susanna.fraser climbs Mount TBR in 2024

I'm Susanna (aka Susan--Susanna is my authorial pen name, but I go by both). I'm a writer with a day job in university research administration. I live in Seattle with my husband and our 19-year-old son, who is currently a student at North Seattle College.

I'm an omnivorous reader, skewing heavily to science fiction, fantasy, and romance on the fiction side and history, science, and theology/religion for nonfiction. I plan to continue to read from various CATs and KITs and participate in TIOLI, but I'm not going to worry about missing a month or two here and there.

My main reading goal for this year is to reduce my to-be-read list, AKA Mount TBR, which I'm defining broadly as anything I own but haven't read plus anything on my library "For Later" list or my "Books to Buy Eventually" list on Amazon. Because I add new books to both lists at maybe 10-20 times the rate I actually READ them.

I'm not saying I'll read only from those lists, because that's a vow I'd never keep. There will be new releases from favorite authors that I'll start reading the day they're released, plus recommendations from friends, impulse picks from the library's new releases shelf, etc. But I'm going to mark each book from the TBR with an asterisk, and it would be lovely if those books are at least half of my tally. And to make sure I take this at least sort of seriously, my choices for the AlphaKIT challenges will ONLY come from Mount TBR.

Q1 Log

January:
1. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
2. The Thin Light of Freedom *
3. Once a Laird *
4. Witch King *
5. His Convenient Husband *
6. Demon Daughter
7. Love & Other Disasters
8. Mystic and Rider *
9. You Had Me at Hola *
10. Rental Person Who Does Nothing
11. Ring Shout *
12. American Revolutions *

February:
1. Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education
2. Menewood
3. Solutions and Other Problems *
4. Eagle Drums *
5. Egg: A Dozen Ovatures *
6. Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk *
7. A Fever in the Heartland
8. Marry Me By Midnight *
9. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends *
10. Hid From Our Eyes
11. Huda F Cares *
12. The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
13. If Found, Return to Hell *
14. It Takes Two To Tumble *

March:
1. Curveball
2. Crow Planet *
3. The Red Scholar's Wake *
4. Holy Envy *
5. Codename Charming *
6. The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator *
7. Some Desperate Glory *
8. Four Weddings to Fall in Love *
9. Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs

Q2 Log

April:
1. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
2. Opposite of Always
3. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
4. One Cowboy, One Christmas *
5. Gods of the Upper Air *
6. A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds *
7. Ordinary Men *
8. Yesterday's Kin
9. A Tempest of Tea
10. Aftermarket Afterlife
11. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
12. The Exvangelicals
13. Much Ado About Nada *
14. 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed

May:
1. What Have We Here?
2. All the Birds in the Sky
3. Slow Productivity
4. Woven
5. Recoding America *
6. Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? *
7. City of Bones
8. Cloistered: My Years As A Nun
9. Prisoners of a Pirate Queen *

Q3 Log

Q4 Log

Books by BIPOC and LGBTQIA authors

Represented by Denali, since I'd love to see more American mountains get their indigenous names back, not least the four Washington stratovolcanoes pictured on my quarterly logs--Mt Baker (Koma Kulshan), Mt Rainier (Tahoma), Mt St Helens (Loowit), and Mt Adams (Pahto or Klickitat).

January:
1. His Convenient Husband * by Robin Covington
2. Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly
3. You Had Me at Hola * by Alexis Daria
4. Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto
5. Ring Shout * by P. Djèlí Clark

February:
1. Menewood by Nicola Griffith
2. Eagle Drums * by Nasgraq Rainey Hopson
3. Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk * by Sasha LaPointe
4. Huda F Cares * by Huda Fahmy
5. If Found, Return to Hell * by Em X. Liu

March:
1. The Red Scholar's Wake * by Aliette de Bodard
2. Four Weddings to Fall in Love * by Jackie Lau

April:
1. Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds
2. A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal
3. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older
4. Much Ado About Nada * by Uzma Jalaluddin

May:
1. What Have We Here? by Billy Dee Williams
2. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
3. Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? * by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

Reserved for Seattle Public Library Summer Book Bingo

CATs

January:
1. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (PrizeCAT)
2. The Thin Light of Freedom * (HistoryCAT)
3. Once a Laird * (CalendarCAT)
4. Ring Shout * (PrizeCAT)
5. American Revolutions * (HistoryCAT)

February:
1. Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk * (PrizeCAT)
2. Marry Me By Midnight * (HistoryCAT, CalendarCAT)
3. It Takes Two To Tumble * (HistoryCAT, CalendarCAT)

March:
1. Curveball (CalendarCAT)
2. Crow Planet * (CalendarCAT, PrizeCAT)
3. Holy Envy * (CalendarCAT)
4. The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator * (HistoryCAT)

April:
1. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (HistoryCAT)
2. A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds * (CalendarCAT)
3. Yesterday's Kin (PrizeCAT)

May:
1. All the Birds in the Sky (PrizeCAT)

KITs

January:
1. The Thin Light of Freedom * (AlphaKIT)
2. Witch King * (SFFKit)
3. His Convenient Husband * (RandomKIT)
4. Mystic and Rider * (SFFKit)
5. You Had Me at Hola * (AlphaKIT)
6. American Revolutions * (AlphaKIT)

February:
1. Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education (RandomKIT)
2. Eagle Drums * (AlphaKIT, SFFKit)
3. Egg: A Dozen Ovatures * (AlphaKIT)
4. A Fever in the Heartland (AlphaKIT)
5. Marry Me By Midnight * (AlphaKIT)
6. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends * (AlphaKIT)
7. Hid From Our Eyes (AlphaKIT)
8. Huda F Cares? * (AlphaKIT)
9. The Sharing Knife: Beguilement (RandomKIT)
10. If Found, Return to Hell * (AlphaKIT)

March:
1. Crow Planet * (AlphaKIT, RandomKIT)
2. The Red Scholar's Wake * (AlphaKIT, SFFKit)
3. Holy Envy * (AlphaKIT)
4. Some Desperate Glory * (SFFKit)

April:
1. Opposite of Always (AlphaKIT, SFFKit)
2. One Cowboy, One Christmas * (AlphaKIT)
3. Gods of the Upper Air * (AlphaKIT)
4. A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds * (AlphaKIT, RandomKIT)
5. Ordinary Men * (AlphaKIT)
6. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles (AlphaKIT)
7. Much Ado About Nada * (AlphaKIT)

May:
1. Slow Productivity (AlphaKIT)
2. Recoding America (AlphaKIT)
3. City of Bones (SFFKit)
4. Prisoners of a Pirate Queen * (AlphaKIT)

BingoDOG



1. A Fever in the Heartland
2. It Takes Two To Tumble
3. The Thin Light of Freedom
4. The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
5. His Convenient Husband
6.
7. Love & Other Disasters
8. Once a Laird
9.
10. You Had Me at Hola
11. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
12. Demon Daughter
13. Crow Planet
14. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
15.
16. Prisoners of a Pirate Queen
17. The Exvangelicals
18.
19. Rental Person Who Does Nothing
20. All the Birds in the Sky
21.
22.
23. Ring Shout
24. Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs
25. Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? *

Fantasy and Science Fiction

1. Witch King *
2. Demon Daughter
3. Mystic and Rider *
4. Ring Shout *
5. Eagle Drums *
6. The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
7. If Found, Return to Hell *
8. The Red Scholar's Wake *
9. Some Desperate Glory *
10. Opposite of Always
11. Yesterday's Kin
12. A Tempest of Tea
13. Aftermarket Afterlife
14. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
15. All the Birds in the Sky
16. City of Bones
17. Prisoners of a Pirate Queen *

Romance

1. Once a Laird *
2. His Convenient Husband *
3. Love & Other Disasters
4. Mystic and Rider *
5. You Had Me at Hola *
6. Marry Me By Midnight *
7. The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
8. It Takes Two To Tumble *
9. The Red Scholar's Wake *
10. Codename Charming *
11. Four Weddings to Fall in Love *
12. Opposite of Always
13. One Cowboy, One Christmas *
14. Much Ado About Nada *
15. Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? *

YA/Kidlit

(The image is Paricutin, which is a very young mountain in Mexico, less than a century old.)

1. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
2. Eagle Drums *
3. Huda F Cares? *
4. Opposite of Always
5. A Tempest of Tea

History (fiction and nonfiction)

1. The Thin Light of Freedom *
2. Once a Laird *
3. Ring Shout *
4. American Revolutions *
5. Menewood
6. Egg: A Dozen Ovatures *
7. A Fever in the Heartland
8. Marry Me By Midnight *
9. It Takes Two To Tumble *
10. The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator *
11. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
12. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History
13. Gods of the Upper Air *
14. Ordinary Men *
15. 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed

Science

1. Egg: A Dozen Ovatures *
2. Crow Planet *
3. The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator *
4. Gods of the Upper Air *
5. A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds *

Religion

1. Huda F Cares? *
2. Curveball
3. Crow Planet *
4. Holy Envy *
5. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
6. The Exvangelicals
9. Cloistered: My Years As A Nun

I love all your pictures, what a great way to tackle Mt TBR.

I'm pretty sure after all my book-buying of 2023 that my own Mt TBR is actually a volcano, it's just spewing out more and getting taller and taller! :D

Great pics! Good luck with your TBR in 2024

Good luck with your 2024 challenge! Wonderful photos!

Happy reading in 2024! Love all the mountain pics!

Have fun with your 2024 challenge and on reducing your Mt. TBR!

Great pictures, I especially love the CAT and KITs. Good luck with your reading in 2024.

Good luck scaling the mountain!

Those are wonderful images. Good luck with your climbing!

Happy reading in 2024, and good luck with the wish list black hole.

Thanks, y'all!

I had some spare time the past two nights, so I sat down and consolidated all my TBRs into a single monster list in a Google spreadsheet...and it's 633 books long. The crazy part is that it seems less daunting now that it's all listed in one place, sorted by title, author, genre, and location. The overwhelming majority is the library For Later shelf, which wasn't really designed for the way I was using it, since it's not sortable and displays only 25 books per page.

Really, I wish I'd done something like this ages ago. Now if I'm in the mood for, say, a nice historical romance, I can easily find one that meets at least one TIOLI or Category challenge without having to sort through multiple different lists. I'll add a new tab for everything that gets added to the list in 2024. Those won't count toward the goal, but this is too good a system not to maintain.

(And it's not like I expect to read all 633 of those books--I'm sure I'll read my fair share of first chapters and think, "Nope, not for me," but then I can take them off the list, which is its own kind of satisfaction.)

>26 susanna.fraser: Congrats, that spreadsheet sounds like quite a feat! And as you say, now it will be easy (or easier) to find something from your own TBR that fits the various challenges.

>26 susanna.fraser: There's something very satisfying about counting and categorising all of Mt TBR, isn't there? Mine is currently at 569, which is the highest it's been in a very very long time.

>26 susanna.fraser: What an accomplishment! I have a spreadsheet but there is not really enough detail about each book. You're an inspiration.

I do love a good spreadsheet! That reminds me my TBR spreadsheet is quite out of date and needs a tidy-up.

Wow, congrats on the spreadsheet! I'm still trying to determine my TBR after multiple moves in the last years. I bet it will be so satisfying when I finally have a list and definite number.

Oh, and Boromir and Claire and Jamie in one thread (plus beautiful mountains and cute animals)? I have to stop by here more often :-)

I'm trying to focus on my TBR this year too. Good luck to you, and to everyone else doing the same! The spreadsheet sounds like a great way to get everything in one place. I need to do something about my unread ebooks, but I don't think I'll be going there anytime soon...

1. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

Somehow I missed this utterly delightful Newbery winner during my childhood (probably because of the lack of horses). I'm so glad the PrizeCAT category led me to this one.

2. The Thin Light of Freedom * by Edward L. Ayers

And my first step up Mount TBR was this look at the Civil War and Reconstruction that's been on my Kindle for several years. Ayers focuses on two communities, one in northern Virginia and one in southern Pennsylvania, and it's a different lens for very familiar history. The political arguments are depressingly familiar--we definitely haven't made a clean break with this part of the past.

>33 susanna.fraser: Always wanted to read this from the time my kids were small!

>35 Tess_W: It's such a fun book. In a weird way it pushes the same buttons for me as a nice kids' portal fantasy, only Narnia is NYC and the Met.

>33 susanna.fraser: One of my favorites as a kid! I was a big fan of the "child runs away and has adventures" genre.

3. Once a Laird by Mary Jo Putney

So that's my third books finished by midnight on Jan. 1...which means I'm currently on pace to finish 1095 books this year! (Sure! Of course that will happen...)

This was a rather gentle and slow-paced historical romance, which in some ways felt like a travelogue of the author's visit to the Orkneys, but sometimes it's nice to read something not too heavy on the drama.

4. Witch King * by Martha Wells

I bounced off this book when I first tried to read it last year because some part of me was hoping/expecting Murderbot, but fantasy, which it just isn't. (There are similarities, e.g. importance of found family, a protagonist who's extremely powerful and feared by most of the surrounding people because of his/its nature, etc., but you don't get that delightfully snarky first person narration.) This time I was better able to read it on its own terms and loved it (though not as much as Murderbot--few things in fiction are as lovable as Murderbot).

>39 susanna.fraser: Murderbot’s almost certainly going to be my “reread a favorite book” BingoDOG.

>40 Charon07: It's in the running for me in that category as well, though I could also pick a Bujold book or one of the Rivers of London series. (Or Jane Austen, or Dorothy Sayers, or Louisa May Alcott...I'm a frequent rereader.)



5. His Convenient Husband * by Robin Covington

A quick, charming take on the green card marriage trope, where NFL player Isaiah marries Russian ballet dancer Victor when his bid for asylum fails. (Slight content warning that the sex scenes are a bit toward the explicit end for what I like to read, more play-by-play than color commentary. Though this is an area where one person's content warning is another's recommendation, of course!)

6. Demon Daughter by Lois McMaster Bujold

New Penric & Desdemona, which I devoured at a gulp and will no doubt return to to slowly savor in the future.

>42 susanna.fraser: I'm slowly collecting all the Penric & Desdemona omnibus editions, though I haven't even started the series yet. Glad to hear there are still new ones coming out!

>43 christina_reads: It's an excellent series, IMHO.



7. Love & Other Disasters by Anita Kelly

A fun contemporary LGBTQ romance set against the backdrop of a fictional cooking competition show.

8. Mystic and Rider * by Sharon Shinn

This book kinda felt like reading a D&D campaign, but in a good way--a bit more episodic and "tell" rather than "show" for my usual tastes, but ultimately it held my interest and I liked the characters.

9. You Had Me at Hola * by Alexis Daria

A fun contemporary romance whose Latinx hero and heroine are costars in a telenovela.

10. Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto

This book's title caught my eye on the new releases table at my local library, though I was somewhat surprised to discover it was a memoir rather than a novel. The author, clearly burned out by capitalism and its associated cultural demands as expressed in Japan, turned to a life of just showing up for people, in ways that don't demand much of them or him. Want to try a new restaurant but feel weird about going alone? He'll come eat with you. Feel like you'd get more work done if someone else was in the room? He'll just sit there and quietly read while you write or draw or tidy or whatever. It's a short book, sort of bizarrely fascinating in the mundanity of it all.

>47 susanna.fraser: That does sound fascinating!

11. Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

Alternate history fantasy/horror set in 1922 Georgia. SO GOOD.

12. American Revolutions * by Alan Taylor

A big-picture history of the American Revolution which pulls in more of a perspective from Loyalists, the British, French, and Spanish, the Native Americans, and the enslaved than the standard high school history class version.

13. Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education by Stephanie Land

A follow up to Land's first memoir, Maid, this one focusing on Land's senior year in college, in her mid-30's, as a single mother of a 6-year-old and pregnant with her second child.

14. Menewood by Nicola Griffith

The sequel to Hild is long, earthy, sometimes gory, often confusing, utterly heartbreaking at points, and wholly fascinating.

15. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

This memoir veered between "almost pulled a muscle in my abs laughing" and way more bleak and nihilistic than I was expecting.

16. Eagle Drums * by Nasugraq Rainey Hopson

This is a middle grade retelling of an Iñupiaq myth, which I found interesting as an Own Voices look at another culture, but it felt a bit overlong for a straightforward retelling but not quite fleshed out enough for a novel in its own right, somehow.

17. Egg: A Dozen Ovatures * by Lizzie Stark

Culture history/food history/memoir/life science book about, well, eggs. Mostly the bird variety, but human eggs come up too.

18. Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk by Sasha LaPointe

A memoir of overcoming trauma, both personal and generational.

19. A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

A 100-year-old true horror story of when the KKK controlled an American state, with a sadistic con artist at the helm. I wish it didn't feel so very timely.

20. Marry Me By Midnight * by Felicia Grossman

A gender-bent Cinderella story set in the London Jewish community of the 1830s.

21. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends * by Nancy Kress

A concise and practical look at structuring short stories and novels, one I can see myself referring back to as I try to improve my own writing process.

22. Hid From Our Eyes by Julia Spencer-Fleming

I'd lost track of this series and only recently discovered that this "new" entry had come out in 2020. It was good to revisit the characters, but since the book the back matter claimed was coming in 2022 still hasn't been released, I won't be surprised if this is the last visit we get.

23. Huda F Cares? * by Huda Fahmy

Humorous YA (or maybe middle grade) graphic novel based on the author's experiences growing up in an American Muslim family as one of five sisters.

24. The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold

I don't normally count re-reads in my annual log, but I'm making an exception in this case because it's a BingoDOG category. This whole series has been one of my prime comfort re-reads over the past 8 often terrible years (not personally terrible, for the most part--just the politics and pandemic of it all). In Murderbot terms, these books are my Sanctuary Moon. I can't imagine any other case where I'd root for a couple with an age gap as yawning as that between Dag and Fawn, but Bujold manages to convince me that these two are right for each other.

25. If Found, Return to Hell * by Em X. Liu

A rather cozy fantasy novella about a young wizard whose boring call center job gets more interesting when he takes a call from a client who's accidentally merged with a runaway demon prince.

>62 susanna.fraser: This series is definitely on my TBR list! But since I've already started acquiring the Penric & Desdemona omnibus volumes, I'll probably read those first...but I just want to read all the Bujold right now!!!

>64 christina_reads: I love pretty much everything of hers I've read, though I think I'm somewhat unusual in being so fond of the Sharing Knife books--they're tied with the Penric & Desdemona series and my favorites among the Vorkosigan Saga (Memory, Komarr, A Civil Campaign, and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance).



26. It Takes Two To Tumble * by Cat Sebastian

A lovely m/m historical romance between a vicar and a naval captain, set in the English Lake District in 1817.

27. Curveball by Peter Enns

A look at a more expansive version of Christian theology than the evangelicalism I grew up in, by an author who found the same challenges in such a faith that I always did.

>65 susanna.fraser: >66 susanna.fraser: I'm taking BBs for both of these!

>67 MissBrangwen: Always glad to provide a BB!



28. Crow Planet * by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

A book on living as an urban naturalist, with a focus on my beloved American Crows, by a writer who like me lives in the crow-dense confines of Seattle--and a book with enough Buddhist and Benedictine spirituality worked in that I ended up counting it toward my religion list as well as my science one.

>68 susanna.fraser: I've added this to my wishlist. You might like to look up some of the books by Esther Woolfson - another urban nature writer, this time in Aberdeen in Scotland.

>69 Jackie_K: Thanks for the suggestion!



29. The Red Scholar's Wake * by Aliette de Bodard

I can sell this one with an elevator pitch: Lesbian pirate romance In! Space!

>50 susanna.fraser: Mainly trying to catch up on threads but I added American Revolutions to my wishlist.

30. Holy Envy * by Barbara Brown Taylor

A thought-provoking book about engaging with other faiths as a Christian, though I have to say it had enough overlap with her earlier Leaving Church that I'd recommend reading one or the other rather than both.

31. Codename Charming * by Lucy Parker

A lovely romcom, sequel to Battle Royal, where a bodyguard and a personal assistant to fictional British royals start fake-dating in a convoluted scheme to stop the paparazzi from making false claims that the PA is having an affair with her royal employer.

32. The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator * by Timothy C Winegard

This wasn't really the book I was hoping for--I was expecting something of an epidemiological deep dive, but it was more military history survey with added information about the impact of malaria and yellow fever casualties.

33. Some Desperate Glory * by Emily Tesh

Dystopian space opera (although with an ultimately hopeful ending) that kept me turning pages.

34. Four Weddings to Fall in Love by Jackie Lau

Another fun sexy romcom set in Toronto's Asian-Canadian community by one of my go-to authors.

35. Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America's Suburbs by Benjamin Herold

A fascinating if grim look at five families experiencing suburban life in different parts of America (specifically, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Georgia, Texas, and California) in roughly 2015-21.

I'm a somewhat weird American insofar as I've never actually lived in a suburb. I was raised not even in a small town, but in an unincorporated rural community 7 miles from the small town where I went to school through high school, and where my paternal ancestors have lived since roughly 1820. Then I went to Philadelphia for college and have spent my entire adult life barring a year in Bristol, England, and a brief sojourn with my parents after coming home from England living within the city limits of Philadelphia and then Seattle.

36. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta

A thorough journalistic overview of the current state of the American evangelical church and how it got into its current disarrayed, politically state. Alberta is a bit more forgiving and optimistic than I am, though I don't know if the fact he's still an evangelical while I'm an ex-vangelical is cause or effect.

37. Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds

YA romance with a Groundhog Day-style time loop at its core.

38. The Holocaust: An Unfinished History by Dan Stone

A short history, and one that's on the scholarly end--in some ways it's as much about the concept of the Holocaust, both when it took place and in how it's been remembered and forgotten ever since. I'm glad to have read it (it's not the kind of book you'd say you enjoyed, of course), and I'd recommend it to anyone with a solid grounding in the basic history of the Holocaust and the European theater of WWII.

39. One Cowboy, One Christmas * by Kathleen Eagle

I needed a break from dense and dark, and this romance with a snowbound rodeo cowboy fit the bill nicely.

40. Gods of the Upper Air * by Charles King

A surprisingly fascinating look at the lives of key early anthropologists from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

41. A Wing and a Prayer: The Race to Save Our Vanishing Birds * by Anders Gyllenhaal

A look at the conservation efforts being devoted to a range of American birds.

42. Ordinary Men * by Christopher R. Browning

A look at the mostly self-described (in the form of archived court transcripts) experiences of a group of mostly blue-collar middle-aged policemen who became perpetrators during the Holocaust. I would've liked to learn more about the men's lives after the war--how do you ever live with yourself after committing such atrocities?--but that was beyond the scope of the book and the primary source material.



43. Yesterday's Kin by Nancy Kress

Science fiction novella, which I finished because of the short length even though I wasn't crazy about it because the characters seemed more like types than people.

>82 susanna.fraser: I've added this to my wishlist. I read his The Moldovans years ago, and it was a surprisingly interesting trawl through the history and politics of the Moldovan lands.

44. A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faizal

A rather dark YA fantasy novel--I warn about the dark aspect because some part of my brain expects any book with "tea" in the title to be cozy!

45. Aftermarket Afterlife by Seanan McGuire

13th in the InCryptid series, and trust me that you'll be completely lost if you haven't read the previous books (frankly I got a little confused on some of the secondary characters who hadn't been in recent books much).

46. The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

Second in a series of cozy mysteries set in a future where humans have colonized Jupiter and some of its moons (via floating platforms in the gas giant's atmosphere).

47. The Exvangelicals by Sarah McCammon

The author is about 10 years younger than me, but so much of her childhood/young adult experience and later estrangement from the evangelical form of Christianity resonated with me.

48. Much Ado About Nada * by Uzma Jalaluddin

Contemporary romance loosely based on Jane Austen's Persuasion and set in Toronto's Muslim community.

49. 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed by Eric Klinenberg

It was a bit harrowing to revisit the early pandemic, but also a useful reminder of how bad it was, not to mention the unique form that badness took in the US.

50. What Have We Here? by Billy Dee Williams

Memoir by the actor. I don't think I'd realized quite how old he is (87 as of this writing). To be honest I mainly know him as Lando Calrissian, but he's had a fascinating life and is part of my parents' generation (born 5 years after my mother) rather than my older brothers'. (My brothers were all teens when I was born and are Baby Boomers to my Gen X.)

>92 susanna.fraser: When my mother found a celebrity attractive, she would say: "he can eat crackers in my bed anytime" ("ew, Mom, gross!"). Billy Dee Williams and Stuart Whitman were two that fell into the cracker-eating category.

>93 ReneeMarie: The version of that I always heard was "I wouldn't kick him out of bed for eating crackers."



51. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

This book is a trippy and fascinating mashup of science fiction and fantasy whose first third is YA and has definite touches of romance.

52. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

An short, rather interesting book on doing less to do more, mostly focused on creative people and knowledge workers. It gave me some ideas to try out both in my day job and in my writing and other personal projects.

53. Woven by Joshua Barkman

Joshua Barkman, author of the False Knees webcomic, has for the past several years done a month-long serial story for Inktober, which he then self-publishes in book form. 2023's story is a beautiful meditation on creativity, loneliness, and rediscovering what gives you joy.

54. Recoding America by Jennifer Pahlka

All about the handicaps facing government as it tries to deliver good service quickly in the digital era, with many examples of how it can be improved. The pain points struck extremely close to home for me as someone whose day job is on the financial side of academic research administration at the University of Washington, where we are currently going through new system implementation hell.

55. Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? * by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

Sort of Bridget Jones meets Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in London's Nigerian immigrant community.

56. City of Bones * by Martha Wells

An early Martha Wells book (originally published in 1995). It's not as good as Murderbot by a long shot, but you can see the roots of her talent and the sort of grumpy outsider with a heart of gold she likes to feature.

57. Cloistered: My Years As A Nun by Catherine Coldstream

I've been fascinated by nun memoirs ever since I first read the novel In This House of Brede. The various monasteries and convents always come out looking worse than Brede Abbey, of course--in this case the author's Carmelite convent morphed into a personality cult. It's an unusual memoir of its kind in that Coldstream doesn't give up on her faith altogether and still values prayer and silence in her secular life as a writer, teacher, and wife. You get the sense if she'd entered a better-run convent, she probably would've stayed in for life and considered her life a good one.

58. Prisoners of a Pirate Queen * by Marshall J. Moore

Second in a cozy, heartwarming pirate series by an author I discovered on TikTok.

I love how eclectic your selections are! I've marked a few to check out. So, thanks!