TBR List Update: September

      

I'm working my way through #VirtualMountTBR. Here's my current To-Be-Read List, and here's the list of titles I have read this year.

In September 2023

Books read: 4

Books I decided NOT to finish: 11

Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA:  It was the least interesting one left on the list.

In an ironic twist, American Appetite was removed from the contenders because the only copy in my library system was discovered to have had coffee spilled across it by a previous borrower or browser. 

Into the Vietnamese Kitchen has lovely coffee-table qualities, but it was enough to flip through it and take note of a few anecdotes from the author and some flavor combinations (and information about how to choose a quality fish sauce).

From the culling of food culture/history/memoir titles: 

• African American Foodways
• Getting What We Need Ourselves
• Every Nation Has Its Dish
• Food on the Page
• From Scratch: Inside the Food Network
• Southern Food and Civil Rights

Four Hundred Souls is a worthy tome, but I've tried several times now to go back to it without success. I'm going to resign myself to not having read it, and take it off the list; I at least know that it exists and can recommend it to readers who want to tackle it.

I also tried (for 3 months!) to get around to reading The Woman in the Mirror, and have accepted that I won't.

Life Undercover

Books left on the TBR List: 50

Best book of the month: The American Way of Eating

The narrative style (from an investigative reporter) drew me in and I could relate to her experiences in retail grocery, food service, and agriculture (I haven't worked in that last industry, but a couple years ago I read Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture, which was pretty fresh in my mind).

Worst book of the month: The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

I didn't really grasp the plot-within-a-plot. This could be because I read the ebook -- would a print format have made the POV clearer from chapter to chapter? Anyway, meh.

I was hoping to catch up this month, by reading the backlog of books I physically have in my possession, but I am still behind. Next come all the horrific treats I requested specifically for spooky season... will I gorge on those sweets or finish my veggies first?

To Be (Read), or not To Be

Heading into Q4 of this challenge year, I'm being a little strategic in my approach to #VirtualMountTBR. I will definitely not read 66 titles (plus those in-progress/in my possession) in 3 months, despite a good showing so far this year. Time to winnow!

Some of the 15 foodways history and food memoir titles are a little redundant, so I thought I might choose only two or three, and hope that browsing the others satisfies my curiosity. Turns out I really liked 6 when I saw them in person: a couple that looked fun and will go quickly thanks to a third of the page count actually being illustrations or footnotes, some memoir from an undercover journalist with a flair for storytelling, and the most accessible of the nonfiction written for a lay audience with a TV remote close at hand.

My first pass resulted in a Maybe stack (to the left) and a No stack (to the right).

Further review: keep these!

I also placed holds on several delightfully horrifying novels and some short stories for the month of October, which will hopefully be read quickly. The Stephen King re-reads are something I've been looking forward to -- they won't count toward my new books read this year, but they'll help shorten the TBR list.

I've limited my NEXT year's list to 50 books (not there yet) and have an idea of a couple I'd remove if I needed space. With any that I choose to keep for another year, and perhaps even some unplanned titles, that should make a full reading itinerary for 2024.

TBR List Update: August

     

I'm working my way through #VirtualMountTBR. Here's my current To-Be-Read List, and here's the list of titles I have read this year.

In August 2023

Books read: 6

Books I decided NOT to finish: 2

Despite hanging onto and coming back to Lost Children Archive, I DNF; the topic seemed interesting but the execution was so dry and weirdly detached! How does the main character feel about her husband accepting a job across the country without consulting with her? Does this mean their marriage is on the rocks? What does he think about her career, and what adjustments or sacrifices is she making to accommodate his? "The girl" and "the boy", their children, blended together for me into an amorphous backseat blob -- I kept forgetting which one was older. When I looked at the "leftovers" from June and July's holds, it just didn't seem worthwhile to keep slogging through this one when I could clear the pile.

I started Calypso, but David Sedaris is for a select palate (not mine). Trauma tossed off wittily but not with a personality I can relate to.

Books left on the TBR List: 66

Best book of the month: A Half-Built Garden

I was so excited by this one! 30 or 40 pages in, I wrote a glowing recommendation to library colleagues, feeling like I'd finally identified the niche of queer Jewish feminist sf that speaks to me most deeply. It's near-future when the aliens land and tell the first humans they meet that the planet Earth is running out of resources and will perish (and the human race along with it) if humans don't evacuate their home planet in the aliens' ships. But the humans, part of a watershed network that champions ethical use of natural resources and seeks to make decisions through AI-assisted consensus negotiation, take umbrage -- they KNOW Earth is in trouble and have been working the last two generations to reverse humans' terrible impact on the planet. Shouldn't they get a chance to save their home?

Worst book of the month: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I did NOT like the first-person writing and all the (improbable) dialogue without commentary in this novel's style. I skimmed a lot of it to get to the plot twists, and would have given it up (DNF) if it hadn't gone so quickly. Creepy, yes, but mostly annoying and confusing.

TBR List Update: July

    

I'm working my way through #VirtualMountTBR. Here's my current To-Be-Read List, and here's the list of titles I have read this year.

In July 2023

Books read: 7

Books I decided NOT to finish: 3

I flipped through Predators, Prey, and Other Kinfolk, but with a towering stack of library holds, it didn't make the cut. I renewed At Home like 8 times -- I do like Bill Bryson's chatty nonfiction -- but finally gave it up. I need more narrative, I guess. I also dropped The New One, which is about new parenthood, because I'd been first on the hold list for months and it was never free, and then I guess my library no longer has access to it in Overdrive, but I didn't get a notification that the hold would never be filled. Maybe I'll listen to the audiorecording sometime and not count it as a book.

Books left on the TBR List: 71

Best book of the month: The Sparrow

I liked The Sparrow more than I thought I would, and the sequel Children of God wasn't bad. either. (It wasn't on the TBR list, but I wanted to read it right after finishing the first, which was.) I missed their debut 20+ years ago, so only had a bare knowledge of the plot: Jesuit priest is only survivor of a space mission to an inhabited planet -- and he is maimed and reviled and generally in a deplorable state. This story was part sci-fi, part philosophy. and took careful reading to explore questions about conversion/colonization, faith/doubt, and what it means to be human. Lots of yummy linguistics, anthropology, theology. There wasn't a ton of text spent on the mechanics of space travel or communication, which means it holds up to a critical review a few decades later -- the same timeframe that part of the book takes place. Thankfully, the author had the good luck to set first contact in 2019, not 2020! I like a story that makes me think, and this one had quite a few ethical puzzlers to mull over.

Worst book of the month: Nothing!

I didn't read much, but it was all pretty good!

#VirtualMountTBR Update: Halfway Point

6 months into a year-long challenge, what's left on the TBR list? 77 titles out of 150. 

• I'm not counting the "in progress" ones already checked out to me.
• I read or listened to a few off-list titles that I came across at a convenient time. They count toward my annual total, but don't bring down the TBR.
• I started discarding titles that I decided NOT to finish.

The breakdown of what remains:

I'm most looking forward to...

• The Foundling
• Ida B.
• A Half-Built Garden
• Not much else, truthfully. I'm kinda burned out. And I'm already wanting to read things on next year's list.