It’s time again for Sue Jackson’s Big Book Summer Challenge, which started the Friday before Memorial Day (6/22) and ends on the Monday of Labor Day (9/7).
The challenge is simple: to read a book that’s 400 pages or more. Check out Sue’s Welcome post for details, including links to her and co-host Melinda’s (A Web of Stories) BookTube videos. The official hashtag is #BigBookSummer.
Over on the Book Cougars BookTube channel, we shared what we plan to read for the challenge, but I forgot about a couple of books while filming that video — probably because the biggest big book that I plan to read this summer is crowding out everything else in my brain.
Pile of Possibilities
Here’s my list of hopefuls. I include each book’s publication year and the page count of the edition I plan to read:
- 11/22/63 by Stephen King (2011, 849 pages). This is the biggest of the big books I plan to immerse myself in this summer. I’m not particularly interested in the Kennedy assassination, but I’ve heard high praise of this novel from a variety of readers. It’s about a guy who time-travels back to 1958 and tries to stop the assassination. Doing a buddy read with my friend Rachel.
- The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl (2006, 424 pages). I read this one years ago when it first came out because of its main characters being 19th-century writers. I want to reread it now that I’ve read Dante’s Divine Comedy. Characters are murdered in ways reminiscent of the way souls are tortured in The Inferno. I’m reading a mass market paperback that is just over 400 pages.
- The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (2023, 432 pages). This one has been sitting on my shelf for a while now, and my Book Cougars cohost Emily brought it up after reading a piece by Patricia Cornwell in The New Yorker that mentioned it. I do own a copy and have thumbed through it here and there, but would like to read it with more intention this summer.
- Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser (1969, 800 pages). I read the first part of this for a past Big Book Summer Challenge. I thought I’d started it last year, but it was actually in 2024! Wow, time flies. I intentionally put it down after reading up through Mary’s return to Scotland at age 19, and it has sat next to my reading chair since then, where I’ve often looked at it longingly.
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton: A Revolutionary Life by Ellen Carol DuBois (2026, 496 pages). I’ve read about Stanton in passing and have heard mixed judgments of her as a person and activist, and would like to get a clearer understanding of her.
While there are other 400+ page books that are calling from my shelves, I think I’ll keep it to the five above.
If you’re reading Big Books this summer, I’d love to hear about your plans, so please leave a comment. Feel free to share a link to your post or video if you have one.