20 Books of Summer is a reading challenge focusing on reading your TBR. We all know that I am horrible at that. I head straight for the shiny new things that catch my eye on the library app or Kindle Unlimited. But, I also like a challenge so let’s see if this cancels out my shiny-grabbing tendencies or just makes me spin like a perpetual motion machine.

Here are the official rules:

  • The #20BooksofSummer2025 challenge runs from Sunday June 1st to Sunday August 31st
  • The first rule of 20 Books is that there are no real rules, other than signing up for 10, 15 or 20 books and trying to read from your TBR.
  • Pick your list in advance, or nominate a bookcase to read from, or pick at whim from your TBR.
  • If you do pick a list, you can change it at any time – swap books in/out.
  • Don’t get panicked at not reaching your target.
  • Just enjoy a summer of great reading and make a bit of space on your shelves!

I’m only officially saying that I’m going to read 10 books from my list – see above mentioned shiny tendencies. I’ll try for more.

My rules are that I need to have owned the book or had it from Kindle Unlimited since before January 1, 2025 for it to count towards my total. Also any Netgalley books that I have before today totally count. I’m also allowed to pick any book from my tbr list that was added before January 1, 2025.

I have pulled some paper books from my shelf to focus on. That worked so well that I already read one that used to be on the stack before the challenge even started.

I made sure I had a mix of genres and lengths of books. I have a bunch of others but this is the stack that I have sitting out to pull from first. I’m not great at choosing to pick up paper books so I also have ebooks available to read and the Netgalley books.

I made a list of about 20 ebooks on my iPad that I haven’t read. I swear I’ve never even heard of a lot of them. Obviously they spontaneously generated in my Kindle app. I didn’t get them for free somewhere and then forget all about them. I’m going to try to shop those books when I need something to read for the next month or so.