Crowdsourced TBR 2024!

Happy New Year!

About a week ago, I made a decision I’ve never made before: I resolved to solicit –– and actually read –– recommendations from other people in my life (family, friends, social media followers, etc.). And actually read them.

This was actually part of a broader resolution of mine, as someone who feels the crushing weight of their Goodreads tbr despite adding onto it almost daily. The thing is almost 3000 books long, with no signs of slowing in its growth; this isn’t only an existential problem (it makes me think about the ephemerality of life, the inevitability of dying with books still to read…) but also a practical, organizational one. A 3000 book TBR is inherently unwieldy. How do I pick, and how do I prioritize?

Traditionally, I’ve chosen which books I read in one of three ways: 1) Have I been assigned this? (as a student, an instructor, a blurber, a reviewer), 2) Is it very timely (addressing something I need to know about Right The Fuck Now), or, most often, 3) Are the vibes right? I’d estimate over 3/4 of the books I read in a given year are selected based on vibes, often interrelated with their immediate availability to me: are they physically there on my shelf, calling my name? Did they come up in my Libby holds?

I realize I’m using a lot of question marks here, mostly because this idea of creating a concrete and time-sensitive TBR is still new to me. My first experience with it was around a year and a half ago, when I made required reading lists for my qualifying exams –– a decidedly not-fun, very-mandatory iteration of the TBR. Luckily, this is not that. Instead, these are fun recs by people who know my taste and want to share words they love with me. My hope is that, if I don’t complete this list in full, I make a decent dent into it and perhaps start a new tradition for myself/community.

Find the list below (that’s the Goodreads version, which will change throughout the year as I add and remove things, is linked). Most of these titles come courtesy of others, but some are books I just want to prioritize this year. This 60something book TBR is partial and leaves plenty of room for vibes and academic books, etc.

The List (in no particular order):

1. Poor Deer, Claire Oshetsky

2. From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Sai Englert

3. Girlfriends, Emily Zhou

4. Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo

5. Book of Extraction: Poems With Teeth, Adrian Dallas Frandle

6. Nayra and the Djinn, Iasmin Omar Ata

7. At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Tara Ison

8. From Whole Cloth: An Asexual Romance, Sonia Sulaiman

9. Leech, Hiron Ennes

10. The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez

11. Gag Reflex, Elle Nash

12. Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield

13. Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body, Megan Milks

14. Something New Under the Sun, Alexandra Kleeman

15. The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, Octavia Cade

16. Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir

17. The Good Sister, Sally Hepworth

18. The Sentient, Nadia Afifi

19. Thrown in the Throat, Benjamin Garcia

20. Lakewood, Megan Giddings

21. Negative Space, B.R. Yeager

22. Homie, Danez Smith

23. Dead Astronauts, Jeff Vandermeer

24. Our Share of Night, Mariana Enríquez

25. Advantages of Being Evergreen, Oliver Baez Bendorf

26. Crooked Plow, Itamar Vieira Junior

27. Salt Slow, Julia Armfield

28. Tears of the Trufflepig, Fernando A. Flores

29. Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Fantastical Trans Femmes, Gwen Benaway

30. Autobiography of a Semiromantic Anarchist, Monica Teresa Ortiz

31. Bad User Agreement, Metropolarity

32. Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi

33. High as the Waters Rise, Anja Kampmann

34. The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, Margaret Killjoy

35. Pseudotooth, Verity Holloway

36. Style of Attack Report, Metropolarity

37. Fen, Daisy Johnson

38. Gutshot, Amelia Gray

39. The Emissary, Yōko Tawada

40. Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie

41. The Swan Book, Alexis Wright

42. Long Division, Kiese Laymon

43. At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories, Kij Johnson

44. The Drowning Girl, Caitlin R. Kiernan

45. A Monster Calls, Patrick Ness

46. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender

47. Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Raja Shehadeh

48. Children in Reindeer Woods, Kristín Ómarsdóttir

49. The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

50. The Fortunate Fall, Raphael Carter

51. Notes of a Crocodile, Qiu Miaojin

52. Blackwater, Kerstin Ekman

53. Poor Things, Alasdair Gray

54. Fefu and her Friends, María Irene Fornés

55. Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh

56. The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin

57. They: A Sequence of Unease, Kay Dick

58. Dogsbody, Diana Wynne Jones

59. The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

60. Cripping Intersex, Celeste Orr

61. Be Kind, My Neighbor, Yugo Limbo

62. A Prayer for a Non-Religious Autistic, Lucas Scheelk

Thank you to everyone who helped make this list possible!!

Paid subscribers will be able to comment their recs below, but all are welcome to hop over to my Goodreads to see my progress/message me their recommendations. Thanks for reading, and here’s to a 2024 full of good books.