she alternates between current fiction and fiction written in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. She finds it gives her good balance. I feel the same. I love reading books published by Persephone. Most of their novels were published during the middle of the 20th century. And as regular readers will know I’m never far from Miss Read and I love writers like D E Stevenson, Angela Thirkell and Agatha Christie.

Holiday reading is the reading which makes me most excited. On holidays, even the ones that don’t involve beaches, swimming pools and sun loungers (all of ours!), there will be more reading time than at home. Holidays are the ideal time to indulge all those reading dreams.

I have said it before here, but I probably spend as much time deliberating over teh books I am going to take on holiday as I do clothes. This year we are going to Canada, and my husband keeps reminding me Canada is an English speaking country with bookstores. I’m not taking any risk. Like all bookworms, my greatest fear is being caught short without a book, so these are the books which will make it into my suitcase and I hope to read over the next few weeks. And as my husband is unlikely to read this he will never know!

Two modern day authors I always holiday with are Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout. They are probably my all time favourite curent day authors and despite anticipating any new releases from them, I rarely read them when they are released, preferring to save them for when I can give them my undivided attention. They are the companions I would never regret travelling with. I have been holding onto both of their latest novels for this summer and I’m fizzing with excitement at the prospect of finally immersing myself in them

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First thing, she loses her job – or quits, depending who you ask. Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door expecting to stay for the festivities. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories, a shared sense of humour – and a cat looking for a new home.

Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret…

Tell me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer, Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house next to the sea. Together, Lucy and Bob talk about their lives, their hopes and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, befriends one of Crosby’s longest inhabitants, Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known – “unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them – reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

This was released in 2024 and again I have been longing to read it so it has easily made it into my luggage this year.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.

Guilty by Definition by Suzie Dent

This was gifted to me by a friend who adored it and I have been saving it for a time when I can give it my full attention

As more letters arrive, Martha and her team follow the linguistic clues to a troubling truth. It seems Charlie was keeping a powerful secret, and that someone is desperate to keep it well and truly buried.

Guilty by Definition is a love letter not only to language but to the city of Oxford, wrapped within an intriguing mystery of a missing woman and considering the emotional aftershocks of her disappearance on those left behind.

Wide Sargossa Sea by Jean Rhys

I have wanted to read this for so long. It often comes up as a desert island book and one I have had waiting for just the right time to pick up. It is also quite slim so won’t take up too much room.

Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

When the Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope

I went with a talk at Chiswick Book festival given by Lucy Easthope and was so impressed by her. Maybe not one to read on the plane though!

Lucy is a world-leading authority on recovering from disaster. She holds governments to account, supports survivors and helps communities to rebuild. She has been at the centre of the most seismic events of the last few decades, advising on everything from the 2004 tsunami and the 7/7 bombings to the Grenfell fire and the war in Ukraine.

When a plane crashes, a bomb explodes, a city floods or a pandemic begins, Lucy Easthope's phone starts to ring.Lucy's job is to pick up the pieces and get us ready for what comes next.

Lucy takes us behind the police tape to scenes of chaos, and into government briefing rooms where confusion can reign. She also looks back at the many losses and loves of her life and career, and tells us how we can all build back after disaster.

All Those Hands Held by Angela Vincent (Me!)

I am taking this not for me to read but to leave somewhere on our travels for someone else to read. My friend Michelle Ciani reminded me that I wrote part of if on the other side of the Atlantic (although US, rather than Canada), so it would be a good to take the finished book back again. I am going to write a little note in it asking whoever reads it to message me to say where they found it and pass it on when they have read it. I hope I might be able to see its journey and the hands it passes through.

I have other reading plans for the rest of the summer but these the books joining my on our road trip through British Columbia!

I would love to know what you plan to read over the summer, do share in the comments.

Thank you for reading, if you enjoyed this a ❤️ would be much appreciated.

Until next time xx