QUESTIONS for the AVID READER

Hello and Happy New Reading Year to all.

I’m SassyLassy. If you’re new to Club Read, this is a thread where I post a question regularly, and anyone who wishes can jump in and respond. The questions are guidelines only. If they inspire a tangential thought, jump in with that. That’s how good discussions often get going. You can also wander off and come back weeks later to respond.

If you’ve been around Club Read for awhile, welcome back to Questions, and do jump in.

If you have a thought for a question, please send me a PM, as I’m always on the lookout for ideas.

image from the Harvard Gazette
QUESTION 1: Carry Forward

New Year is often a time of fresh starts, clean slate, and all that kind of talk. However, the things that made up the old year didn’t just stop dead at midnight. What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

>1 SassyLassy: yay

>2 SassyLassy: Thomas Malory mainly. And my long term project to read through selected cornerstone literary classics. I’m shifting to Renaissance (although Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio are Renaissance, they predate Chaucer and Malory, who are (arguably) more medieval). Also Atwood’s Book of Lives carries over on audio.

William Faulkner does not. I might be done with him. Switching to Virginia Woolf.

QUESTION 1: What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

Oh God, too many things to list!

Immediately, I am bringing forward two books from my list of Christmas reads to read in December, but didn't get to. Case of the Holiday Hijinks and Christmas With the Queen. I am also bringing forward two books that didn't get finished for the 2025 Reading Through Time categories: Death at the Village Chess Club and The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.

I have entire lists of "leftovers" on my thread. I never let go of themes that I have done in the past, and even keep adding titles to those. So Old Themes, but new titles. And this year I have also created a challenge, where I have listed 16 leftovers, and the goal is to read 12 of them - one a month. The one I have picked for January is Wolf Hall - a book I have read half of, and restarted several times. It's a GREAT book, so I don't know why it has been so hard to finish. In a way, it is a book that needs to be studied, and I can't maintain the kind of intensity it requires perhaps.

One of the Old Themes I am reprising this year are books related to Pride and Prejudice. But I am specifically focusing on Mr. Darcy. So I'll be reading An Assembly Such As This in January. It's an interlibrary loan request that will have to be returned in a couple of weeks.

I have a few series and authors that I carry over. One I've had for a few years is Elizabeth Chadwick. I'd like to read all of her books more or less in chronological order. And I haven't managed to get very far! I'm carrying over The Conquest from last year, and her Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy starting with The Summer Queen.

A long term project I have, just because the book is over 1,000 pages. My grandmother gifted me the book eons ago, and I have tried to read it for years: ...And Ladies of the Club. I WILL get it read one of these years, if for no other reason than it was a book she loved enough to want to share it with me.

And finally, just because I list about 250 books to read every year, I actually only read less than a quarter of those, and so the rest become leftovers, especially the books that I have marked as wanting to read in one of my monthly plans. I'm going to have to live to be 500 at least to get everything read that I want to read!

QUESTION 1: What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

This year, I'm carrying 2 current reads into this year. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and Bemused by Farrah Rochon. These are books I've started and paused for other books as the end of 2025 rolled around.

Right now, I'm really focused on diversity reading. Growing up in a minority-majority city, I had assumed that my reading would automatically be pretty varied in terms of author heritage and own voices. I've always been an avid reader. Two years ago, I realized that my giant list of read books wasn't nearly as diverse as I'd hoped! Some of the art styles from children's books were just taken culturally and used by other authors who had no connections or roots in it, the way my family, my school and I did. Now I want to be sure things I'm reading are more authentic to the experience I've lived and my community. I want the kids I read to at Storytime to be able to look back and say the books they heard at the library or during school visits WERE actually as diverse as they may think later on.

I'm working on trying to finish more of the books that my sister and sister-in-law have lent me. They've gotten into the habit of throwing TONS of books at me and I'm working through everything slower than expected. I keep reading library books over the ones I have borrowed on my shelf. I'd really like to correct that to get more buddy reading aspects in my life, more shared discussions.

I'd also like to try to actually connect with more readers in the group/in online book spaces. I tend to be a bit of an island, with a fear of reaching out to others or feeling bad because I get distracted with my library work. I'm hoping this year will be my social butterfly book year online!

>3 dchaikin: I have a couple of Faulkner's books, but I've yet to tackle them. I haven't dabbled in Woolf. What has turned you off with Faulkner?

Dante's Inferno has been on my TBR for far too long!

>6 royallyreading: Faulkner is fascinating. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are two of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m not his best reader and not everything he wrote works for me. I didn’t like Absalom, Absalom!, which many consider his best. I think he peaked for me around 1929, or even 1927, and then slowly got harder for me to appreciate. His later works are universally criticized as lesser. So it’s maybe not entirely just me. His Collected Stories (published 1950, Pulitzer 1951) are what finally made me decide I needed a long break. … that might be more than you wanted to know. 🙂

The Sound and the Fury is one that I have in my classic TBR pile at home, which is why I was curious! I've heard mixed things about his books and that difference between earlier/later is likely why the discourse I've seen has been so varied.

Q1: What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

I finished my paper book (The Poppy War) on New Year's Eve, so although I started with a fresh book on the 1st, it was the next book in the trilogy, so also a continuation. I also carried over my audiobook: The Life and Times of Nicholas Nickleby.

As for themes, very little changes for me there from year to year: Paul's challenge, my RL book club, translated literature, the Zola group read (where I am terribly behind, but determined to continue), Holocaust literature, Reading Globally quarterly theme reads. This year I want to return to my Chinese history reading. It got sidelined last year, in part due to a reading slump partway through the year that required some lighter reading to kick. Otherwise same old!

In my homeschool adventures, we will be segue waying from Greek mythology to a children's version of the Iliad by Gillian Cross next week. We will be creating a giant 3D map in order to track the action through both the Iliad and Odyssey.

The Sound and the Fury is one that I have in my classic TBR pile at home, which is why I was curious! I've heard mixed things about his books and that difference between earlier/later is likely why the discourse I've seen has been so varied.

What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

I am not one that needs a fresh start on Jan. 1st. So the book I was reading the day before carried into the new year.

I haven't put enough thought into my reading plans, so many of the themes/goals will carry over -- to read more diverse authors, to read more translated literature for my Global Reading Challenge (I hope to have read a book from every country in the Americas by the end of this year), to reduce my physical TBR, and finally, to finish reading books from the 1001-Books-to-Read list.

>5 royallyreading: this is such a lovely admirable goal - reading to be more in with your own community.

>8 royallyreading: maybe. Faulkner is never easy. He doesn’t tell what’s he doing till after he finishes. You have to tolerate that and then rethink, and reread. TS&F has a super challenging first part - the Benji section. But once it clicks, it’s not challenging anymore. It’s magnificent. But it’s got to click. You probably need to read it twice, once super frustration and once for the special experience. Other books require a certain patience and tolerance with Faulkner’s views, tones, indulgences. His characters are human, but also often awful people. His own perspective on race he liked, but we don’t. He thought he was being a good person, sincerely adoring the house servants who helped raise him and who were, of course, black. All together, views are, i imagine, bound to be mixed. 🙂

>11 ELiz_M: “So the book I was reading the day before carried into the new year.” 🙂

>4 WelshBookworm:

Oh, I love An Assembly Such As This (I think my favorite of the trilogy is These Three Remain, though...and now I want to reread them all)! And I, too, have ...And Ladies of the Club sitting on my shelves, courtesy of my maternal grandparents' library (when they passed, I inherited some of their books). Also haven't read it yet, because it is massive, but maybe I will get to it this year!

Q1: What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

I am also one of those readers who rarely times their reading, so I am always in the midst of one or more books at the start of every year. I also don't tend to plan out my reading in any great detail, preferring to approach the process with a certain reliance on serendipity and whim.

My current big "project" is a measured, two year reading of Deadlier at one story a week. I'm finding that it's a good way to approach a big anthology, and it's also getting me to read more short fiction.

Other things that are carrying over are a reread of the Vorkosigan Saga with my youngest sibling (we do regular buddy reads together, and started in on this series back in September); keeping up with my in-person book club (easier, as all of our picks for the beginning of 2026 are books I have previously read, and January's book I read back in July, so I probably won't be revisiting it directly); and capping my list of active reads at ten books. That last one was a new endeavor in 2025, and it seems to have worked well as a form of encouragement for me.

>16 shadrach_anki: “ capping my list of active reads at ten books.”

Only ten? This comment made me smile

>17 dchaikin: Well, when you consider the fact that prior to setting that limit I would regularly have 20+ "active" reads, it's quite the exercise in restraint on my part! It's also encouraging me to focus on finishing things (or make the conscious decision to set them aside).

>18 shadrach_anki: i do appreciate what you’re doing. As a thought, sometimes it’s good to read a small part from several works without any intention of finishing them. It could work wonderfully with poetry. But also sometimes we need a sense of completion.

QUESTION 1: Carry Forward
I’m another one who tends to get fired up about new reading projects and leave old ones dangling, so no promises!

- I’m hoping to carry on with Elias Canetti’s memoirs. I got him up to 1931 in 2025, and there are two more volumes sitting on the TBR shelf, which together would take me about a decade further.

- I’ve also recently added a couple of East German books to the pile, so I’m likely to return to my long-running and frequently neglected DDR theme. Especially since the Netflix series Kleo left me with a hankering for track-suits and boldly-patterned wallpaper…

Hi here from a newcomer,
It's an excellent question. As I tend to read several books at a time, a whole bunch got carried forward into 2026. Since then, I finished Hunger Knut Hamsun
I have The Portrait of a Lady that I have restarted after being quite impressed by The Ambassadors last year.
The Possessed by Gombrowicz is not living up to the expectations, it will take some time to finish.
In am more likely to get over the finish line first with Justine by Durrell - I love the language but do not enjoy the story. The Alexandria Quartet will get a break after that.
The series I intend to abandon after the first book is Les Rois maudits by Druon. It's just not good.
Finally, there is a math book Meta Math that takes a bit of effort.
Happy reading in 2026!

>21 VladysKovsky: Hamsun has promising future 🙂 (since 1890!) I should read this politically unpalatable guy, too.

QUESTION 1: Carry Forward

What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

One goal I have is to make a dent in the unread books from my Archipelago Books subscription. I receive at least 10-12 books per year, which are quality books of literature in translation, but somehow I never seem to get to them on a timely basis, and thus I have several dozen of Archipelago titles in my library.

>22 dchaikin: Just tried to imagine what it would feel reading him back then

>24 VladysKovsky: and so charming how you put in the review!

I'm not carrying over any books-in-progress because I put in a reading marathon on New Year's Eve day to finish reading a gargantuan biography of Huey Long by T. Harry Williams (875 pp).

I am persisting on my reading queue though. It tends to have about 80 books in it. I alternate one new book with one book off-the-shelf. (My husband is a great reader too, though, so many of the books off-the-shelf end up being books that he just read.) I'm very strict with myself -- I have to read them in order except that books I'm reading for a book group get to skip to the front. This has been a great thing for me because I no longer buy books and shelve them without reading them. Also, it helps to see more difficult books coming at me from a distance so I can steel up my resolve. Previously, I had a static pile on my bedside table and I never got to the bottom book.

>21 VladysKovsky:
I read Hunger in 2023 and didn't enjoy it as much as you did. Intellectually, I could see that the narrator Andreas's judgment and perception of the world was impacted by his hunger. I could also see that Hamsun intended to describe the humiliation of poverty. But I was just not that interested in the soul-searching at the center of the book. Andreas was trying to figure out his sins so he could atone for them, but I was never as interested in him as he was in himself. He was so self-absorbed that he didn't seem to see others as fully human.

>5 royallyreading:
Good luck with Les Miserables! I finished it last year and it took forever because I had this idea that I should keep it as the audiobook I listened to while exercising. The recording was more than 65 hours and I definitely had deluded myself about how frequently I was realistically going to exercise by myself.

I am carrying forward Mari Sandoz Story Catcher of the Plains by Helen Winter Stauffer and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which I’ve been reading for - literally - years. I know there are a lot of other books around here that are in the process of being read, but they are kind of stalled at the moment. I really want to get at least a few of them back into the current mix, but am uncertain at the moment which ones are likely candidates for completion in the future.

>28 aprille: I definitely had deluded myself about how frequently I was realistically going to exercise by myself.


I had to laugh out loud at this, especially as I had to dust off my recumbent bike today it had been so long since I used it.

>23 kidzdoc: We need to form a support group for that… :)

>26 aprille: i like your system

>28 aprille: lol!

>29 Fourpawz2: i didn’t know you were reading Gibbon. How interesting. Someone recently told me his 1st book is charming and funny.

>31 AnnieMod: Archipelago support group ?

>31 AnnieMod: That's a good idea, Annie. I'm nearly finished with I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem, and the next work of fiction I'll read will be an Archipelago book, Cécé by the Haitian author Emmelie Prophète, Kay gave it 4½ stars.

>32 dchaikin: Annie is referring to those few of us who have subscriptions to Archipelago Books; unless any of us keep up we're probably drowning in those books, as good as they are.

QUESTION 1: Carry Forward

What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

My two ongoing multi-year projects continue. I want to read the complete history of short fiction nominated for US science fiction awards, and to read at least one book by each of the 90-ish authors I blogged about for the library I used to work for. I'm about 20% of the way through the SF project, which began three years ago. The blogged authors project is only a year old, and I began with about one-third of the 90-ish authors crossed out from having read them earlier in life.

What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

I'll be continuing to read Davis Grubb's work, though not very quickly as he didn't write that much and I've already read three of the five that I was most interested in (out of 10 novels total). I have some other classic West Virginia novels I want to get to as well.

My normal theme of reading widely shall continue and perhaps I'll get even better about dropping non-fiction books that are annoying me.

I don’t do projects, plans, or fresh starts, so I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing: reading about the French Renaissance and gobbling up books by Joan D. Vinge.

On the other hand, now seems as good a time as any to finally admit I won’t finish The Saint of Bright Doors. I can’t connect to it, maybe it’s the present tense narration, it just doesn’t work for me.

On the other other hand, I bought Patty Smith’s Book of Days just before the year end and was planning to read one page a day, and I’m already 3 days late 😊

>27 aprille: Aprille, I understand that. Indeed there's little empathy and the concerns are very individualistic. The protagonist's connections to other people are mostly determined by his perceptions of propriety, which are being transformed as he drifts further and further away from a state of sufficient comfort and into the abyss of hunger.

What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

I tend to usually work on a relatively slim TBR pile at home, but it grew more than normal in 2025 so I'm bringing that varied list into 2026 with me.

I read another couple of McEwan's in 2025, and didn't manage to get to his new one in December as planned, so that will be on the to read list this year at some point. An Edmund de Waal book blew me away last year, and I'm delighted to have another of his on the TBR pile to read, so that's a must too. As always, I'll be looking to keep myself mentally motivated and inspired with a few good (hopefully!) memoirs and personal development books.

I also hope to read a few titles from the vast library of much missed Caroline McElwee as part of the memorial thread set up in the 75ers group.

>38 AlisonY: would you mind posting a link to the Caroline memorial thread? I didn’t find it.

>39 dchaikin: Here you go: https://www.librarything.com/topic/377046#n9060308

>40 AlisonY: ❤️ 🙏

>13 dchaikin: "Faulkner is never easy. He doesn’t tell what’s he doing till after he finishes."

You've reminded me of an old saying I've always liked: Experience is the worst teacher because it gives you the test before teaching the lesson.

>26 aprille: "I alternate one new book with one book off-the-shelf. "

I do something like this, except I have a 3-way rotation. One new book, one off the shelf book, and one book of my "short list" TBR. That "short list," however, currently contains 120 books, including the series I'm in the midst of, which finally brings me to . . .

Question 1: What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

The series I'm in the midst of, as mentioned above, include:

* Walter John Williams' cyberpunk/SF Hardwired series (1 book to go)
* John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series (14 books to go)
* Richard Stark's (a.k.a. Donald Westlake's) Parker series (16 books to go)
* Don Tracy's Giff Speer series (3 books to go)
* C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series (4 books to go)
* Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series (3 books to go)
* Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time series (4 books to go)
* Emile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series (19 books to go!!)
* Giovannino Guareschi's Don Camillo series (8 books to go)
* The stories/novellas/whatever they are's in Sir Walter Scott's Chronicles of the Canongate (3 stories to go)

Books in my currently ongoing (thereby bringing forward into 2026) "between books" (anthologies, collections and other books of short entries I read one story/chapter at a time instead of plowing through them all at once). I alternate between two stacks of them:

Stack 1
* Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
* New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian and John D. Yohannan
* Baseball in Pinellas County by Dan Hirshberg
* My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell
* Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy by Mary Roach

Stack 2:
* Best Sports Stories 1965 edited by Irving T. Marsh and Edward Ehre
* The Public and Private Life of Daniel Webster by General S. P. Lyman
* Sweet Seasons: Recollections of the 1955-64 New York Yankees by Dom Forker
* When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010 by Tony Judt
* Life Magazine November, 7, 1955 edited by Edward K. Thompson

I'm also bringing forward
* The tradition that my wife and I established several years ago of each giving the other to read the book we enjoyed most (and that we think the other will enjoy) from the previous year's reading. This year my wife gave me The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (I absolutely loved his On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous), and I gave her the first book from the Don Camillo series, The Little World of Don Camillo.
* My project of reading all the novels of Isaac B. Singer in chronological order of their being published in English. I read two per year, the first book I start in the new year** and the first book I start in July. I have six Singer novels to go, including the next book on the list, The Penitent, which I'll be reading next. (After that, the Vuong)

I think that's it, other than my overarching goal of reading every interesting book ever published in English. :)

** I had to make an exception this year due to the fact that time was pressing for this month's selection for my monthly book group, so the Singer will be the second book started in 2026.

Aren't you glad you asked?

I want to read the second book of On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle. In terms of authors that I read for the first time I really want to look for more Patrick Modiano. His Invisible Ink was not fully resolved but I was left with the impression of a first rate author.

Edited to add: I also want to continue nibbling on United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal. Best in small doses.

>43 mejix: Impressions is a word I associate with Modiano. I've read two of his books, and the words atmospheric and muffled spring to mind as well.

>44 labfs39: I can see that, yes. Very minimalist. Many silences. At least in this one book.

Good to see all the carry forwards.


image from The Digital Humanities Reader

QUESTION 2: You in Your 2025 Books
This next question has been floating around LT and other sites. It's a place to have some fun with what you actually read in 2025. Just match a title from last year's reading with the description. As an example: You fear: The Worst Journey in the World.

Describe yourself:

Describe how you feel:

Describe where you currently live:

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?:

Your favourite form of transportation is:

Your favourite food is:

Your favourite time of day is:

Your best friend is:

You and your friends are:

What's the weather like?:

You fear:

What is the best advice you have to give:

Thought for the day:

What is life for you:

How you would like to die:

Your soul’s present condition:

What was 2025 like for you?

What do you want from 2026?

Question #2: Laurel's 2025 in books

Describe yourself: Cat About Town

Describe how you feel: Curiosity Thrilled the Cat

Describe where you currently live: Castle of Refuge

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Cats Cafe

Your favorite form of transportation is: Wanderland

Your favorite food is: Gingerbread

Your favorite time of day is: The Twilight Garden

Your best friend is: The Cat of Yule Cottage

You and your friends are: A Conspiracy of Friends

You fear: The Lost Words

What is the best advice you have to give: A Vow of Silence

Thought for the day: Friends Lovers Chocolate

What is life for you: The Whole Cat and Caboodle

How you would like to die: The Lady Flirts With Death

Your soul’s present condition: Wandering Stars

What was 2025 like for you? Good as Goldie

What do you want from 2026? The Tenth Gift

This was fun!

Describe yourself: Strong Female Character (Fern Brady)

Describe how you feel: The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)

Describe where you currently live: The Island Villa (Lily Graham)

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?:Night Boat to Tangier (Kevin Barry)

Your favourite form of transportation is: 6:40 to Montreal (Eva Jurcyzk)

Your favourite time of day: Evenings & Weekends (Oisen McKenna)

Your best friend is: The Queen of Dirt Island (Donal Ryan)

You and your friends are: The Bookclub for Troublesome Women (Marie Botswick)

What's the weather like?: Cold (Drew Hayden Taylor)

You fear: Rejection (Tony Tulathimutte)

What is the best advice you have to give: Wisdom in Nonsense (Heather O’Neill)

Thought for the day: I Hope This Finds You Well (Natalie Sue)

What is life for you: The Retirement Plan (Sue Hincenbergs)

How you would like to die: Surprise Me (Sophie Kinsella)

Your soul’s present condition: So Far Gone (Jess Walter)

What was 2025 like for you? My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh)

What do you want from 2026? An Impossible Fortune (Richard Osman)

>46 SassyLassy: i’ll wait till I can find some time and come back. Sometimes these kinds of questions leave me feeling like I’m playing that apples to apples card game and I’m stuck with all the impossible to match cards.🙂

I thought this was fun!

Year-End Meme for 2025:

Describe yourself: I Know What I Am

Describe how you feel: Everyday Average Jones

Describe where you currently live: Cold Crematorium

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

Your favorite form of transportation is: Memed, My Hawk

Your favorite food is: The Vegetarian

Your favorite time of day is: So Late in the Day

Your best friend is: The Genius Under the Table

You and your friends are: Women Talking

You fear: Killers of a Certain Age

What is the best advice you have to give: How to Get Your Child Off the Refrigerator

Thought for the day: Don't Forget to Write

What is life for you: Fun Home

How you would like to die: Elena Knows

Your soul’s present condition: Between Shades of Gray

What was 2025 like for you? Ten Thousand Light Years from Okay

What do you want from 2026? The New Retirement

Q2 - enjoyed this!

Describe yourself: Braver Than You Think

Describe how you feel: I'm Not As Well as I thought I Was

Describe where you currently live: The Colony

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Long Island

Your favorite form of transportation is: A Swim In a Pond in the Rain

Your favorite food is: Health Revolution: Finding Happiness and Health Through an Anti-Inflammatory Lifestyle

Your favorite time of day is: Our Evenings

Your best friend is: Lucy By The Sea

You and your friends are: Prisoners of Geography

You fear: The Big Leap

What is the best advice you have to give: Beyond the Shallows: Life is Better in the Deep End

Thought for the day: God is Closer Than You Think

What is life for you: Don't Stop Me Now

How you would like to die: Things I Don't Want to Know

Your soul’s present condition: The Untethered Soul

What was 2025 like for you? The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self

What do you want from 2026? The Joy of Not Working

Your responses are really funny, Alison. If I'm not careful I'll start choosing books based on their titles for next year's book meme.

>52 labfs39: Ditto! Sadly quite a few of mine felt too apt! ;)

From 2025 reads - or that’s the plan

Describe yourself: Harping On

Describe how you feel: like A Man on the Moon

Describe where you currently live: The South

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?: Hotel du Lac

Your favourite form of transportation is: well, not One Boat, and not a Small Boat, but i don’t seem to have any other options

Your favourite food is: Flesh

Your favourite time of day is: ??

Your best friend is: Will There Ever Be Another You

You and your friends are: Fast and Loose

What's the weather like?: Home Fire (for the day)

You fear: Housekeeping

What is the best advice you have to give: The Secret of Life

Thought for the day: There’s A Monster Behind the Door

What is life for you: Misinterpretation

How you would like to die: Things I don’t Want to know

Your soul’s present condition: Clear

What was 2025 like for you? Gone to the Forest

What do you want from 2026? Perfection

I did this one in my topic a few days ago, so I'll just copy it here:

Describe yourself: Replaceable You
Describe how you feel: Burn This
Describe where you currently live: All Systems Red
If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Across the Universe
Your favourite form of transportation is: The Local
Your favourite food is: One Pot, One Portion
Your favourite time of day is: When the Moon Hits Your Eye
Your best friend is: Tigerheart
You and your friends are: How Lucky
What’s the weather like: Cue the Sun
You fear: The Shattering Peace
What is the best advice you have to give: Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Thought for the day: Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth
What is life for you: The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told
How you would like to die: Exhalation
Your soul’s present condition: Scorched Grace
What was 2025 like for you? Rough Cut
What do you want from 2026? A Marvellous Light

...and I will also repeat the note that I am not nearly as depressed and stressed as my book titles might make me suggest, and I really need to find some books with happier titles this year.

Describe yourself: I Who Have Never Known Men

Describe how you feel: The Idiot

Describe where you currently live: North Woods

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?: Another World

Your favourite form of transportation is: If I Had the Wings

Your favourite food is: Fresh Dirt From the Grave

Your favourite time of day is: A Time to Be Born

Your best friend is: The Unconsoled

You and your friends are: Ghosts

What's the weather like?: A Different Hurricane

You fear: Death of the Author

What is the best advice you have to give: Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring

Thought for the day: Broad and Alien Is the World

What is life for you: The History of Sound

How you would like to die: Martyr!

Your soul’s present condition: A Void

What was 2025 like for you? Worst Case Scenario

What do you want from 2026? Trust

Describe yourself:Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself.

Describe how you feel:Chocky

Describe where you currently live: ‎Nesting: A Novel

Your favorite time of day is:Three Days in June

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: The Dream Hotel: A Read with Jenna Pick

Your favorite form of transportation:Slow Man

Your best friend is:Gliff: A Novel

You and your friends are:‎Scattered All Over the Earth

What are you eating: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

What’s the weather like: The Long Sunset

You fear:Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future

What is the best advice you have to give: The Secret of Secrets

Thought for the day: The Less People Know About Us

How you would like to die: Prophet

Your soul’s present condition:Sweet Sickness

What is life for you: Deep Water

What was 2025 like for you? The Midwich Cuckoos

What do you want from 2026? The Place of Tides

>50 labfs39: ah, this is fun! So many good choices! My thanks to Lisa for introducing me to this game. I ran it with my bookclub and everyone had a very consistent set of answers.
Here is my version number 2 for 2025:

Describe yourself: The Man Who Spoke Snakish

Describe how you feel: The Loser

Describe where you currently live: Border Districts

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Into the Forest

Your favorite form of transportation is: Walking to Aldebaran

Your favorite food is: The Egg and Other Stories

Your favorite time of day is: L'heure bleue (Peter Stamm)

Your best friend is: A Single Man

You and your friends are: The Ambassadors

What’s the weather like? Absolute Zero (Artem Chekh)

You fear: Crusaders (Dan Jones)

What is the best advice you have to give: Lady Oracle

Thought for the day: Exit Strategy

What is life for you: Lessons

How you would like to die: System Collapse

Your soul’s present condition: Artificial Condition

What was 2025 like for you? Ordinary Human Failings

What do you want from 2026? The Proof of My Innocence

Q2

Describe yourself:
A most wanted man
Describe how you feel:
Little man, what now?
Describe where you currently live:
The 15-minute city
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?:
Astray
Your favourite form of transportation is:
On James Baldwin (*)
Your favourite food is:
Honey and salt
Your favourite time of day is:
Don’t call it night
Your best friend is:
A friend of the earth
You and your friends are:
The gay crusaders
What's the weather like?:
The howling miller
You fear:
The American No
What is the best advice you have to give:
To engineer is human
Thought for the day:
If you liked school, you’ll love work
What is life for you:
Across the pond
How you would like to die:
Four bare legs in a bed
Your soul’s present condition:
On Chesil Beach
What was 2025 like for you?
The end of the world news
What do you want from 2026?
Promise of a dream

—
(*) Sorry! I usually have plenty of books with transportation in the title, that was the closest I could get this year.

>46 SassyLassy: This is fun!

QUESTION 2: You in Your 2025 Books

Describe yourself: A Quiet Teacher by Adam Oyebanji (this was too good to pass up)
Describe how you feel: Suspicion by Seicho Matsumoto
Describe where you currently live: A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey
If you could go anywhere, where would you go?: The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez
Your favourite form of transportation is: Vertical Motion by Can Xue
Your favourite food is: Papaya Salad by Elisa Macellari
Your favourite time of day is: The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (hour, presumably)
Your best friend is: The Magpie at Night by Li Qingzhao
You and your friends are: Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda
What's the weather like?: Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi
You fear: Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
What is the best advice you have to give: Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
Thought for the day: Everything in this Country Must by Colum McCann
What is life for you: School of Instructions by Ishion Hutchinson
How you would like to die: A Fatal Crossing by Tom Hindle
What is your soul’s present condition: Archaic Smile by Alicia Stallings
What was 2025 like for you? Smaller and Smaller Circles by F H Batacan
What do you want from 2026? Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

>59 thorold: "Astray"

That made me giggle, thank you

Describe yourself: Living

Describe how you feel: Smart, Wrong, and Lucky

Describe where you currently live: The Drowned World

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?: The Towers of Trebizond

Your favourite form of transportation is: A Walk in the Sun (I had to go back to 2024 for this one.)

Your favourite food is:

Your favourite time of day is: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World

Your best friend is: The Betrothed

You and your friends are: Loving

What's the weather like?: Ill Wind

You fear: The Betrayers

What is the best advice you have to give: Tell My Horse (Another from 2024)

Thought for the day: Old Truths and New Cliches

What is life for you: Soul Mountain

How you would like to die: The Sleep of the Just

Your soul’s present condition: We Called it Music

What was 2025 like for you? The New York Game

What do you want from 2026? Good People

QUESTION 2:

Describe yourself: Heaven and Hell

Describe how you feel: The Imposter

Describe where you currently live: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?: Peach Blossom Paradise

Your favourite form of transportation is: The Road

Your favourite food is: The Serviceberry

Your favourite time of day is: The Stars at Noon

Your best friend is: The Adversary

You and your friends are: The Enchanters

What's the weather like?: Blue Skies

You fear: Misinterpretation

What is the best advice you have to give: Dream of Ding Village

Thought for the day: On Bullfighting

What is life for you: The Book of Illusions

How you would like to die: Free

Your soul’s present condition: Midnight and Blue

What was 2025 like for you? The Mountain and the Valley

What do you want from 2026? World enough and Time

>54 dchaikin: I feel fear of housekeeping is legitimate.

>64 AlisonY: it’s a real and present fear! 🙂

Catching up on these questions, since I'm already behind on keeping up with this group in the new year.

Q1 What will you bring forward from 2025: which authors, series, and/or themes will you continue pursuing?

I am bringing forward my TBR of approximately 1500 volumes. I will surely be able to make a giant dent in those by the end of the year. And to not add to it by buying more than I read. Right? Right?

QUESTION 2: You in Your 2025 Books

Oh, I always find this thing fun. Thanks for including it!

Describe yourself: Out There

Describe how you feel: Breathless

Describe where you currently live: Wandering in the Clear Light of New Mexico

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?: Unseen Universe

Your favourite form of transportation is: From Apollo to Artemis

Your favourite food is: Salt Sugar Fat

Your favourite time of day is: The World at Night

Your best friend is: The Pursuit of Grouchiness

You and your friends are: Off the Edge

What's the weather like?: Looking for Alaska

You fear: On Tyranny

What is the best advice you have to give: Don't Believe Everything You Think

Thought for the day: Is Math Real?

What is life for you: A Secret of the Universe

How you would like to die: Swan Song

Your soul’s present condition: Dark Places

What was 2025 like for you? The Age of Calamities

What do you want from 2026? Lies Sleeping

Inspired by Question 2



image is Composition 8 from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

QUESTION 3: Composition Challenge

Take any one category from Question 2 and write a paragraph or two linking all the responses to that one category.
Please state your category.

Here's an example:

Category - Your best friend is

CR held a party and everybody invited their best friend. It was quite an assembly. It ranged from animals like The Cat of Yule Cottage and The Magpie at Night to royalty like The Queen of Dirt Island.

Are the Women Talking about Lucy by the Sea or A Single Man? Is either of them The Betrothed?

There's Tigerheart who is definitely A Friend of the Earth, but a Gliff may well see him as The Adversary instead, engaged in The Pursuit of Grouchiness.

Over in the corner is The Unconsoled wondering Will There Ever Be Another You.

Not sure everyone is getting along.

>67 SassyLassy: this question is tough Sassy! 🙂

>68 dchaikin: I've been wondering who will take on the challenge!
Think of it as a distraction from the world.

>67 SassyLassy: I'll give it a try.

Category - Your soul’s present condition

On Chesil Beach at Midnight
And Blue, Clear waters of the day
Are So Far Gone,
Forgotten is the Scorched Grace of sand

Instead the sea Between Shades of Grey
Harbors A Void for The Untethered Soul.

Like Wandering Stars we dance along
In the Dark Places of the night
Deceiving ourselves.
We Called It Music -
This Artificial Condition of the mind.

Our Sweet Sickness would not last
With an Archaic Smile you waved, you left
And turned the present into past.

>70 VladysKovsky: That's amazing.
Thanks so much for giving it far more than a try.

I'll give it a shot. This is category 3 (Describe where you currently live):

When we saw that it was All Systems Red, we knew it was time to leave, so we left The Island Villa that we had built in The Colony, left behind The 15-minute city and the Cold Crematorium, and put The Drowned World behind us. Travelling through The North Woods, past Border Districts, Wandering in the Clear Light of New Mexico, we arrived at last in The South and built our Castle of Refuge. We are A Long Way from Home but sometimes it feels as though We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

>70 VladysKovsky: and >72 rasdhar: these are fantastic. Love “Instead the sea Between Shades of Grey / Harbors A Void for The Untethered Soul.” And we “put The Drowned World behind us”

>72 rasdhar: Another great one! I love the way you connected them leading to home.

>73 dchaikin: Waiting for yours!

>70 VladysKovsky:
>72 rasdhar:
brilliant!

>74 SassyLassy: i saw this on Feb 8th. But i’m still evading. 🙂

>70 VladysKovsky: and >72 rasdhar: Thanks so much for taking it on!

Now for all you evaders out there, a simpler question


image by Mikhail Leonov/Shutterstock from ScienceAlert

QUESTION 4: Time

Time, oh good good time, where did you go? Don Williams*

There's been a lot of discussion in various threads about the amount of time to invest in reading or listening to a book.

How important is the time commitment to you? Do you even consider it?

Do you have a mental equation between the amount of time it appears must be invested, and the appeal of the book?

Do you dismiss some books because you feel they're too long? If so, which books have suffered this fate?

If time is a consideration, has it always been so? Was there a time when you would just lose yourself in a book completely and forget all else?
______________

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIoUs_8tWIE

Q4: Time

Tempus fudjits, as one of our teachers used to say…

In theory it shouldn’t make any difference, since reading is a continuous process interrupted periodically by the need to change books. If anything, reading long books is more efficient, because you don’t need to get up and walk to the bookcase so often. And there is a special pleasure of immersing yourself in the fictional world of a really good long novel (Dickens, George Eliot, Stendhal, etc.) and knowing you won’t have to leave for another few hundred pages.

In practice I find there are various things that might discourage me from tackling a really long book. One of those is the awareness of all the other exciting books on the TBR pile that might have to be postponed an extra day or two if I’ve got to plough through a 900-page monster first. Another is the physical awkwardness of dealing with something big and heavy, and the fact that you wouldn’t want to take it on a journey (obviously that doesn’t apply to ebooks or audio). Another thing that shouldn’t play a role, but perhaps does sometimes, is knowing that you won’t have any reviews to post on LibraryThing until you finish it (unless you commit book-adultery with a novella in between times…).

At the moment I’m halfway through a 500-pager in German, and I’m quite happy to be there for another day or two. But there are a few monsters lurking on the TBR pile that have been there a while — Don Quijote, Shogun, A short history of nearly everything, La Noche de los tiempos. At least one of those will have to be read soon!

>78 thorold: book-adultery. 🙂

>77 SassyLassy: I see time is our tragic ultimate reading limit. We only live so long, and we can only spend so much time reading. So it’s always on my mind.

Book size discourages me on an unconscious instinctual level and on a practical level. I can’t squeeze a long book in. They are a commitment. Reading them means I’m not reading something else.

I have found that there is an ideal book length. 8-10 hours seems ideal. And yet, here i am reading only long books this year.

Q4: Time

For me, the length of a book comes into play primarily when suggesting books for one of my book groups. In each of my two book groups there are members who just won't finish a book that's more than about 350 pages and so we have a kind of informal rule that we don't consider longer books unless they are especially compelling.

For myself, I used to be more daunted by the prospect of starting a long book and the long ones stayed in my TBR pile much longer. But about five years ago, I started following a strict reading queue. I find that if I see myself advancing incrementally toward a long book, I'm prepared to handle it when it reaches the top of the pile.

This question led me to look at the "Pages" statistics page on my profile and I learned that last year I read 16 books that were at least 500 pages, with Les Miserables far and away the longest at 1,456 pages. The average of all books I read last year, though, was 320 pages. I read a lot of plays, and those are typically less than 150 pages.

QUESTION 4: Time

The only 2 times when I am looking at the length of a book is when I am close to a trip out of town - I do not like leaving a book half-way through and switching books because of that and I rather not lag paper books with me or when I need to return enough books to the library to get all of my holds home when books beat the expectations :)

If I want to read the book, I want to read the book. 90 pages or 1,200 pages :)

Question 4: Time

Not only does a long book deter me from reading it, I'm more likely to enjoy it than a shorter book, whether fiction or non-fiction. This particularly applies if I'm on a long plane or train ride, when I'm in an enclosed space and can completely lose myself in the book. One notable example was Don Quixote, which was just under 1000 pages, but I didn't want it to end. My favorite read from last month was Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs, a 600+ page work which could have been longer in its coverage of the last decade of his life.

If I'm enjoying a book the time commitment is irrelevant, except if it's a library book that I have to rush through to return on time.

Working full time and having busy evening hobbies definitely has changed my relationship with long books. Unless it's a book I'm particularly mad to read, I'm likely to reach for something in the 250 to 350 page range. Psychologically, starting a massive book at 9 o'clock at night (my main hour for reading) feels quite stressful. Once I'm in I'm fine, but it feels daunting starting, and knowing I've only an hour max of reading per day I can't help thinking about those other books I'm not getting to.

It helps if it's an author I trust or a series I'm already hooked into. Knausgaard doesn't know how to write short books, but I'm always confident he'll hook me in early, so it feels less pressurised starting one of his.

Maybe that's the word I'm searching for. Long books make me feel somehow pressurised as I've little free time.

With audio books, my sweet spot is something less than 8 hours, and I avoid double figure listening altogether. I only get 3 hours of listening in the car each week spread across Monday to Friday, so I'm already into a 3 week commitment with an 8 hour audiobook.

Most long books I've read I've really loved, so I'm hoping when I retire I have mentally more space for them.

QUESTION 4: Time

My RL book group balks at much over 300 pages or 10 hours audio for a book expected to be finished in a month. I typically get these books as audio, listen while walking 30-45 minutes per day, don't generally want to spend more than 2-3 weeks on a single book.

Other books, depends on my level of interest. An extremely long book, I'm not going to remember enough to justify the time, so it's more a matter of whether I'll appreciate the experience. My time is scattered (not to mention my mind): work, weekday evening community meetings, weekend errands and events, craft projects, blogs, podcasts, videos... I rarely want to take on a tome, however classic or important it may be. Fundamentally, I'm not really an "avid reader".

QUESTION 4: Time

I read pretty avidly as a child, and by 3rd grade I had moved to books for older kids, not the typical chapter books. By 4th grade I was reading classics like Little Women. I was so tired of checking books out of the library and being finished with them in a day. I wanted a book that would occupy me, so I started looking for the fattest books there were. I still love "chunky" books but length doesn't matter so much now, since I tend to read 5 or 6 books at a time. And I've come to appreciate the cozies that I can finish in a couple of days. Fortunately, those also tend to be series, so I can immerse myself that way rather than in one single book. Time is rarely a consideration any more.

QUESTION 4: Time

As a teen, I loved long books. As a practical matter, because we didn't have much money, long books offered the most bang for the buck, but I also loved being immersed in another world for long periods. It was less jarring. I remember reading Gone with the Wind at age twelve and being excited that I had read a 1000 page book. In college, I focused on 19th century novels, because they tended to be longer than modern ones. Over time I've diversified the length of the books I read, but I still enjoy long books (evidenced by my current projects of listening to Dickens novels, each well over 30 hours, and reading the Rougon-Macquart cycle). Although the latter is not a single novel, I am committing to it as though it were one. I've also read some long nonfiction, although I am more willing to DNF a nonfiction work if it ceases to be enjoyable, for instance Alan Turing's biography (736 p.). I don't know that I've ever rejected reading a book because of length, although I have been intimidated by some long books for other reasons (War and Peace, I'm thinking of you).

QUESTION 3: Composition Challenge

Category: You fear

Although I Know What I Am, an Everyday Average Jones, and what I want The New Retirement, I am stuck Between Shades of Gray, Ten Thousand Light Years from Okay. The world seems such a scary place these days, a Cold Crematorium rather than a Fun Home. Killers of a Certain Age are running the country, while The Genius Under the Table hides to avoid deportation. Women Talking are seen as threats and The Vegetarian is a woke liberal. I long to go Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and where Memed, My Hawk can fly free, but it's So Late in the Day and I have to figure out How to Get Your Child Off the Refrigerator and safely into bed without dreams of ICE and school shootings. Oh, and Don't Forget to Write a check to the IRS. DHS needs its funding after all. Perhaps Elena Knows how we are supposed to live in this world. I don't.

>87 labfs39: excellent. (And hugs)

? 2. Me in 2025 Books

Describe yourself: FAIREST
How do you feel? I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK
Describe where you currently live: ROSETOWN
If you could go anywhere...? HONEYMOON IN PARIS
Favorite form of transportation: DRIVING MISS NORA
Your best friend is: ELLEN FOSTER
You and your friends are: THE BENEVOLENT SOCIETY OF ILL-MANNERED LADIES
What's the weather like? COLD DAY FOR MURDER
What’s your favorite food? MILKWEED
Your favorite time of day is: MORNINGS WITH ROSEMARY
What is life for you? MORE PERFECT THAN THE MOON
You fear: A CURSE DARK AS GOLD
Best advice: HOW TO AGE DISGRACEFULLY
Thought for the day: NO ORDINARY DAY
How you would like to die: SHE DIDN’T SEE IT COMING
Your soul’s present condition. INNOCENT
What was 2025 like for you? STORY SHE LEFT BEHIND
What do you want from 2026? IMPOSSIBLE FORTUNE

I like >78 thorold:'s "reading is a continuous process interrupted periodically by the need to change books"!

I don't really consider the time commitment before starting a book, but I do consider the bulk. I'm just back from a week's holiday and although I thought about taking physical books, it was a trip with quite a bit of travelling to different places, and I ended up deciding just to read ebooks. If it was a single destination I might have taken one.

In fact before starting an ebook I generally have no idea how long it is going to be, and am sometimes surprised by something being either very short or very long.

I don't have a mental equation between the length of the book and its appeal, but I am very happy to abandon books if I am not enjoying them - even if I think I might enjoy them under different circumstances - so it's not really any loss for me.

The amount of reading time I have is quite related to the length and nature of my commute. At the moment it's shortish and on a busy underground train so I'm generally standing and it's harder to get a book out. But I am not very good at fitting my plans into available resources, whether that is time, energy or money, so this doesn't seem to affect what I try and do. I feel like it's a really long time though since I spent a weekend day lazing on the sofa just reading. That's a shame, isn’t it?

(removing duplicate post)

>77 SassyLassy: Question 4: Time

I usually consider the time on a case-by-case basis, relative to the rest of my reading list or current workload.

For example, if I'm going on a roadtrip, I'll usually be okay with a longer audiobook, since I need to fill more hours. I get nauseous reading a physical or ebook in the car, so I listen to audiobooks only there. If I'm doing a short trip, I'll get a shorter book, so I feel like I'll actually finish it and not leave it only partway finished once I return home and inevitably get busy.

Or, if I'm doing a project at work, I often listen to audiobooks. Most times, I try to stay at 16 hours and below. I generally listen at 2x speed, so it will be 8 hours or less to listen to them. This works well for when I'm cutting/prepping storytime crafts or processing new books. I don't like to spend over a week listening to a single book, when I'm at work.

If there's a book I really want to listen to that's longer, I'll usually save it for when I'm cozy gaming (fishing on Animal Crossing for example).

For physical books, it depends on my library checkouts. I own a few BIG books I've put off reading because I have library books I want to read first. So I've been making VERY SLOW progress on Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan. I make good progress when I DO read them, it's just a matter of making them my focal point again.

When I was in school, I wasn't as particular. I would read anything since I'd be sitting in class anyway and could just focus on one book at a time. Now that I work at a library, do multiple reading challenges, and have grown to be a mood reader, it's harder to have one book that suits EVERY reading need I have at any given time. I regularly jump between physical books, eBooks, and audiobooks depending on if I'm at home, in the car, in my office, or on the computer at the circulation desk.

Question 4: Time

I don't avoid longer books, although I generally appreciate shorter books for the really silly reason that each year my goal is to read 50 books, so of course too many long books are going to make that harder. I very much do not care for, in fact would go so far as to say I resent, having long books chosen for any book club I might be in. I find it presumptuous, in fact. But, on the other hand, some of my favorite reading experiences have been with long books. I think Darryl mentioned Don Quixote, a call I heartily second. We, the Drowned is a wonderful book and the time I spent with it was lovely time. Just before leaving on our recent trip to New Orleans, I finished Independent People by Halldor Laxness. I still owe a review of that novel, but I'm just back from Mardi Gras one day ago, and still feeling pretty groggy. Anyway, I found that to be a terrific book, although the protagonist is not always so wonderful to spend time with.

When I was younger I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings trilogy so much (and all three of those books would qualify as "long" on their own) that I wished the three books were all longer.

Question 4:

In theory, I'm perfectly happy to read really long books. In practice, I often find myself avoiding it because spending longer on any one book means reading fewer books in any given month or year, and some part of my brain can't help believing that it's the number of books coming off my TBR shelves that's what really "counts" and feeling bad if that number is too low, even when that's illogical and counterproductie.

By the way, I am finding these days that it's usually taking me longer to finish even relatively short books than it used to, probably because I have both more distractions and more distractability. Which still means I'm reading quite fast by most people's standards, but it's a bit frustrating to me. When I read a book in three days, I don't have time to get bored with it unless it's very boring, but after nine days, I'm likely getting tired of it even if it's good, and impatient to move on to something else.

>94 bragan: That first paragraph is very much me. And since I've gotten into doing some of the LT challenges, enough of my month is taken up with those (*) that I don't have time left for a really long book. Yes, I could read a bit of a long one each month, but I don't usually like to jump back and forth between books.

(* - All of the books I read for challenges are books that I wanted to read anyway. The challenges are perhaps dictating when and how quickly I get to certain books, but I'm not reading any book only because it fills a challenge.)

>81 AnnieMod: I’m with Annie on question 4 (time). I don’t think I have ever paid any attention to the length of a book. With paper book of course, it’s impossible to ignore it, but with ebooks it’s much easier. I tend to read too many books at the same time, so I often take time to finish a book, and when I get tired of it I can always switch to another on my reader, and get back to it later. I remember that someone commented on a forum when I mentioned I had loved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. The comment was « but isn’t that a very long book », and my response was, is it? I hadn’t noticed. Also I couldn’t see what that had to do with anything.

>95 KeithChaffee: Well, I suppose it's nice to know it's not just me!

I haven't done much in the way of reading challenges on LT, but I did regularly used to do the Read Our Own Tomes challenge. That was nice to do, but I stopped precisely because it made me even more focused on quantity. Dropping it didn't help change that nearly as much as I'd hoped, though.

QUESTION 4: Time

I don't hugely consider the time commitment of a very long book, but sometimes I feel like I'm not in the mood to start one (though with non-fiction it's more about subject matter than length). There was a period in my reading life where I'd gotten too fixated on quantity and meeting a goal that was evenly divisible by 52 so had some hesitation about longer books, but that only went on for a couple of years.

My life (physically disabled person who is alone at home 90% of the time) affords essentially endless time to read, and that is usually the main feature of my day. Sometimes length is a factor if I've started a book and lost interest but feel I should give it another chance (looking at you The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman).

I have a strange habit where it seems like my brain has decided that no matter what, I will always average out to about a book a week. So whenever I get a book off the shelf my brain will immediately divide the page count by 7 days. Which means that a 120 page play which should be read in about three hours (since that's how long a performance of that play might take), and a 600 page book that should take longer, are both read in one week's time. It kind of drives me nuts especially with those 100 page books which technically I should be able to read in one day easily but they get divided into 20 page chunks by my brain and it's as if I'm not allowed to read more than that.

>99 lilisin: This made me chuckle. I wish I'd been able to finish Les Miserables in a week!

Question 4: Time

I tended to avoid big books specifically due to time commitment they required and limited reading opportunities - on the train to/from work and sometimes for an hour or so before bed.

Lately, I discovered that audiobooks allowed me to return to thick volumes. I can combine walking and reading! My lunches with colleagues have become a thing of the past however. Good-natured small talk around a table cannot tempt me away from my hour of walking with a sandwich in hand and Dickens in my ears.

>101 VladysKovsky: cannot tempt me away from my hour of walking with a sandwich in hand and Dickens in my ears

I love it!

Well time has certainly passed. Some of it was spent reorganising my desks. I realised I needed a system other than scraps of paper in odd envelopes to keep my book Wishlist in order, leading to this next question, seeking answers:


image from Pinterest

QUESTION 5: The Book Wishlist

How do you keep track of books you want?

Do you categorize them by author, by topic, by genre, by source, by some other method, or maybe even not at all?

Do you review your Wishlist periodically, and drop titles?

What do you do about out of print books?

Do you share your Wishlist with others, hoping to whittle it down through their good nature?

What's on your Wishlist? A few titles please...

QUESTION 5: The Book Wishlist

How do you keep track of books you want?

I visit them in bookstores and thrift shops to be sure they're being adequately fed and housed. I want them all, you see, or just about. I do the rounds through the city from time to time to check on them all. Sometimes I even bring one home.

Otherwise, I don't really have the sort of wishlist you're referring to. I have a project with a goal of reading every interesting book ever written. I'm not going to make it but I'm going to do my best. Cheers!

Q5 Wishlist

I’m not particularly systematic about it — if something comes up as a recommendation from a friend, something I see on LT or in a newspaper, mentioned in another book, or just seen in a bookshop at a moment when I’m not ready to buy it, I add it to a task-list on my phone, which currently stands at 77 entries. I usually don’t delete them until I have read the book, so there are a couple of entries on the list that are also on the physical TBR (a recipe for disaster, but it hasn’t happened yet…).

I did keep a wishlist on LT for a while, which was useful when I participated in the SantaThing (I gave up, because I’m usually travelling at the critical time). But it is too structured — I sometimes want to wishlist an author or even a subject, or a book whose title I don’t quite know.

Occasionally I cross things off because I remember what it was that made me put them there and decide that whatever it is doesn’t apply any more. Or they turn out to be too vague or too obscure to be worth pursuing.

Usually things on the list are relatively low priority — anything I really want to read now I don’t need to write down, I have it in the front of my mind and look for it in the library or the next bookshop I visit or whatever. What often happens is that when I am ordering something online I try to add one or more titles from the list to justify the postage.

At the moment the oldest item on the list is a book called Stevie Smith and authorship by William May — no idea where the reference to that came from, but I’ve been a fan of Stevie Smith since my teens. Not sufficiently to search for it on ABE Books, though…

I’m currently reading The time-regulation Institute, by Hamdi Tampinar, which was about ten places down from that. I think I must have added it some years ago when we were reading Turkish books for a Reading Globally thread, and ended up reading something else.

The freshest item on the list is Steeple chasing: around Britain by church, which I saw in a bookshop in York a opulent of weeks ago but didn’t want to carry around on my UK trip.

QUESTION 5: The Book Wishlist, Otherwise Known as Chaos Rules

I have several wishlists: 283 on my LT wishlist, lists in the LT list section, a running list of Chinese history titles, lists on my laptop, photos on my phone of books I've seen and want to read, scraps of paper with book titles that accumulate on the table beside my reading chair, books stuck in various baskets and carts on book sites. Very occasionally I take a book or two off the list, usually because I forgot why I wanted to read it in the first place or because I've learned more about it and have changed my mind. Once I started trying to collect all the Holocaust books I had wishlisted and tried to create a master list, but I abandoned it as it became unwieldy. So, no real system, and rarely helpful, but occasionally I go through a pick out a few to acquire.

Q4 - TIME

Some of my all time favourite books are very long (Bleak House, Anna Karenina), and I have fond memories of the summer when I was 15 and had chicken pox and read Gone With the Wind. And in the 80s I read Stephan King's The Stand at least 5 times. But I generally avoid long books, for all the reasons mentioned here already. But I have another reason too -- I don't like being in that one world for too long. It's kinda the opposite of being wrapped up and immersed in a book. I find that too much time spent in one book world gets tedious. Not always, but often. With books published in the last 20 or 30 years that are long, I often think thet weren't edited properly. Too much repetition and filler.

Q5 - Wishlists

I used to have a long wishlist here on LT, but for some reason it didn't really work.

Now I keep my wishlist on Indigo-Chapters, which is a big box book seller in Canada. They don't have everything, so anything else I keep on my Amazon wishlist. I don't usually buy off these sites, but they are easy to check when I want to see my wish lists.

I take pictures of books I don't intend to buy immediately then log them onto my Amazon wishlist. I don't use Amazon but it's a conveniently place to pull titles especially for those out of print titles. Also their algorithm will suggest more titles once I've added books so then I can add even more to my wishlist.

At one point in my life I had my wishlist linked on my facebook page and men aiming for my affections would sometimes purchase one of the books but unfortunately that part of my life is gone.

Usually I'll review the wishlist when I go to add more and that's when I'll either commit to purchasing them next I'm in a bookstore, or I'll drop them off the list.

>109 lilisin: I had my wishlist linked on my facebook page and men aiming for my affections would sometimes purchase one of the books — Hmm. Interesting idea, but too late for me to try that, I fear...

I tend to do the reverse — when someone says they want to buy me a book (rare, but it does happen) I give them a link to my LT catalogue and say "get me anything you think I might like, but nothing I've got catalogued here."

>109 lilisin: "I had my wishlist linked on my facebook page and men aiming for my affections would sometimes purchase one of the books . . . "

There's an idea for a short story, or even maybe a novel! A woman goes back and contacts all the men who bought one of the books on her Facebook-linked wishlist, men who'd purchased the books in hopes of gaining the narrator's affections, to find out what became of the men, and how they liked the books they'd purchased. Maybe it's a collection of short stories or maybe essays. She's able to contact some of the men. Some she's only able to talk to the men's grown children, and some remain mysteries that she has to conjecture about. That book would go on my wishlist!

>104 rocketjk: That's how I think about the books at my local libraries. Those books are also all technically MY books, just stored elsewhere. It helps me keep my home library largely just full of books I already love or maybe it's just the result of my dad being a librarian most of my life and spending so much time in his libraries so I felt a lot of ownership.

Wishlists
My library catalog has a list function and I use that for physical materials, and the favorites/wishlist function on their digital offering sites as well (Hoopla, Overdrive/Libby). For books not available through the library I'll usually add them to an Amazon wishlist, just because there will generally be a listing for everything on there whether it's in print or not. I rarely buy even used books through Amazon, but it's a very convenient one-stop place for a wishlist.

I rarely edit my various lists, except to remove things I've read now, and even that is a bit hit or miss. I do wish it was easier to sort into categories, even just fiction and non-fiction. Even a subject I've slightly wearied of will likely interest me again eventually, so might as well leave the books on the lists. I previously kept a text document list, but it felt a bit superfluous.

>111 rocketjk: This plot reminds me of the film Broken Flowers by Jarmusch.

>103 SassyLassy: QUESTION 5: The Book Wishlist

For awhile, I was simply buying any book that I really thought I want to read. Which sounded great on paper but in practice now I have too many books I never got to and in some cases no memories why I have them. Need some major weeding.

These days, I keep a list of books I may want to read in my library lists (and occasionally work through them - my library allows the creation of different lists which is useful although I had been known to just delete the lot of them and start over) and a shorter list ("next in a series" and next books from authors I like mostly) in my wishlist here in LT.

I don't do well with planning and as I has said before, the best way to make sure I do not read a book is for me to put the book on a wishlist somewhere... :) I am better with series than with individual books in that regard but still...

Q5: The Book Wishlist

There are currently, ah, 1,017 books on my wishlist. I use the LT Wishlist collection to keep track of them, but otherwise don't sort or tag them in any way. It's just a great big list of books I thought seemed like something I might want, for one reason or another.

Once in a great while, I'll browse through the thing, realize there's stuff on there I definitely don't want anymore and delete a few things, but not very often.

Back when I spent a while trying to learn Python programming -- which didn't go super well, but never mind that -- I wrote a program that would pick random books off my wishlist, and I've done something really enjoyable with that. See, I realized that I had so many books on there, added over such a long period of time, that I no longer remembered most of what was there or why I wanted it. Which seemed to make it very unlikely that I'd ever actually find, buy, and read most of them. And that seemed like a great shame, because I must have put them on there for a reason! So now what I do is get the book the program picks out for me, and as soon as I've ordered it, I pick what my next one is going to be (so I have something to look forward to). Then when I've read the current "random wishlist book" I get to go on to the next one, and to pick out what the one after it will be. It's sort of like buying a surprise book present for myself, as well as heading off the despair at the thought that books will simply disappear into the depths of the wishlist forever, and I've had a lot of fun with it. I've been doing it for years and years, and I've gotten 53 books that way so far. Some of them fantastic things that I might never have gotten around to reading otherwise, and some of them, well, not. But I always enjoy finding out what's going to be next.

When it comes to other people getting stuff for me from the wishlist... yeah, not so much, except for a bunch of SantaThing gifts, which I always appreciate. I often add a few books from my LT wishlist to my Amazon wishlist, and I have gotten a fair number of books as gifts that way. But I also used to include a link to the LT wishlist -- which apparently Amazon will no longer let you do -- with the suggestion that people could pick gift books from there, and nobody ever went for it.

The most recent addition to my wishlist is Human-Ish by Justin Gregg, which was in my latest batch of LT recommendations, and which I thought looked interesting. The oldest books are from 2018, and there are a lot of them, because that's when I imported the books from my Amazon wishlist onto LT, having gotten entirely too annoyed at their habit of disappearing without trace if Amazon stopped selling them or something. But the very first on the list is I Am What I Am by John Barrowman, which I added because I enjoyed his first memoir, Anything Goes (and also because I'm a giant Doctor Who fan, obviously).

>106 labfs39: I forgot to add some books from my wishlist. The first one I added to my LT wishlist is The Time of Light by Gunnar Kopperud, recommended by Deborah/arubabookwoman and entered 06/19/2011. My most recent is In the Country of Others by Leila Slimani recommended by Ameise1, entered 1/27/2026.

Top contributors to my LT wishlist**:

Deborah/arubabookwoman 25 books
Kerry/avatiakh 22 books
Rebeccanyc 16 books
Kay/ridgewaygirl 13 books
SassyLassy 12 books
Cushla 11 books

**Note that I used to remove the tags by which I track recommendations, so a lot of data was lost. I read (and removed the rec tag) for dozens of books by rebeccanyc, for instance.

>113 VladysKovsky: Hmmmm . . . I thought I'd seen all the Jarmusch films, but that title doesn't ring a bell.

>117 rocketjk: It’s not the best film by Jarmusch but it won him Palme d’Or at Cannes.
My favorite ones are Dead Man and Paterson. Which ones did you enjoy?

QUESTION 5: The Book Wishlist

How do you keep track of books you want?

If the title is in one of the two local library systems I'm a member of then I'll add the book to my wishlist. I also have a paper book and ebook wishlist on Amazon, which doubles as a Christmas list for my brother and cousin. The books I want to buy ASAP are usually on the top of my mind, and I'll look for them whenever I visit a local indie bookshop.

Do you categorize them by author, by topic, by genre, by source, by some other method, or maybe even not at all?

No, not at all.

Do you review your Wishlist periodically, and drop titles?

Yes, that definitely applies to books that I've already been able to borrow or decide that I no longer wish to read.

What do you do about out of print books?

Hmm. I'm not sure I've ever encountered this problem before.

Do you share your Wishlist with others, hoping to whittle it down through their good nature?

Yes, as I mentioned above.

What's on your Wishlist? A few titles please...

Let's see...from my Free Library of Philadelphia list of Interesting Books I have Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo, Warrior poet: a biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux, and A history of Palestine: from the Ottoman conquest to the founding of the state of Israel by Gudrun Krämer; and from my Margaret Grundy Memorial Library wish list I have A thousand ways to die: the true cost of violence on Black life in America by Trymaine Lee, The Silence of the Choir by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and An African history of Africa: from the dawn of humanity to independence by Zeinab Badawi, along with dozens of other books. (Hmm...)

Question 5: The Book Wishlist

I'm not sure what I have is properly a wishlist. Long ago, sort of before computers, or before I started keeping lists on computers or websites, I used to make lists of interesting titles in notebooks, or even slips of paper if I didn't have my notebook handy. I kept that up for a long time, just out of habit. When ebooks came along, and I acquired quite a lot of them just because they were offered free, it became necessary to try and keep track of what I owned so that I wouldn't accidentally buy something that I already had, and I had books across several different platforms - Kobo, B&N, Kindle, etc. I tried Calibre for awhile, but I could only access it on my home computer, and because I was a public librarian I was always coming across interesting books, so I needed something web-based that I could access from any computer. I began using Goodreads more and more. I could create unlimited shelves (aka tags) so I could have a "books I own" shelf, and an "ebooks I own" shelf. I will often look for a book to read based on location, or time period, as well as genre or subject matter. It doesn't matter if a book on my "Want to Read" shelf is owned or not, or out of print or not. I try not to accumulate print books anymore, unless I really, really want it or it is useful like a cookbook, or a knitting book, or a coloring book, things I collect like Arthurian fiction or medieval history or Welsh language books. I do have a very small Amazon wish list of things to buy, and I maintain a wishlist on Audible because they will alert me when something on my wishlist is being offered for sale. Because I already add an extensive list on Goodreads when I joined LibraryThing I decided that LibraryThing would just be for print books that I own. And I've never gotten around to cataloging most of those except for my Welsh books and some very old books that my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had collected (mostly theological stuff.) I still would like to get more stuff catalogued, and even do my extensive LP collection, but here we are....

So I suppose I look at Goodreads as my own personal curated library from which I can pick books to read. Because everything on my shelves was chosen for some reason or other, even if I will never read it, or no longer am interested in it. But you never know. So I don't remove things, and yes, I probably should. And yes, it's one of my goals for this year. I probably add something like 300 (or more) books a year, and manage to actually read 50-75. So my "library" is now around 5,000 titles. But it is sortable, not only by shelves/tags but by keyword. For the last ten years or so, I have created an annual list based on both random selection, and selection by targeted themes. It used to be around 100 books or so, but now it is around 250 titles that I will use as a sort of priority list for this year. Next year the list will be mostly entirely different, with some books carried over because I really want to read them and didn't get to them.

The reality is, I will never read everything I want to. And I will never read everything I own. But I like choosing annual themes and making lists and that is half of the fun.

How do you keep track of books you want?

Do you categorize them by author, by topic, by genre, by source, by some other method, or maybe even not at all?

I keep multiple wishlists at Libby -- SF, SF awards, mystery, fiction, NF, a very small poetry list -- and they're all lumped together in a "TBR: Libby" list in my LT library, with the type of list added as a tag. There's a smaller list of books that my library has only in print form, not in e-book, marked "TBR: LAPL" (for Los Angeles Public Library).

I use the lists as a way to save "oh, that might be interesting" books. Every now and then, I think I should go through and add a separate tag for the books that I know I definitely want to read -- favorite authors, NF topics that particularly interest me, etc. -- but I haven't done it yet.

The lists are really helpful in finding books to fill my category challenges. Coming up in November, for instance, one of the AlphaKit letters is K, and the MysteryKit theme is guns for hire. Pull up the "mystery" tag, search those books for the capitol letter K, and by golly, there's Killers of a Certain Age, perfect for both (and it'll also fill a BingoDog square!).

Do you review your Wishlist periodically, and drop titles?

I delete occasionally, mostly when I've been disappointed by my first read from an author and decide I don't want to read anything more by them.

What do you do about out of print books?

I do keep a small "TBR: hunt for copies" list in my LT catalog (currently five titles) for books that are either OP or not held by any of the three public libraries where I have cards. I occasionally go hunting for the OP titles at Alibris or ABE Books, and should any of the more recent books ever be a perfect challenge fit, I might consider buying a copy. (I try not to buy a lot of books these days; I'm at the point in life where the goal really should be to prune down the number of books on the shelves so as not to leave a massive mountain of stuff for someone else to have to deal with when the time comes.)

Do you share your Wishlist with others, hoping to whittle it down through their good nature?

I have a small wishlist at Amazon for my family to refer to at Christmas time, and there are always a few books on it, usually the ones that are more "I definitely want to read that" than they are "oh, that might be interesting."

What's on your Wishlist? A few titles please...

Well, let's just pick the first title alphabetically from each of my sublists:

SF award nominees: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress
other SF: The Actual Star, Monica Byrne
mystery: The Accomplice, Lisa Lutz
fiction: The Abbess of Crewe, Muriel Spark
non-fiction: 100 Places to See After You Die, Ken Jennings
poetry: Eating Salad Drunk, ed. by Gabe Henry
LAPL (print): Back in the USSA, Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
OP/harder to find: Bimini Run, E. Howard Hunt

>103 SassyLassy: QUESTION 5: The Book Wishlist

I have what I call 'The Spreadsheet of Doom' but also a Notebook of Doom. It contains the titles and authors and sometimes publication info if I have it, and some notes about why it is on the list (blurb looked interesting, Booker Prize longlist, recommended on LT, etc).

I keep my main TBR list on Libby, but there isn't a way to include details about why I want to read it (prize longlist, recommended by, etc). There is a tagging system, but the wishlist (that is tied to my libraries) by default sorts to the bottom, so I don't create too many extra tags. And, unfortunately, if the book is out of print or otherwise not on Libby, it doesn't get added unless it bubbles to the surface later on and is available. But with over 650 titles I don't mind so much of I miss a few.

I use Storygraph global challenges for all the books that I find for a specific country.

LT is where I keep the wishlist for books I want to buy, mostly the pretty editions of favorite classics.

A few titles: I Am a Cat, Can't and Won't, The Chukchi Bible, Slanting Towards the Sea, Underground Barbie

>122 rasdhar: 'The Spreadsheet of Doom'

I can relate! 😂

Question 5. Backlog

In the beginning of this year I realized that there was no way I could read all the books I had on my Wishlist before my reading ultimately stopped. My list contained close to a 1000 titles. I attacked the list and deleted all the books I did not recognize. That did not help much as I still had over 800 books. Than I deleted all the books I recognized but no longer wanted to read. 600 books left. Finally, in a more meticulous effort I removed the books I would like to read but could do without. I got down to 450 titles and I could not reduce that list any further. Still, the number looked less intimidating - I was quite satisfied. About half of these 450 unread books were actually sitting somewhere on my shelves, so it was easy to further reduce this number by simply reading the books I already had!

My reading year 2026 started out quite well. I finished 12 books in 2 months, which was excellent considering a demanding full-time job and an active 3-year old boy at home. To my horror I realized that during the same 2 months I added 36 new books to my Wishlist. My problem was of a different kind from the one I originally set out to solve. I was not reducing a large amount, I was dealing with a divergent time series.

This looks entirely hopeless now. I feel quite depressed with this growing mountain in front of me that I will never scale. The only trusted way to cheer myself up is to go to a bookstore or a library and load up on some new books.

>125 VladysKovsky: Read 12, add 36. That's an extremely good ratio for this group... ;)

>125 VladysKovsky: I love your entire post, and can relate 100%. The endless struggle . . .

>125 VladysKovsky: I feel your pain. I have read 11 and added 60.... But the Walter Scott longlist came out...

>126 AnnieMod: >127 Nickelini: >128 WelshBookworm:
Thank you for your encouragement. I see I am not alone in my predicament! I just started on a book that was not on my list…

>125 VladysKovsky: I feel quite depressed with this growing mountain in front of me that I will never scale.

I used to have that problem. Training myself to think of the mountain as an inexhaustible resource rather than as an uncompleteable task helped me get over it. I was able to stop thinking "I'll never finish all of these books" and start thinking "I"ll never run out of books to read."

>130 KeithChaffee: Wise advice!

>125 VladysKovsky: & >130 KeithChaffee:

"I feel quite depressed with this growing mountain in front of me that I will never scale."

"I used to have that problem. Training myself to think of the mountain as an inexhaustible resource rather than as an uncompleteable task helped me get over it. I was able to stop thinking "I'll never finish all of these books" and start thinking "I"ll never run out of books to read.""

Never fear. In the words of some French philosopher whose name I can never remember . . .

"Owning more books than you can possibly read in your lifetime is humankind's way of reaching toward the infinite."

>132 rocketjk: This is a very compelling argument in support of my irrational book hoarding

>130 KeithChaffee: I used to think that way! But now thinking that “the glass is half full” scares me more than the alternative

There was an essay about this (relatively) recently. I think it was from Reactor Magazine, but I could be misremembering. The general thrust of it was that the author had decided to stop thinking of her TBR/wishlist as a goal to reach and start thinking of it as a wine cellar from which to select something to enjoy in a given moment. That reduced the anxiety surrounding it.

Someone else here may remember enough to actually find the essay itself, but even if we don't manage that, it's still a reframing that you may find helpful.

Another way to look at it, and I'm sure I'm joined here in this by most, is . . . Buying books is fun, so what the heck!!!

>135 Julie_in_the_Library: Heard about the wine cellar analogy. Doesn’t work for me as I never bothered to collect wine, or much of anything except books.

I would rather go with what Borges said:
“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books”

Describe myself: Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

Time: I have a lot of time to read, what I lack though is good lighting.

My bedroom has about 750 books in it and yes, I agree with Borges -- "I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books"

Long books: I love long books. I usually won't read books that are under 400 pages. 565 pages are ideal but I read 1000 plus pages fairly often.

- I forget the other questions...

P.S. Oh yeah, one other question I remember. Carry over from 2025: I started Jade City by Fonda Lee a couple of times in 2025 but only read 4 pages. When I picked it up again late February 2026 I said to myself this time I'll read it through and so I am.

Wish lists

So i have things to deal with in regards to wishlists. One is that I started reading a lot more when i 1st joined LT. And added hundreds of books to my LT wishlist. And my amazon wishlist. I don’t use either anymore, so they’re like wreckages of past plans out there to misdirect some electronically errant lost soul.

A second thing is impulse. And a third thing is guilt. There is so much I’ve been meaning to read for years and haven’t read yet. A fourth thing is that TBR.

The issue with impulse is what i want to read now is not what i wanted to read last month, or last year or 15 years ago. So i no longer wish for those impulse wishes.

So I manage it this way: i make a note on my phone that I call “ideas for reading”. I start it on January 1. I add any title that strike me that i want to remember. Then, at the end of the year I copy my full list into a new one. Scan through the whole list. Delete everything I no longer feel that wish-urge for.

This manages the impulse by culling. It manages the guilt by mental erasure! And it manages the TBR by making me more selective when i finally buy stuff. 🙂

Here are all my 2026 additions, newest on top :

- So Much Blue by Percival Everett - April on Bluesky (or Erasure, or Telephone)
- I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong - VladysKovsky

Longlist for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
* Dominion by Addie E. Citchens
* King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby
* Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores
* The Devil Is a Southpaw by Brandon Hobson
* The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes
* The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
* Heart the Lover by Lily King
* Make Your Way Home by Carrie R. Moore
* An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park
* Small Scale Sinners by Mahreen Sohail

- Sakina's Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag - kjuliff
- The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien - Carolyn Elliott (fb friend)
- The Artful Dickens: The Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist by John Mullan, where he describes various creative literary devices and themes that Dickens commonly uses. Each chapter discusses some aspect, like speech, naming, ghosts, drowning, etc. - kac522
- Beginning, middle, End - Valeria Luiselli's new novel - markon
- Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli - rasdhar
- A little history of poetry by John Carey - thorold
- James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry - K Williams (fb friend)
- The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson - SassyLassy - start with Heaven and Hell

Also i loved reading everyone’s answers. So many different ways and feelings. Great question Sassy!

>139 dchaikin: This is a very nice approach - rewriting the reading list every year. I might try that!

I have a very, very long wish list on Amazon that I occasionally cull, but not nearly often often. My husband regularly dips into my wish list for presents for Valentine's Day, Christmas stocking fillers, birthdays, etc., and in the last year or so I've realised how out of control my wish list has become when I don't even recognise titles he's bought me (although they definitely are from my wish list).

I do need to cut it more often. Sometimes I add titles on a whim and then change my mind. And there's no categorisation at all - just a dump of titles.

If something's out of print I just cut it and move on - there are always plenty more books on the wish list to get to...

A few titles from the teetering list:

Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer by Tyler Staton
More Fuel You: Understanding your body & how to fuel your adventures by Renee McGregor
It Would Be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo
Twelve Nights by Urs Faes
Arms & Legs by Chloe Lane
The Theoretical Foot by M.F.K.Fisher
Crazy by Jane Feaver
Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann
The Hero of this Book by Elizabeth McCracken
Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
Inlands by Elin Willows

In the last couple of months, I've seen four film adaptations of well known books, leading to this next question, which also appeared a few years ago. Maybe you've changed your mind since then, or come up with a new title.


The Grosvenor Picture Theatre, image from What's on Glasgow

QUESTION 6: Translating to the Silver Screen

Given a bottomless budget, and no casting limits, what book would you most like to see translated into a film?

Would it be a huge widescreen cinematic extravaganza, or a quiet film for an intimate theatre?

Who would play the major characters?

What kind of musical score would it have?

If you follow directors, who would you select for your magnum opus?

Would you want to revise the book somewhat, making changes to era, genders, settings, etc, or even the title?

All thoughts welcome.

Q6 Silver screen

Well, obviously, I’d love to see the remake of Trainspotting by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, set in pre-1914 India. And Buñuel’s The tale of Peter Rabbit. But what I’m really waiting for is Pedro Almodóvar’s adaptation of The yellow wallpaper.

A bit related to the silver screen question. At my bookclub we are doing a book selection 'Great Novels - Great Films' in May. Not easy to do pick those great books that also became excellent movies. I will post here again after we have cast our votes!

>144 thorold: Okay, now you have me contemplating Pasolini and Middlemarch, or perhaps Fassbinder doing War and Peace in 1930s Germany.

>145 VladysKovsky: Looking forward to seeing the list. You're right, it's not easy to pick them.
It's also worth discussing films adaptations that were better than the books.

I'm desperate to see Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series (Niccolo Rising is the first one) made into a bunch of movies. Swashbuckling intrigue, romance, revenge, surprises, great women characters and a clever, conflicted hero. My daughter and I took a trip to Bruges just to walk around the book's setting.

I would like to see a filmed version of We, the Drowned by Danish author Carsten Jensen, a novel multi-generational novel about life in a Danish seafaring town. I don't think a movie could do the book justice, but, say, an 8-part TV series with excellent production values could be good, I think.

Along the same lines, I 'd like to see a high-value TV series of Under the North Star, Vaino Linna's trilogy of novels covering the life of a family, again multi-generational, in 20th century Finland. One 10- or 12-part season per book.

>143 SassyLassy:

I would love to see Lonesome Dove get a new movie on the scale of the Dune movies. To see that level of camera work take on the American landscape would be extraordinary. However, I'm not good at guessing which actors should take on what role so I would trust the professionals.

Would be interested to see Lanark by Alasdair Gray as a film.

I'd do a huge widescreen cinematic extravaganza of the Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee with Jade City, Jade War, and Jade Legacy. Perhaps three films (a trilogy like the books).

Shannon Lee (Bruce Lee's daughter) would be the producer with film director Justin Lin (they did the series Warrior). It'd be great to have Andrew Koji who was the lead in Warrior in it
(however, I'm not sure in what role since he's a leading man) *but* (I don't know how to add a spoiler here so *I won't* though instead, I'll suggest him perhaps as the Weatherman's Shadow).

Possible co-producer / and or / co-director (I'm not sure if she has directed before) -- Fonda Lee -- I do know she and Shannon Lee have co-authored a book together -- so they might like to team up again on this.

I wouldn't change anything. In my opinion it would be a fantastic blockbuster!

You know, movies based on books is such a mixed thing, and all too often horrible - no matter the cast and budget or length (see Wheel of Time)

What made A River Run Through It or Empire of the Sun, or The Princess Bride work? Those must be my favorite adaptations where I have read the book. In each case i think the director made the movie they wanted, and transformed the book into something else. (Forrest Gump comes to mind too. While not an absolute favorite movie, I do like it a lot and it’s iconic … and completely different from the weird book it’s based on)

So, I can’t say I would want any of my favorite books on film. But if I followed film more and had favorite directors, i would be interested when they tried a book i liked.

>152 dchaikin: In each case I think the director made the movie they wanted, and transformed the book into something else

Exactly — this is why this question turns out to be so hard. What we are looking for is someone else's inspired interpretation of a book we like (or hate, or are puzzled by, or have some kind of strong feelings about, at least..). And what we are not looking for is someone else's ridiculous/pedestrian/stupid/half-assed/misguided interpretation of that book. It's usually easy enough to love or hate a film adaptation of a book we know, but without being film directors ourselves can't imagine one that doesn't exist yet. That's their job...

QUESTION 5: The Book Wishlist

How do you keep track of books you want?
I keep a digital shelf somewhere for books I want to buy. For the past year I've been trying to use LibraryThing and it works great when I'm on a PC at work or on my laptop shopping online. It hasn't been as easy to navigate on mobile for me. This year I'm trying out the Wishlist function of Bookmory. Right now, I only have one book on there, which is an upcoming release. At work, I add books to my LibraryThing wishlist and then once I get my phone I add them to Bookmory. Then I can go book shopping with my phone without missing a beat. It's a bit crazy, I'll admit, going back and forth between 2 tools but...it's what my brain likes best right now.

Do you categorize them by author, by topic, by genre, by source, by some other method, or maybe even not at all?
I don't categorize my wishlist. I only organize Library Wishlists, as a TBR.

Do you review your Wishlist periodically, and drop titles?
I do. I had a wishlist on ThriftBooks for when I'm actively shopping and occasionally I've taken things off that I've picked up elsewhere as time passes.

What do you do about out of print books?
I don't have too many out of print books on my active wishlists. I still need to do a collection check to see what older books I'm missing in series. I figure I'll keep them labeled somehow when I get to that point.

Do you share your Wishlist with others, hoping to whittle it down through their good nature?
I don't. I occasionally mention a book or send a pic of one to my husband and he'll usually take note of it. My sister keeps tabs on my wishlist through conversations we have about books. For example, she went to a Friends of the Library bookstore and knew I'd been wanting to read Prince of Song and Sea by Linsey Miller. She saw it there and picked it up for me.

What's on your Wishlist? A few titles please...
For this year I have Wings of Reverie by Anna Bright on my wishlist. It releases in August and adds a new story to Disney's Pixie Hollow lore.
I've been picking up DC's Compact Comic line, so I have several newer volumes I've yet to get. There are also more scheduled to be released that I'll eventually buy.

>153 thorold: I’m nodding along to all that. I completely agree

>154 royallyreading: thanks for sharing

>153 thorold: Well, sure. I think it's fair to assume that the question is really, "What book would you like to see made into a movie that fits your own desires and expectations for what a movie version of that book should be?" :) Anyway, that's how I read it.

And by the way, and I think I've mentioned this maybe before on CR, but the question brought to mind for me the fact that Mark Leyner, in one of his early short story collections, has one that features a service that allows a person to order any movie they wish to see, but with Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the lead male role.

>143 SassyLassy:

Q#6

I'm afraid this is terribly unimaginative and shamelessly self-indulgent at the same time: I can think of no book I'd absolutely want translated on-screen, BUT, I wish that one of my favourite actors, Conrad Veidt (also loved by such as Eudora Welty and H.D.) had been given a chance to act opposite Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo. Welty imagined him and Brooks in a Faulkner tale "down South", and there is a novel by Gustaf Sobin about a real, failed attempt to make a film set in Istanbul with Veidt and Garbo. Both instances would do me just fine.

They would be silent movies, the Deep South story with an original score, while the Orientalist film would use a mix of modernist and late-Romantic pieces (a little bit like the original run of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari).

The latter would probably be directed by Mauritz Stiller (this was right before he took Garbo to the US) and the former, well, let's say Pabst if in Europe; Allan Dwan if in Hollywood.

My wishlist: messy and large and I need to be better organized -- I'll get there eventually.

Edit: ooops, sorry a few titles - hang on a few seconds.

Okay here are a couple:

Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah
by William G. Dever

Indian Burial Ground
by Nick Medina

Ah! gotta go -- Laotian delivery is here!

>153 thorold: I would love to see the Welsh trlogy by sharon K penman. The books are about the daughter of King John of England who gives Marriage to the Prince Llewellyn of Wales. The story of this marriage And the push and pull between the two men it's quite well done on paper and I think there were scenes in it that would be perfect for the screen

How do you keep track of books you want?

the old fashioned way, with a spiral notebook and pencil. I've tried using technology to do this but I find it just so much easier this way as long as I don't lose either the book notebook or the pencil

Do you categorize them by author, by topic, by genre, by source, by some other method, or maybe even not at all?

aside from the date and who recommended it, I don't categorize my wishlist.

Do you review your Wishlist periodically, and drop titles?

I do. I look at the list regularly and note if a book has been there for a whil. I then look at reviews and decide if i want to read it or keep it in the list

What do you do about out of print books

I rarely have trouble with finding out a print books anymore especially when I could get on book Finder I get what I'm looking for Or my local antique bookshop. That helps. ebay has turned into a treasrue trove for me

I don't have too many out of print books on my active wishlists.

Do you share your Wishlist with others, hoping to whittle it down through their good nature?

*not sure i understand: are we hoping they will find a boook for you, or sharing to friend if shes interested in it.

What's on your Wishlist?
fifth sun
the river has roots
the mercies

>159 cindydavid4: I'd like to see this too!

QUESTION 7: Escape



You may be feeling the need for escape these days.

What is your escape reading?

Does it differ by situation, e.g. sick in bed vs scary monsters?

Do rereads help you escape when that's what's needed?

Please offer a few tried and true suggestions.

Q7 Escape

P G Wodehouse and Simenon are the great standbys. Otherwise Jane Austen, Dickens and Trollope. In extreme cases a complete re-read of Patrick O'Brian might be called for, but that's fortunately not arisen very often.

>162 SassyLassy: Romance in almost any form is my escape read. I have reread Jane Austen so many times that she is pretty much used up unfortunately. Georgette Heyer is also a good candidate for rereads. But I also have tons of new or used romantasy to choose from.

>163 thorold: I’ve been meaning to read Patrick O’Brian for some time.

Weirdly enough, my escape reading is usually nonfiction. Somehow my brain processes it much easier than fiction. It could an issue of emotional investment, like I don't have to get emotionally attached to dead Romans the way I get attached to fictional characters.

SPQR by Mary Beard often ends up being my go-to re-read. Or sometimes I'll re-read old chapter books from when I was a kid.

>165 b.ray: i get that. The more straightforward history books create structure that i find comforting too

ETA - Mary Beard is chairing the 2026 Booker Prize committee

Q7 - lately any reading is my escape

my escapes are often sci fi / fantasy like once and future king, hitchikers guide to the galaxy,good omen I love rereading older short stories or essays , by EB White or Joseph mitchell ,if that doesnt work i take my collections of mad magazine if that doesnt help i go for a walk

>162 SassyLassy: Good question this number 8.

I often escape to other worlds. Usually they are darker than ours, scarier and nearly devoid of hope. Compared to these speculations our lives are bright and full of fun and pleasure. The warnings these darker worlds provide come as amplified messages of what we stand to lose. They could be realities of the future depending on our choices.

Then there is comfort reading. Not escaping but hugging a favourite soft toy and immersing in joy, living in this conversation with a friend. These friends are not always the same. When I was young it was Jules Verne, then Ray Bradbury, then Strugatsky brothers. Later it was Murakami, and now David Mitchell, Jim Crace and Kazuo Ishiguro. With friends like these I don’t need to escape.