My Summer TBR List

 It’s the middle of April, and almost the end of the school year. Consequently, this will also be my last blog post for this year. I thought I’d contribute to the inevitable hive mind and list out a few books I plan on reading over the summer. Of course, summer is universally acknowledged as a time of freedom (and the absence of school), so most of the books on this list will be long, or part of a continuous series. Side note: I don’t typically follow my TBR’s–I consider myself a free spirit when it comes to reading–however these are just some books I feel like I need to read in order to consider myself an “avid reader.” But without further ado, here is a (very small part) of my summer TBR.

1. Dune series by Frank Herbert

Perhaps in light of the recent release of Dune 2, Frank Herbert’s dystopian series has been added to my TBR, although I have not watched either movie, as I wish to wait until I have read the books to do so. Though nearly impossible to get almost anywhere–largely I believe due to the movie release and Timothee Chalamet’s appearance in it which is extremely apparent in the lack of any interest for the Dune books past book 2–I hope to either stumble upon it at a Barnes & Noble or miraculously win a loan at the public library. While I haven’t read it, and thus can’t offer my opinions on it, I can say that if you enjoy dystopian novels, this could be a series for you. I often avoid reading serial books over the course of a school year due to the naturally busy nature of the season, but I hope that with six hours of my day freed up, I can get to this series, which currently, sits in the top ten portion of my extensive TBR list. 

2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 

Keeping with the serial/extremely long book trend, War and Peace is next on my list. Two years ago, I attempted to read this book, only to be bamboozled by the plot. Now, as I am a little bit more mature, I hope to be able to finish the book. Set in the author’s motherland of Russia but not the author’s lifetime–the Napoleonic Wars, it is a historical fiction novel detailing the many effects of France’s emperor and the small stories that come with it. As we learned a bit about Tsarist Russia in Subbie Social Studies, I hope that that information could come in handy when attempting to decipher this novel. 

3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

I, and perhaps a lot of people, know this novel from its balletic adaptation–which, fun fact, is my favorite ballet production–but like Dune, I think that more people have watched the ballet than read the book. And so I have made it my mission to read it this summer. The first modern novel ever, though extremely long, tells the story of a romance (like almost all ballets) and a lovely bromance, or so I’ve heard, between two men, one insane, the other sane. Perhaps once I read this I can better understand the ballet which, like all ballets, is impossible to understand if you’re not in it. 

4. Jaws by Peter Benchley

Unlike Dune, I don’t think that anybody knows that Jaws the movie is an adaptation of Peter Benchley’s novel. Of course, even if you don’t know the movie, you’ve most likely heard the ominous theme before. The movie and book plots are essentially the same, entailing a murderous great white shark and the journey to kill it, but while I haven’t interacted with either, I have no prior expectations to go off of. I think that the further I go down this list, the more obscure (but not really because these are all extremely famous books) the novels get. Like Dune, this is part of a series, (Jaws 2, and Jaws: The Revenge), all three of which I hope to get to read this summer. 

This blog post is already extremely long, so I won’t go into further detail about any other books I have lined up for the summer, and I would link my entire TBR list below, but it’s a bit exposing :D. So I will have to settle with merely listing a few more in rapid succession:

1. Alice in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll

2. The Percy Jackson Series: Rick Riordan

3. The Lord of the Rings + Series: J.R.R Tolkien

4. Great Expectations: Charles Dickens 

5. Any Agatha Christie novels

6. Winnie the Pooh: A.A. Milne

And that’s a wrap everybody! It’s been quite fun writing and reading blogs this year, and I hope that in the future, we will be able to do so again. In writing this, I have become slightly sentimental as to the idea of writing blogs and I might take it up again at some point. So as this blog post comes to a close, I bid adieu to Uni High Bloggers, and a great year of Freshman English!

Have a fantastic summer everybody (though it is a bit early)!

Thank you for reading,

Emma Tong