Crowdsourced TBR 2024!
In which I resolve to read others' recommendations (mostly)
Happy New Year!
About a week ago, I made a decision I’ve never made before: I resolved to solicit –– and actually read –– recommendations from other people in my life (family, friends, social media followers, etc.). And actually read them.
This was actually part of a broader resolution of mine, as someone who feels the crushing weight of their Goodreads tbr despite adding onto it almost daily. The thing is almost 3000 books long, with no signs of slowing in its growth; this isn’t only an existential problem (it makes me think about the ephemerality of life, the inevitability of dying with books still to read…) but also a practical, organizational one. A 3000 book TBR is inherently unwieldy. How do I pick, and how do I prioritize?
Traditionally, I’ve chosen which books I read in one of three ways: 1) Have I been assigned this? (as a student, an instructor, a blurber, a reviewer), 2) Is it very timely (addressing something I need to know about Right The Fuck Now), or, most often, 3) Are the vibes right? I’d estimate over 3/4 of the books I read in a given year are selected based on vibes, often interrelated with their immediate availability to me: are they physically there on my shelf, calling my name? Did they come up in my Libby holds?
I realize I’m using a lot of question marks here, mostly because this idea of creating a concrete and time-sensitive TBR is still new to me. My first experience with it was around a year and a half ago, when I made required reading lists for my qualifying exams –– a decidedly not-fun, very-mandatory iteration of the TBR. Luckily, this is not that. Instead, these are fun recs by people who know my taste and want to share words they love with me. My hope is that, if I don’t complete this list in full, I make a decent dent into it and perhaps start a new tradition for myself/community.
Find the list below (that’s the Goodreads version, which will change throughout the year as I add and remove things, is linked). Most of these titles come courtesy of others, but some are books I just want to prioritize this year. This 60something book TBR is partial and leaves plenty of room for vibes and academic books, etc.
The List (in no particular order):
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Sai Englert
Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo
Book of Extraction: Poems With Teeth, Adrian Dallas Frandle
Nayra and the Djinn, Iasmin Omar Ata
At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Tara Ison
Leech, Hiron Ennes
The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez
Gag Reflex, Elle Nash
Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield
Something New Under the Sun, Alexandra Kleeman
The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Octavia Cade
The Good Sister, Sally Hepworth
The Sentient, Nadia Afifi
Thrown in the Throat, Benjamin Garcia
Lakewood, Megan Giddings
Negative Space, B.R. Yeager
Homie, Danez Smith
Our Share of Night, Mariana Enríquez
Advantages of Being Evergreen, Oliver Baez Bendorf
Crooked Plow, Itamar Vieira Junior
Salt Slow, Julia Armfield
Tears of the Trufflepig, Fernando A. Flores
Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes, Gwen Benaway
Autobiography of a Semiromantic Anarchist, Monica Teresa Ortiz
Bad User Agreement, Metropolarity
Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi
High as the Waters Rise, Anja Kampmann
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, Margaret Killjoy
Pseudotooth, Verity Holloway
Style of Attack Report, Metropolarity
Fen, Daisy Johnson
Gutshot, Amelia Gray
Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie
The Swan Book, Alexis Wright
Long Division, Kiese Laymon
At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories, Kij Johnson
The Drowning Girl, Caitlin R. Kiernan
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender
Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Raja Shehadeh
Children in Reindeer Woods, Kristín Ómarsdóttir
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
The Fortunate Fall, Raphael Carter
Notes of a Crocodile, Qiu Miaojin
Blackwater, Kerstin Ekman
Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh
The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin
They: A Sequence of Unease, Kay Dick
Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones
The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
Cripping Intersex, Celeste Orr
Be Kind, My Neighbor, Yugo Limbo
A Prayer for a Non-Religious Autistic, Lucas Scheelk
Thank you to everyone who helped make this list possible!!
Paid subscribers will be able to comment their recs below, but all are welcome to hop over to my Goodreads to see my progress/message me their recommendations. Thanks for reading, and here’s to a 2024 full of good books.
I'm guessing you might like GennaRose Nethercott's "Thistlefoot," a modern fantasy novel about the descendants of Baba Yaga.