Sue Jackson’s Big Book Summer Challenges 2024 kicks off this weekend! This annual reading challenge runs from the Friday of Memorial Day weekend (May 24) through Labor Day (September 2). The rules of this challenge are simple: read one or more 400+ page books between the above dates.

This is one of my favorite reading challenges. Last year, my main big book was Ulysses by James Joyce. 

This year, I have a stack of five books I’d like to read. The links go to Goodreads.

Big Book Summer Challenge 2024 Hopefuls

• THE AWAKENING by Nora Roberts, 435 pages. This is the current Book Cougars podcast readalong title for the second quarter in our year of reading romance novels. I started it on Friday and am already 33% into the audiobook, which is narrated by Barrie Kreinik. It is a fantasy romance that’s set mainly in Ireland. So far, it feels like an adult fairy tale.
  
• THE WOMEN’S ROOM by Marilyn French, 471 pages. The Goodreads link goes to the 1978 mass-market paperback edition (688 pages) my mom and older sister read when I was a kid. My parents never forbade me from reading anything. I was 12 in 1978. I asked if I’d like this novel that all the older women in my life were excited about. They said I probably wouldn’t be interested in it now, to wait a few years. Well, here I am, 46 years later, about to give it a go. I checked out the well-read hardcover first edition from my local public library. My next trip to the used bookstore will be to look for the mass-market paperback edition I can still see lying on the dining room table of my childhood home.
  
• MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS by Antonia Fraser, 800 pages. This is another blast from my past. Growing up in the 1970s, we had one TV, so I watched what my parents watched. One of the movies that has stayed firmly lodged in my mind is the 1971 film Mary, Queen of Scots, starring Vanessa Redgrave (with whom I was in love from years of obsessively listening to my parent’s LP of the 1967 movie soundtrack of Camelot. Julie Andrews originated the role in the 1960 Broadway production of Camelot, but I digress). Earlier this year, I revisited that 1971 film and also watched the 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots. I decided it was time to read a biography of this queen who captured my imagination all those years ago.
  
• FELLOWSHIP POINT by Alice Elliott Dark, 592 pages. This novel caught my eye when it first came out two years ago. I had heard mixed reviews, but recently, Karen (on Instagram @barkerforbooks) gave it high praise. She writes, “It’s about two women whose friendship has endured for over eighty years despite their somewhat different approaches to life. The sales pitch on this book suggests that the major conflict is how to bequeath a shared parcel of land in Maine. While that is a part of the novel, the majority of the text explores friendship and family.” My Book Cougars buddy, Emily, and our friend Kate will buddy read Fellowship Point this summer.
  
• THE MAKIOKA SISTERS by Junichiro Tanizaki, 576 pages. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. My friend Shawn sent me this novel when he lived in Japan. It is the story of four upper-class sisters in Osaka and the changes to their “traditional” way of life in the years before World War II. It is considered one of the most important Japanese novels of the 20th century. I may have avoided reading it because I don’t want to spoil the gorgeous cover. Just kidding (maybe not).

If you’d like to participate in the Big Book Summer Challenge 2024, head over to Sue’s blog, Book by Book, for more details and how to sign up officially.

And if you plan to read a big book (or several) this summer, please list them in the comments below, or if you’re a blogger, feel free to leave a link.

P.S. Emily and I made a BookTube video about our “stacks of hopefuls” for the challenge on YouTube.