Earlier this week I shared a simple way to jumpstart your reading. Today I’m sharing ideas for your summer reading list. Of course, if you’re like me, you might already have more books on your list than you could read in a lifetime, let alone a summer. Oh well, life rolls on.

For the list, I consulted other summer reading lists, recent bestseller lists, online reader reviews from Amazon and Goodreads, and my own list of favorites. I didn’t aim for a specific number of anything, I just looked and listed and edited and came out with what’s below; which is why some categories have five or more items and some have two.

Two more notes in the interest of full-disclosure:

1. I have not read every book on this list. Books I’ve personally read are marked with an asterisk (*).
2. All links are affiliate links, which means when you complete any purchase through them, you help support this blog.

And, without further adieu, I give you…

31 Books for Summer 2012

Five Fiction Ideas

Popular and fairly recent, here are five reads that repeatedly showed on lists I browsed:

• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson
• The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
• The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman

Five Notable Biographies

• Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
• Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall – from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady
• Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy by Caroline Kennedy
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery by Eric Metaxas*

Six Books to Catch Up On

If there is something here you haven’t read yet, add it to your pile!

• Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery*
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini*
• Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake by Frank W. Abagnale with Stan Redding*
• Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn*
• Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott*

Two Other Non-Fiction Ideas

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings

Two To Read Before the Movie Releases

• The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*

Three Series to Finish

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins*
• The Harry Potter Series by J. K. Rowling*
• The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin#

Three Memoirs You Might Be Interested In

• Bossypants by Tina Fey
• Lots of Candles and Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen
• Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson

Five Books from My Summer List

You know, just in case you’re curious

• Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
• Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World by Bob Goff
• Divergent by Veronica Roth
• Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman

So what about you?

What’s on your list for this summer? What recommendations do you have?

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