Sue Jackson’s Big Book Summer 2025 Challenge has kicked off! I love this challenge and have been doing it for years now. As always, it runs from the Friday of Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day. (Dates this year: May 23-September 1.)

The gist of the challenge is to read one 400+ page book between these holidays. It’s a low pressure event. Using the official hashtag on social media is a fun way to discover other readers and maybe even someone who will buddy read a particular book with you.

Check out Sue’s announcement video for details or her blog post where you can link your relevant blog posts or videos (these are not required and there’s no official signup).

Melinda of A Web of Stories is cohosting the challenge this year. Watch her announcement video.

Here’s my short stack:

MARGARET FULLER: COLLECTED WRITINGS, edited by Brigitte Bailey, Noelle A. Baker, and Megan Marshall. This one comes in at 929 pages and is the text we’ll be using for the #FullerSummer reading group I have planned with a handful of readers. The reading dates are June 20 to September 22, 2025 and all are welcome to read the whole book or dip in here and there. I’ll create an Instagram discussion group next week to get the conversation going about how we’d like to proceed.

THE WEIGHT OF INK by Rachel Kadish (592 pages). I purchased this novel last summer at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. Shortly before seeing it in the bookstore there, someone had told me that since I loved People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (it was a top ten read of 2023), I would love The Weight of Ink. Fingers crossed!

Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. 
 
When Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of newly discovered seventeenth-century Jewish documents, she enlists the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.”
  
Electrifying and ambitious, The Weight of Ink is about women separated by centuries—and the choices and sacrifices they must make in order to reconcile the life of the heart and mind.  

I was going to make The Weight of Ink my first Big Book of the summer, and said as much on Episode 235 of the Book Cougars (out tomorrow), but as I was packing my bag for the 70th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference yesterday, a different big book swept in. Tucked away in my suitcase is a mass market copy of The Shining by Stephen King (672 pages). Lately, I have been hankering for a reread of this now classic horror novel. I first read it in high school and again in my 40s, and loved it both times for different reasons. I’m 59 now, so we’ll see how it strikes me this time.

I’ll stop with these three books. There are more I’d like to get to this summer (aren’t there always?), but I would be super happy to read these three.

Are you participating in Sue’s Big Book Summer?

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If you missed it, read my May 2025 Recap post