The Beauty of Lists

So, this thread is a test, an experiment. Basically, I'm asking: does a thread of lists interest you?

...

An introduction:

Recently Jennifer (japaul22) posted a short list of recently purchased book in the what-are-you-reading thread instead her personal thread, by mistake. And, it just kind of struck me how nice it was to stumble across a list of interesting titles, even out of context. So I thought, why not a thread of lists?

Well, I suggested as an idea there were hard questions, because, well, what the heck would a thread of lists look like? I haven’t a clue. We all like lists. The questions-for-the-avid-reader had lots of fun lists. We have best of lists, read lists, thematic lists, to-read lists, wishlists. And there are award lists, long and short or just winners. Yesterday Jennifer charmingly described her “list drama” while making a list of favorite titles published every year of the past century. Reading Globally has themes and then lists suggested books to fill the global theme.

So, we already have lists. Why would we want a thread of just lists? And what would it look like? And would it fill a need? Should we prompt for a list, or is that an Avid Reader thing and not for a thread of lists.

Going back to Jennifer one more time (sorry!), Barry (baswood) made a comment on “the beauty of lists” and gave me a title for this thread. But I’m still lacking a way forward.

....

So, I googled “book lists”. And Google responded with suggested searches:

- complete book lists by author
- lists of books to read
- 100 must read books of all time
- 100 greatest books of all time
- list of great books
- book list challenges
- books everyone should read list
- best book lists

Google also pointed me to Library of Congress booklists, ones “that will spark the imagination and transport readers to new and exciting places.”

Library of Congress Booklists: History & Biography
Link: https://read.gov/booklists/

- Balz, Dan, and Haynes Johnson. “The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election.”
- Downey, Kirstin. “The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience.”
- Duncan, Dayton, and Ken Burns. “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”
- Gordon-Reed, Annette. “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.”
- Ifill, Gwen. “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama”
- Kidd, Sue Monk, and Ann Kidd Taylor. “Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story”
- Kurlansky, Mark. “Food of a Younger Land”
- Meacham, Jon. “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House”
- Minor, Rickey. “There’s No Traffic on the Extra Mile”
- Schama, Simon. “The American Future: A History”
- Sullivan, Patricia. “Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement”
- Taylor, David A. “The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America”

Did you the AARP has a list of “41 of Winter’s Best New Books”: https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/books/info-2023/new-books-for-winter.html#lis...

...

All of which leaves me unsure how to direct a thread of lists, or know what it might best contain, or how it might best work here with our group, or if it actually interests anyone. So...

...

Well, I’ll step gently on the questions-for-the-avid-reader-threads toes, and suggest you, dear reader, please, post a single list of books, one list, any list. And we can chat about what is posted, and just see where it goes. Any interest? Want to play?

This will be a dangerous thread for me! I LOVE lists. I keep lists of favorite contemporary authors, favorite "classics" authors, series I'm reading, books TBR on my kindle, and vocabulary lists (words I come upon in my reading that I have to look up), and possible book projects. As Dan mentioned, I recently started a list of a favorite book I've read from each publication year that stemmed from an idea on Eliz_M's thread.

I also read from several lists: 1001 books to read before you die, 500 great works by women, and awards lists like the Booker, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the National Book Awards (U.S.).

I'd love this thread to be a place people share their lists. Those might spark discussion or they might prompt people to make their own similar list. I personally don't think we need to have specific prompts or "list assignments". :-)

That Library of Congress History and Biography list has some interesting titles on it . . .

I am a list addict. I am in therapy but it’s not working. Oh well…. I’m in!

I have so many lists its difficult to know where to start. I sometimes post them on my own thread. However not to take up too much of anybody's time I made a list yesterday inspired by Thorold (Mark) who posted a review of Maigret's Christmas by Georges Simenon published in 1951. I have a project of reading books published in 1951 (a list far too long to put here), but it was missing books by Simenon. As many of you will know Simenon was one of the most prolific authors of his time and it was easy to create a new list of:

Books published by Georges Simenon in 1951

Maigret au Picratts
Maigret en Meublé
Memoires de Maigret
Un Noel de Maigret
Tant Jeanne
le temps d'anais
Une vie comme neuve
Maigret et le grande Perche.

Isn't that beautiful

I'll share two sections of my "favorite from each publication year" list, just for fun.

The 2000s: (publication year, title, author, rating out of 5 stars)
2022 The Colony Magee, Audrey 5
2021 Small Things Like These Keegan, Claire 5
2020 Hamnet O'Farrell, Maggie 5
2019 Ducks, Newburyport Ellman, Lucy 4.5
2018 The Great Believers Makkai, Rebecca 5
2017 Lincoln in the Bardo Saunders, George 5
2016 Homegoing Gyasi, Yaa 5
2015 A God in Ruins Atkinson, Kate 5
2014 Lila Robinson, Marilynne 5
2013 Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin Lepore, Jill 5
2012 The Snow Child Ivey, Eowyn 5
2011 The Warmth of Other Suns Wilkerson, Isabel 5
2010 The New Jim Crow Alexander, Michelle 5
2009 Wolf Hall Mantel, Hilary 5
2008 City of Thieves Benioff, David 5
2007 The Frozen Thames Humphreys, Helen 5
2006 Love and Louis XIV Fraser, Antonia 4.5
2005 The Secret River Grenville, Kate 4.5
2004 The Seas Hunt, Samantha 5
2003 The Namesake Lahiri, Jhumpa 5
2002 The Story of Lucy Gault Trevor, William 5
2001 The Age of Homespun Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher 4.5
2000 The Feast of the Goat Llosa, Mario Vargas 4.5

And the 1950s:
1959 The Vet's Daughter Comyns, Barbara 4.5
1958 A Glass of Blessings Pym, Barbara 4
1957 The Birds Vesaas, Tarjei 4.5
1956 Tea at Four O'Clock McNeill, Janet 4.5
1955 The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne Moore, Brian 5
1954 The Long Ships Bengtsson, Frans G. 4.5
1953 Jane and Prudence Pym, Barbara 4.5
1952 Excellent Women Pym, Barbara 5
1951 Hangsaman Jackson, Shirley 4.5
1950 The Grass is Singing Lessing, Doris 5

>4 baswood: it really is beautiful :)

>5 japaul22: goodness, now I want to read Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. I love your list. I'm seriously thinking of making my own version of the same. Your 1950's group is impressive.

>5 japaul22: Ooh, I'm so happy to see The Snow Child on your list. I loved that book. Unfortunately on my list (which I started after seeing your by the year list), it got bumped by In the Shadow of the Banyan. Does anyone else have a different book for 2009 besides Wolf Hall, lol.

The Long Ships was originally published in two parts in 1941 and 1945. Are you going by the translation date? Or the date it was published as one book? Or are the numbers juxtaposed? I have it on my list under 1945.

Lists are always fun!

One of the first LT lists I started was “best public transport fiction”, https://www.librarything.com/list/78/all/Best-public-transport-fiction, currently headed by Murder on the Orient Express, but with a lot of much less obvious stuff as you scroll further down, including quite a few books I don’t know.

I often enjoy the “top ten …” lists on the Guardian book page. Each week they get a different writer or expert to pick ten books on a theme that’s relevant to them. LT member Cynfelyn has been reposting the archive of those here for some time, the current thread is: https://www.librarything.com/topic/341768

>4 baswood: Definitely beautiful! I expect I’ll get to a few of the 1951 Maigrets soon. Les mémoires de Maigret is the only one I’ve read apart from the Christmas novella.

>5 japaul22: There seems to be a very healthy dose of Barbara Pym going on there. Excellent!

>8 thorold: goodness, I didn't even know LT had this feature. Oh, the possibilities...
( for anyone curious, also go to your own lists: https://www.librarything.com/home#lists )

Regarding the Guarding list, somewhere I picked up this book called The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books by J. Peder Zane. It's from 2007. He basically collected a bunch of top ten all time book lists from several authors and then had fun in excel and published it. Slim content. I keep wanting to toss it, but then I open it up and page through and, well it's still here.

>7 labfs39: Hmmm, I'll have to research The Long Ships. Goodreads listed the publication date as 1954. I was definitely finding that the older a book is and if is translated complicates publication dates. A lot of 1800s novels were published in serial form first. Or for multi-volume works (like Kristin Lavransdatter) you can take each book separately or do you take the publication date from the first time they were published as a single volume?

I've found several mistakes already in years that I assigned books to, but it's just for me, so I'm not too concerned. I'll correct them as I find them!

ETA: Yes, 1954 for The Long Ships is the first time the complete book (both parts) was published in English.

>7 labfs39: >11 japaul22: - I had 1955, but I don't recall my source. My review says:

— 1941 - Röde Orm Sjöfarare i västerled ("Red Orm on the Western Way")
— 1945 - Röde Orm : hemma och i österled ("Red Orm at Home and on the Eastern Way")
— 1955 - translated and combined.

>11 japaul22: >12 dchaikin: Which leads to interesting thoughts about how we interpret "publication date." I am going by the date the complete work was published in the original language, but even that got me into trouble. Too Loud a Solitude is a Czech novel first published in 1989 in the Czech Republic, after the fall of communism, but it was self-published as samizdat in 1976. Which is the true publication date? To each his own, of course, I didn't mean to imply judgement, I just wondered if you had transposed the numbers.

ooh! I love lists, and tagging and sorting and categorizing things!

I'll share my list of mystery, crime procedural, and detective fiction with Jewish protagonists. This list only includes books that I've personally read.

1. Blood Money by Rochelle Krich: 4 stars
2. The Big Silence by Stuart M. Kaminsky: 4 stars
3. Murder in Jerusalem by Batya Gur: 3 stars
4. Shadows of Sin by Rochelle Krich: 3 stars
5. Nights of Awe by Harri Nykänen: 3 stars
6. The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything by D. A. Mishani: 3 stars
7. A possibility of Violence by D. A. Mishani: 3 stars
8. The Missing File by D. A. Mishani: 3 stars
9. Literary Murder by Batya Gur: 4 stars
10. The Saturday Morning Murder by Batya Gur: 3 stars
11. Bethlehem Road Murder by Batya Gur: 4 stars
12. Murder on a Kibbutz by Batya Gur: forgot to rate

>14 Julie_in_the_Library: another unique and lovely list.

Someone mentioned word lists... Here's a list of the words I've looked up on my new Kindle. I love the vocab builder feature.

pashmina
ulema
mihrab
nitrile
opercula
endogenous
panegyrics
anhedonia
hemiplegia

Surely i knew panegyric...? Anyway, I to look it up. Had no clue on the rest. Not even opercula, which seems self-explanatory after looking it up.

I read Beowulf on the Beach : What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan in 2009. I liked the list, and eventually, around 2012, decided to work through it, but in an annual theme format. I started from either side and, at 2 themes per year, have a rough 25 yr plan. The semi-obvious problem being that the 19th-century is a long way away (about 10 yrs from today). Anyway, I thought I would enjoy hacking at it, and I have.

So, here's my personal list - all 50 books, with some notes on my themes or what I've read.

1. The Illiad-Homer (circa 900 B.C.) – 2016 theme
2. The Odyssey–Homer (circa 900 B.C.) – 2016 theme
3. The Old Testament (15th- to 2nd-century B.C.) – 2012-to-2015 theme
4. The New Testament (1st-2nd century) – 2018 theme
5. The Aeneid–Virgil (19 B.C.) – 2017 theme
6. Metamorphoses-Ovid (A.D. 17) – 2017 theme
7. Beowulf (10th century) – 2019 theme
8. Inferno Divine Comedy)-Dante Alighieri (1308) – 2020 theme
9. Paradiso (Divine Comedy)-Dante Alighieri (1321) – 2020 theme
10. The Decameron-Giovanni Boccaccio (1353) – 2022 theme

xxxxxxxxxxx everything above has been part of an annual theme xxxxxxxxxx

11. The Canterbury Tales-Geoffrey Chaucer (1400) – 2023 theme
12. The Faerie Queen-Edmund Spencer (1596) – read in 2011
13. Hamlet-William Shakespeare (1600) – read in 2013
14. King Lear-William Shakespeare (1605) – read in 2019
15. Macbeth-William Shakespeare (1605) – read in 2018
16. Don Quixote-Miguel de Cervantes (1615)
17. Paradise Lost-John Milton (1667)
18. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling-Henry Fielding (1749)
19. Pride and Prejudice-Jane Austen (1813) – read in 2005.
20. Faust I II-Johann Wofgang von Goethe (1832)
21. Eugene Onegin-Alexander Pushkin (1832)
22. Père Goriot-Honoré de Balzac (1835)
23. Jane Eyre-Charlotte Brontë (1847) - read in 1991
24. Wuthering Heights-Emily Brontë (1847)
25. Moby Dick-Herman Melville (1851) – read in 2012
26. Bleak House-Charles Dickens (1853)
27. Great Expectations-Charles Dickens (1861)
28. Madame Bovary-Gustave Flaubert (1856)
29. Crime and Punishment-Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) – read in 2003.
30. The Brothers Karamazov-Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880) – read in 2010
31. War and Peace-Leo Tolstoy (1869)
32. Anna Karenina-Leo Tolstoy (1877) – read in 2004
33. Middlemarch-George Eliot (1872) – read in 2022
34. The Wings of the Dove-Henry James (1902)
35. Remembrance of Things Past-Marcel Proust (1922)
36. Ulysses-James Joyce (1922)
37. The Magic Mountain-Thomas Mann (1924) – read in 2011
38. The Trial-Kafka (1925)
39. To the Lighthouse-Virginia Woolf (1927)
40. The Sound and the Fury-William Faulkner (1929)
41. A Farewell to Arms-Ernest Hemmingway (1929)
42. Tropic of Cancer-Henry Miller (1934)
43. Native Son-Richard Wright (1940) – 2023 theme

xxxxxxxxxxx everything below has been part of an annual theme xxxxxxxxxx

44. The Man Without Qualities-Robert Musil (1942) – 2022 theme
45. Lolita-Vladimir Nabakov (1955) – 2020/2021 theme
46. Giovanni’s Room-James Baldwin (1956) – 2019 theme
47. One Hundred Years of Solitude-Gabriel García Marquez (1967) – 2018 theme
48. Gravity’s Rainbow-Thomas Pynchon (1973) – 2017 theme
49. Blood Meridian-Cormac McCarthy (1985) – 2015 theme
50. Beloved-Toni Morrison (1987) – 2013/2014 theme

---

All my themes have been at least ok, most were terrific. Homer was my favorite, with Dante close second. Morrison, McCarthy, Marquez and Baldwin were also especially wonderful. This year is Chaucer and Richard Wright.

>17 dchaikin: It's a fun feature of my Kindle. Every time I click on a word, it brings up a definition and adds it to my list in the Vocab Builder. I can then quiz myself, or delete the word once I know it. Mostly I've been deleting words like "the", because each time I try to highlight a passage, I end up clicking on words by mistake!

>18 dchaikin: I'm curious as which are the ones on the list he would recommend skipping. I've read 28.

>20 labfs39: well, none, of course. They're all worth reading and all get reflected in later literature in various interesting ways - which is a major reason for doing this. The less satisfying for me, personally, were the NT (sorry to devotees, I just didn't take to Paul), Musil and Pynchon (and yet I loved V.) (Also Plutarch and Petrarch, easy ones to confuse with each other, were only ok experiences. But they aren't actually on the list. Ok, Plutarch was really rough...but he does echo, and not just in Shakespeare. So I do really like having read him, even if I did not much care for actually reading him.)

>11 japaul22: LT seems to regard 'publication date' as the date of the edition you have. Then in Common Knowledge, there is 'Original Publication Date'. This is often a help with translated works, where the translation is later than the original publication.

>21 dchaikin: Oh, I thought the author was going to say what to skip too.

>23 labfs39: ah, of course. He suggests skipping sections but not entire books. I remember he said it’s ok to not finish Musil, since Musil himself didn’t finish. 🙂 But I don’t remember other specifics.

>18 dchaikin: Oh that's an impressive list Dan. I have read 24 of those and so you are doing better than me.

We obviously need more lists, so why not here. Please feel free to post more.

A book a year by date published, that I've read

So on Litsy there is a five-year-theme to read a book published every year from 1925 to 2025. I'm not joining, but Jennifer made a list on her thread of what she has read overall each year. I think Lisa was thinking about it. As the college football game imploded tonight, I decided to work through what I had. OK, it was exhausting. After tormenting myself to pick only one book from 2019, and second thing myself intensely, I have to do it all over again for 2018, and so on. So, some weird choices came out of all that. But also, I'm very selfishly charmed at how nearly complete my list is. After this, I'll need to check out what's available from 1943 & 1944.

2022 The Colony by Audrey Magee
2021 No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
2020 An Island by Karen Jennings

2019 Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli --- lots of good choices this year
2018 Milkman by Anna Burns
2017 Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
2016 My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
2015 The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
2014 Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. by Viv Albertine
2013 Seeking Palestine : New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home by Penny Johnson
2012 Stag's Leap: Poems by Sharon Olds --- tough year, lots of good options
2011 My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
2010 Just Kids by Patti Smith

2009 Beowulf on the Beach : What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan
2008 Woman of Rome : A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck
2007 Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible by Karel van der Toorn
2006 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
2005 Stark Beauty by Larry D. Thomas
2004 The African by J. M. G. Le Clezio
2003 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
2002 Island Fire : An Anthology of Literature from Hawai'i by Cheryl A. & James R. Harstad
2001 The Bible Unearthed : Archaeology's New Visions of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman
2000 When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant

1999 Véra : Mrs Vladimir Nabokov by Stacy Schiff
1998 Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
1997 Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
1996 Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
1995 The Trophies of Time : English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century by Graham Parry
1994 The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
1993 Cuba: Poems by Ricardo Pau-Llosa
1992 All the pretty horses by Cormac McCarthy
1991 Maus II : A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman
1990 Omeros by Derek Walcott --- 1st easy choice

1989 Our Parents' Lives: The Americanization of Eastern European Jews by Neil M. & Ruth Schwartz Cowan
1988 Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga --- easy choice
1987 The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin --- another really difficult year
1986 Maus I : A Survivors Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
1985 Blood Meridian : Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac Mccarthy --- another really difficult year
1984 Love and Exile: An Autobiographical Trilogy by Isaac Bashevis Singer
1983 Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth : Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer by Diane Wolkstein
1982 Aracoeli by Elsa Morante
1981 The File On H. by Ismail Kadare
1980 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

1979 Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
1978 Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer
1977 Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
1976 A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
1975 The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez
1974 Alive : The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read
1973 Sula by Toni Morrison
1972 My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
1971 The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor
1970 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
1968 Desert Solitaire : A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey
1967 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1966 Speak, Memory : An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov
1965 Dune by Frank Herbert
1964 Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates
1963 The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
1962 We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
1961 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

1959 The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
1958 Night by Elie Wiesel --- 1st year with only one entry
1957 Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
1956 Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
1955 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1954 The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
1952 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1951 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
1950 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis

1949 1984 by George Orwell
1948 Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
1947 Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
1946 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
1945 The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric
1944 --- 1st year without an entry
1943
1942 Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1941 12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright
1940 The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

1939 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov
1938 Anthem by Ayn Rand
1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
1936 Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
1935 Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather
1934 Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
1933 To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1931 Barracoon : The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston (not published)
1930 The Eye by Vladimir Nabokov

1929 A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
1928 The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
1927 Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
1926 My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather
1925 The Professor's House by Willa Cather
1924 The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
1923 A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
1922 One of Ours by Willa Cather
1921
1920

1919 In Search of Lost Time: Volume II, Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
1918 My Ántonia by Willa Cather
1917 Summer by Edith Wharton
1916
1915 The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
1914
1913 In Search of Lost Time: Volume I, Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
1912 The Reef by Edith Wharton
1911 Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
1910

1909
1908 A Canyon Voyage; the Narrative of the Second Powell expedition Down the Green-Colorado River from Wyoming, and the Explorations on Land, in the Years 1871 and 1872 by Frederick Dellenbaugh
1907 The Fruit of the Tree by Edith Wharton
1906 Madame De Treymes by Edith Wharton
1905 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
1904
1903 Stories from the Country of Lost Borders by Mary Hunter Austin
1902 The Valley of Decision by Edith Wharton
1901
1900 The Touchstone by Edith Wharton

That was fun to look through, Dan! I'll have to update the one I put in my thread. I posted it before I'd gone all the way back through my LT review. I am also missing 1944, but for 1943 I'd recommend Iceland's Bell by Halldor Laxness.

Here's a link to my updated post of "books by publication year"
https://www.librarything.com/topic/346894#8025553

>27 dchaikin: Nice list! I've been working on mine, but haven't filled in gaps yet. Stay tuned...

I love lists too. Might try that book-by-year list. Are people going back and adding books they read years ago? Or starting from now?

>16 labfs39: Are you telling us how young you are by not knowing "pashima"? Or did you somehow escape the pashima craze of the late 90s-early 2000s?

>16 labfs39: >19 labfs39:

Somehow I didn't realize this feature was a thing. I've got a lot of random stuff to delete from mine (the highlighting thing). I also have...a lot of very random words that I am not deleting because I actually looked them up. A sampling....

amanuensis
catechu
scrofulous
swotting
gallipots
salmis
whimbrel
arbutus
puisne
pulchritudinous
grise
shamus
buhl

>32 shadrach_anki: I enjoy these vocab lists.

>31 Nickelini: for my book by year list, I counted anything I’ve read and reviewed since joining LT and starting my annual reading log in 2009

>34 japaul22: Thanks. When I have time, I'll do that too

>31 Nickelini: Yes, I'm adding books that I read in the past. Lol, I would love to be that young, but no I must have missed the pashima craze. I have never been much into clothes or fashion. I'm still wearing clothes I wore in college, and that was a looonnnggg time ago.

>32 shadrach_anki: Another way to spend time... cultivating vocab lists. I'm amongst my people here.

You all are having way too much fun!

I'm not nearly as much of a list-maker as a lot of folks here, but a post full of odd individual lists does seem like a fun thing, and I'd like to play. Maybe I'll go all the way back to the original inspiration -- a list of recently purchased books -- and just throw out the list of books I acquired last month. Because my book acquisitions do tend to be interestingly random (as well as far too numerous).

So, Books I Acquired Last Month:

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Please Report Your Bug Here by Josh Riedel
The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light by Paul Bogard
Tiny Deaths by Robert Shearman
The Who Revealed by Matt Kent
Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive by Carl Zimmer
The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco
Mycroft Holmes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara by David Fisher
The Illustrated Al: The Songs of "Weird Al" Yankovic by Weird Al Yanokvic, et al.
Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography by Mia Fineman
The Time Traveler's Almanac: A Time Travel Anthology by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VenderMeer
Nona the Ninth by Tamsin Muir
The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill
Infinite Wonder: An Astronaut's Photographs from a Year in Space by Scott Kelly
Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan
We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker
Galatea by Madeline Miller

Yep. That's a list of books, all right.

>38 bragan: lots of books I hope to see you read and review this year! Great selections!

>38 bragan: Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

“necessity of violence”? How does that phrase fit in that title? But fun month.

List of favorite authors from my LibraryThng profile page. My criteria for inclusion: have to have read multiple books (3?) and rated them highly (4+*). One book wonders excluded.

Jane Austen
Fredrik Backman
Philippe Claudel
Robert Frost
Diana Gabaldon
Vasily Grossman
Olga Grushin
Arnošt Lustig
Ben Macintyre
Hilary Mantel
Czesław Miłosz
Jacques Poulin
Mary Doria Russell
Neal Stephenson
Sigrid Undset
Elie Wiesel
Connie Willis

>16 labfs39: >17 dchaikin: >19 labfs39: I was going to try to put my finger on the words in your list to get the definition Lisa. Unfortunately that doesn't work on LT. I am so used to reading on Kindle (and Libby has the same feature), and I find it so valuable.

Several years ago, as a way to work on clearing my TBR books, I decided to read books from my shelf published from 1950 (year of my birth) to present. And I did in fact have unread books for every year. Before fizzling out I read books from 1950-1953). I think I have the list somewhere (not packed for the move), and I'm going to try to dig it up.

>31 Nickelini: In one of the groups on LT closer to 2009 when I joined than to now, there was a project to read a book published in each year (of the 20th century I think). I think it would be fun to try to do something like that again.

>41 labfs39: Great list of favorites, Lisa!

I am just ignoring you all... the last thing I need is another place to make lists. :)

Just kidding. I think. I may be back with a list or 3 - some of the lists above give me some ideas...

>38 bragan: great list Betty - I think random is a good word for those acquisitions.

Books I have in my library that were originally published in 1923:
Men like gods by H G Wells
The man who knew too much by G K Chesterton
Leave it to Psmith and The inimitable Jeeves by P G Wodehouse
Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
Whose body? by Dorothy L Sayers
Valmouth by Ronald Firbank
The captive and the fugitive by Marcel Proust
Dersu the trapper by V K Arseniev

1823:
Quentin Durward by Sir Walter Scott

(Assuming the CK is correct: I haven’t checked any of these)

>39 japaul22: I think there are a few of those I will probably be getting to sooner rather than later, too.

>40 dchaikin: No idea, but I'm looking forward to finding out!

>44 baswood: I also still like "eclectic." :)

>42 arubabookwoman: I was going to try to put my finger on the words in your list to get the definition Lisa. Unfortunately that doesn't work on LT.

That's funny! It is definitely a nice feature of reading e-books. It has prompted me to start a paper list for my non-ebooks, but it's not nearly as easy or fun.

Dan, I think your idea for a lists thread is a hit!

>41 labfs39: I've only read five, and I've never heard of Olga Grushin or Jacques Poulin

>45 thorold: that's so cool... Antic Hay? hmm.

>48 labfs39: well... Check back in May. :)

I of course have an Excel file with many lists: previous years and this year's reading, TBR lists in several languages, read manga over the years, manga TBR, etc...

I also keep track of Japan's major literary prize, the Akutagawa Prize, so I have that list on hand so I can check off when I've read a prize winner. And while I don't go out of my way to read from the 1001 Books Before You Die list and the Guardian's 1001 list, I do have those lists available on excel as well to help track my reads.

But the most important list to me is the list I have of every Japanese book I've ever read. It's a long list but I provide it below.

Multiple books read by single Jpn author:
Junichiro Tanizaki : In Praise of Shadows; The Makioka Sisters; Le meurtre d'Otsuya
Yasunari Kawabata : Thousand Cranes; Kyoto; Dandelions
Seishi Yokomizo : La hache, le koto et le chrysanthème; Le village aux huit tombes
Yasushi Inoue : La Favorite; Shirobamba; Le paroi de glace; Le fusil de chasse
Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo Express; Le vase de sable
Shusaku Endo : La fille que j'ai abandonnee; The Sea and Poison; When I Whistle; Scandal; Silence
Kobo Abe : The Woman in the Dunes; The Box Man; The Face of Another; Secret Rendezvous; The Kangaroo Notebook; The Ark Sakura
Yukio Mishima : La mort en ete; Le marin rejete par la mer; Sun and Steel
Akira Yoshimura : Shipwrecks; La jeune fille suppliciee sur une etagere; On Parole; Un spécimen transparent : Suivi de Voyage vers les étoiles; Le convoi de l'eau; La guerre des jours lointains
Kenzaburo Oe : Nip the buds, Shoot the kids; Gibier d'elevage; Hiroshima Notes; A Personal Matter; A Quiet Life
Haruki Murakami : 1Q84; Après le tremblement de terre; Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche; 色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年; L'Étrange Bibliothèque
Ryu Murakami : Almost Transparent Blue; 限りなく透明に近いブルー; From the Fatherland, with Love; オーディション; In the Miso Soup
Banana Yoshimoto : The Lake; Kitchen; アルゼンチンババア; ハチ公の最後の恋人
Otsuichi : ZOO1; ZOO2; GOTH 夜の章; 夏と花火と私の死体
Shizuko Natsuki : La promesse de l'ombre; Hara-kiri, mon amour
Ayako Miura : Lady Gracia: A Samurai Wife's Love, Strife and Faith; Au col du mont Shiokari
Michiko Yazuki : 14歳の水平線; しずかな日々
Keigo Higashino : The Devotion of Suspect X; Salvation of a Saint
Hiroko Oyamada : 穴; The Factory
Natsuo Kirino : Out; Intrusion
Takeshi Kaiko : Into a Black Sun; Darkness in Summer
Aki Shimazaki : Azami; Hozuki; Suisen
Fumiko Enchi : The Waiting Years; Masks
Yuko Tsushima : Territory of Light; Child of Fortune
Yoru Sumino: また、同じ夢を見ていた; よるのばけもの
Eiji Yoshikawa : Taiko; Musashi

Only one book read by Jpn author:
Kyouya Origami : 花束は毒
Keisuke Hada : La Vie du bon côté (Scrap and Build)
Kaori Ekuni : Dans la barque de dieu
Yasumi Kobayashi : 玩具修理者
Maha Harada : ハグとナガラ
Eto Mori : カラフル
Sekaikan Ozaki : 母影
Takumi Toyoda : 駅に泊まろう!
Chie Katou : アンバランス
Kazumi Yumoto : 夏の庭・The Friends
Natsuko Imamura : むらさきのスカートの女
Kaori Fujino : 爪と目
Fuminori Nakamura : L'Hiver Dernier, Je Me Suis Separe de Toi
Fumie Kondo : インフルエンス
Risa Wataya : Pauvre Chose
Hideo Furukawa: Slow Boat
Soji Shimada : Tokyo Zodiac Murders
Keizo Hino : Isle of Dreams
Seio Nagao : Meurtres à la cour du prince Genji
Natsu Miyashita : 静かな雨
Akimitsu Takagi : The Tattoo Murder Case
Yoko Ogawa : The Memory Police
Tomoka Shibasaki : Spring Garden
Yu Miri : Tokyo Ueno Station
Hatano Tomomi : 海の見える街
Rikako Akiyoshi : 聖母
Yoko Tawada : The Last Children of Tokyo (aka The Emissary)
Kanehara Hitomi : 蛇にピアス
Sayaka Murata : コンビニ人間
Sawako Ariyoshi : The Twilight Years
Maiko Seo : 天国はまだ遠く
Kumi Saori : いつか海に行ったね
Yasutaka Tsutsui : Hell
Hikaru Okuizumi : The Stones Cry Out
Michio Takeyama : Harp of Burma
Masuji Ibuse : Black Rain
Natsume Soseki : And Then: Natsume Soseki's Novel Sorekara
Akiyuki Nosaka : La tombe des lucioles
Shohei Ooka : Fires on the Plain
Murasaki Shikibu : The Tale of Genji
Hitonari Tsuji : La lumiere du detroit
Ryunosuke Akutagawa : Rashomon et autres contes
Nobuko Takagi : Translucent Tree
Meisei Goto : Shot by Both Sides
Mitsuyo Kakuta : The Eighth Day
Osamu Dazai : Soleil couchant
Nagai Kafu : Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale

Nonfiction writers (foreign or Jpn):
Anonymous (tr. Edward Seidensticker) : The Gossamer Years
Lester I. Tenney : My Hitch in Hell
Kazuo Sakamaki : I Attacked Pearl Harbor
Robert S. Boyton : The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project
Junichi Saga : Confessions of a Yakuza
Donald Keene : Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan
Richard Lloyd Parry : Ghosts of the Tsunami; People who Eat Darkness
Tatsuzo Ishikawa : Soldiers Alive
Sayo Masuda : Autobiography of a Geisha
Hiroo Onoda : No Surrender
Iris Chang : The Rape of Nanking
Takashi Nagai : The Bells of Nagasaki
Donald Richie : The Inland Sea
Mineko Iwasaki : Geisha, a life
Komomo : A Geisha's Journey: My life as a Kyoto Apprentice
Alan Booth : The Roads to Sata
Ian Reader : Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo
Jon Hersey : Hiroshima

Short story anthology:
Michael Emmerich : Read Real Japanese Fiction: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers

Jpn author but not about Japan (not counted in total count):
Akira Mizubayashi : Une langue venue d'ailleurs

TOTAL: 148 books

>50 lilisin: That is an amazing list, Lilisin. I've read a few, have a few on the shelves, and am intrigued by others.

>50 lilisin: fantastic! I haven’t read any, but have Silence on the shelf. I listened to Iris Chang’s book on the history of AmericanChinese, focused on American racism.

There was a pitiful list in the Washington Post this morning of science fiction that has sparked the public imagination in space travel: Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Surely we can do better??

>50 lilisin: wow!

>27 dchaikin: I made a similar list in my reading journal. Like you, 1944 is the first year (going back from 2022) without an entry. Between 1900 and 1944 I've read books for 25 years. Fun!

>27 dchaikin: >55 Nickelini: For 1944, I have The Story of a Secret State by Jan Karski, an excellent read, if you are looking for something.

I visited my favourite local Little Library this morning. I obviously wasn’t the only person to have discovered one or two superfluous books on my shelves at the start of the year, since it was in Maximum Bookalanche condition, the state where you open the door and then have to spend half an hour piling all the escaped books back into it, so it gave me a chance to reflect on what might be on a list of Things you find in Little Libraries.

This is roughly in order of the likeliness of finding these things, based on my fieldwork mostly conducted in the Netherlands, Germany and France: obviously there will be local differences elsewhere.

— Random flyers, advertising anything and everything, but with a preponderance of pizza, dance/exercise classes, nimby initiatives, and lost pets
— Evangelical tracts. Nobody is ever seen putting these in (still less taking them out), but they seem to appear spontaneously everywhere. Possibly they grow from spores, although I’ve also heard the theory that they are a parasitic life-form that feeds off undigested Dan Brown (vide infra). These are usually the first things to appear in an empty Little Library.
— One stray CD, with cover art featuring a sinister-looking accordionist. Exceptionally, the accordionist may be replaced by shamrocks, beer glasses, elderly seafarers, and/or dancers (m/f) in wide skirts. But there is never more than one CD, and no-one ever removes it.
— Multiple copies of one particular book by Dan Brown (the title varies, but there are always duplicate copies)
— Multiple copies of one particular book by Heinz Konsalik (the title varies, but there are always duplicate copies)
— Oversize airport-bookstall thrillers, with or without water damage
— Romance novels with torn or missing covers
— 1980s hotel/restaurant guides for unlikely places
— 1970s directories of naturist camp-sites, also for unlikely places
— Unread self-help books, meditation guides, etc.
— Obsolete textbooks, usually in the fields of medicine, sociology, business studies or law
— Computer manuals not quite old or exotic enough to be classed as vintage
— Books that look interesting but turn out to have been translated from a language you can read and/or into a language you can’t read (generally Turkish. If you can read Turkish then it will probably be Polish.)
— Books that turn out to be things you’ve already read under a different title (US/UK variants, etc.)
— Books you discarded a year or two ago, evidently on their third or fourth time around
— That elusive book you’ve been seeking for years…

>57 thorold: You're a riot, Mark. But how true! I would add kid's books that have been chewed by either dogs or rabid children.

>58 labfs39: Yes, but fortunately that’s often segregated out onto a lower shelf so you don’t have to got there unless you’re particularly looking for it. I could have mentioned the bizarrely useless-looking cookery, handicraft and DIY books as well.

>57 thorold: but they seem to appear spontaneously 🙂 i’m learning this was Aristotle’s theory on eels (but he didn’t know Dan Brown)

>60 dchaikin: Are you reading The book of eels? I loved the bit about young Freud.

>57 thorold: Too true, she said ruefully, but so sad. I enjoyed that.

Where I live in a rural area, you are quite conspicuous when examining the contents of an LFL, so I suspect there is perhaps more care taken since you are instantly identifiable as 'that person'. Having said that, Dan Brown is always there. Also, in this part of the world, there is always a biography/memoir/autobiography of a somewhat long in the tooth politician whom no one listens to anymore.

My best find ever was Derek Jarman's Garden. I guess that goes under 'That elusive book...

>62 SassyLassy: Congratulations on the Derek Jarman!

To be honest, I’ve found quite a few interesting books over the years, although I probably am one of those evil people who put in more than they take out. And one good thing in the Netherlands is that you keep finding Boekenweek gifts, which are actually fun to collect and often well worth reading as a short introduction to an author you don’t know.

>61 thorold: yes. It’s a group read in Litsy (The Book of Eels). The Freud chapter was really entertaining…in many ways.

>50 lilisin: That's a very interesting list. I tend to often look at my catalog (the Read collection) split per original language but never thought to actually grab that and make lists of it (anything pre-move is not recorded but at least there are the last years). I use it to make sure all my original languages are set properly for the books I read but creating a list of the more often read languages actually sounds like fun.

Does the language of the title in your list indicate which language you read it in?

PS: The generic link is: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/AnnieMod&collection=-1&originallang... or you can get there from the Charts and Graph original language pie chart.

Just replace my name with yours, the usual MEMBERNAME placeholder does not work. Then filter to whichever collection you want (the numbers remain for the complete catalog but...)

>65 AnnieMod:

Yes, the language of the title indicates which language I read the work. I have a separate thread for all my Japanese reading in the Japanese literature group where I properly give the English translation for every work but as this list is just for my use, I want to know what language I read it in.

If I use that link it pulls up only 68 books out of what should be 253 so better I gather the date myself by hand.

Books I borrowed over the weekend:

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
Five Bells by Gail Jones
Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War by Assia Djebar
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

>67 labfs39: Well, they all sound wonderful to me, especially the Djebar (who I haven’t read)

>68 dchaikin: I thought a straightforward novel would be a better choice for me than the pastiche which was So Vast a Prison.

>70 avaland: Books I Loaned Someone Over the Weekend:

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
Five Bells by Gail Jones
Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War by Assia Djebar
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

List of Five-Star Books from the Books I Entered on My First Day Putting Books in LibraryThing - Oct 4, 2006 (most were read before 2006)

We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
The White Earth, Andrew McGahan
Tainted Blood, Arnaldur Indridason (crime novel)
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville (fantasy)
Death's Jest Book, Reginald Hill (crime novel)
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
Black Juice, Margo Lanagan
Villette, Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair, Anthony Trollope
The Lighthouse, P.D. James (crime novel)
The Hungry Tide, Amitiv Ghosh
George Eliot (Authors in Context) (Oxford World's Classics). Tim Dolin (non-fiction)
Wives and Daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, John Crowley
City of Truth, James Morrow

Most of authors were or became favorites, but I never did read any thing else by Shriver. The question I am left with is: Do I rate books the same as I did back then OR have I evolved ....

>70 avaland: Wise aleck!

>70 avaland: >72 labfs39: 🙂

>71 avaland: That’s really cool. Pre-LT corruption.

These are my first Lt entries as I started experimenting and deciding if I wanted to spend money on a website (gasp). Entry date is recorded by LT, June 25, 2006

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
This Ain't Brain Surgery : How to Win the Pennant Without Losing Your Mind by Larry Dierker
Saturday by Ian McEwan
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
March by Geraldine Brooks

Some time after I moved, I deleted all of the books which were not reviewed and not part of the collection I was sure I kept back at Mom's. Which looking back was probably not a very bright idea but what can you do more than a decade later. I was still not sure how I wanted to use LT at the time :)

From the books added on my first day in LT (2009-04-23), the survivors are:

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente (which is also my earliest review, added on Jul 13, 2009)
The Patriot Witch by C. C. Finlay
Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer
Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress

And these are from the next day:

Turn Coat by Jim Butcher
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann
Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England's Tragic Queen by Joanna Denny
Batman: Year One by Frank Miller

Which is pretty close to what I was reading at the time: Speculative fiction, Comics and the Tudors (plus the regularly scheduled favorite authors - that's how Archer made it in so early).

That was an interesting trip down memory lane...

And here are my first entries on March 24, 2008:

The spiral staircase : my climb out of darkness by Karen Armstrong
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson
Dreams from my father : a story of race and inheritance by Barack Obama
Night draws near : Iraq's people in the shadow of America's war by Anthony Shadid
The tipping point : how little things can make a big difference by Malcolm Gladwell

And my first five star reads entered:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (LOL!)
Hebrew-English Tanakh Student Edition (Good to know I thought highly of it!)
Huge Harold by Bill Peet ("doggone and dagnabbit, that's what I call a whoppin' big rabbit")
The Odyssey of Homer
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

>74 dchaikin: I didn't get an Ian McEwan into LT until the 11th of October 2006 and that was Atonement. Saturday was entered early November same year.

>76 labfs39: The Connie Willis was good but I only gave it 4 stars (put in 2007, so not a truly ancient read)

How about a LIST of "Books Bought While Sitting on my Tuckus for Days After Foot Surgery"
21 days and counting....the self-administered prescription seems to be "order equal to at least one book every other day".

Force of Nature by Jane Harper
Best of Australian Poems 2022
Best Canadian Poetry 2023
A Memory for Murder (Selma Falck series) Anne Holt 2022
Storytellers by Bjørn Larsson, 2018
A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth by Daniel Mason, 2021
Dinosaurs: A Novel by Lydia Millet 2022
The Forward Book of Poetry 2023
Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays Since 1965 date not listed
Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics (Sydney Studies in Australian Literature), 2020
Our Shadows by Gail Jones, 2020

Hmm. I have at least three more days not walking on it, but then there are the weeks of PT, surely I should work that somewhere in the formula....

>78 avaland: ...but then there are the weeks of PT, surely I should work that somewhere in the formula....

Maybe as the pace of recovery picks up, the ordering pace can pick up too - that would be even more fun!

Hi! I'm just finally perusing this thread. Lots of fun and interesting lists.

You folks might be interested in the Bestsellers over the Years group (https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/2847/Bestsellers-over-the-Years): It's not really that active any more, but it is full of great lists.

>57 thorold: Mark, that's great. I would add self-published conspiracy espousing thrillers.

>76 labfs39: "And here are my first entries on March 24, 2008:"

Great idea! Here are mine, but from January 21, 2008
Bystander by Maxim Gorky
Low Man on a Totem Pole by H. Allen Smith
Black Diamonds : Life in the Negro Leagues from the Men who Lived It by John Holway
Baseball Stars of 1963 by Ray Robinson
Out of the Blue by Orel Hershiser

Here are my first five books reviewed on LT from my 2008 50-Book Challenge thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/28494):
Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage by Noah Andre Trudeau
Bystander by Maxim Gorky
Modern Short Stories: The Uses of Imagination edited by Arthur Mizener
The Birth of the United States by Jim Bishop.
Baseball for British Youth by Eric E. Whitehead

I know I've posted this before somewhere in LT (but never on a thread officially for lists!), but here's a list of books I've been gradually reading through about African American history, the history of slavery, and the history of racism in America, provided several years ago by my friend Kim Nalley, who is both a terrific blues and jazz singer but also a PhD in American History and a professor at Cal State-Berkeley. I've been working these into my reading about every three or four books, and I've also added to the list myself. As Kim had included Their Eyes Were Watching God on her list, I felt free to add a few novels, as well. As you may notice, I did not read them in chronological order by subject matter, but skipped around instead. I have quite a few other books on my shelves that would be appropriate here but for now, once I've read the Andrew Young memoir, I'll consider this project complete, at least for the time being:

Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon F. Litwack
Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon F. Litwack *
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Colliins
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee *
Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year by Tavis Smiley *
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu *
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
The Sellout by Paul Beatty *
Conjure Women by Afia Atakora *
Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin *
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison *
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs
The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein
Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson * (currently reading)
An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young * (still to be read)

* Added by me.

Me, earlier today: "I might not buy any books this year for months and months. I own so many books, zillions of them still in boxes since I moved and I don't have bookshelves in my new house."

Me, now, after going to the mall and unsuccessful at buying any of the items on my list. At least the bookstore had something: "Here are the books I saw at the bookstore that made me take them home:"

Things We Do In the Dark, Jennifer Hillier (on sale! Canadian non-white author!)

Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart, Jen Sookfong Lee (as my husband says, "when a friend publishes a book, I always buy it." Lee isn't a friend, but she's the ex-wife of a friend and I've met her a handful of times. I was always going to buy this, so I might as well have taken it home from the store)

The Enigma of Room 622, Joel Dicker (I only learned about this book and author today and there was the book, just sitting on the shelf. Obviously it was meant to be. Swiss author, bestseller, translated into English, mystery. That checks off a box in a rare category)

Mindful of Murder, Susan Juby (love this author and this sounds great)

Spare, Prince Harry (I thought I might read this when it came out in paperback, but the reviews I've read have made it sound quite good, and I love to stick it to Piers Morgan and that nasty Clarkson guy (who I'd never heard of until he decided to tell the world how he stays up at night hating a woman at the cellular level, a woman who has no influence on his life in anyway. Whoever you are, get help asap) ). This was 25% off, plus I had 10% loyalty program on top of that . . . good thing because this book was $47 Canadian dollars :-O. I still think $31 is a lot.

So I wasn't going to buy any books until at least May, but I think I had some pretty good reasons . . .

>77 avaland: that was the first and last I read of Ian McEwan.

>78 avaland: new books! benefits of foot surgery?

>80 rocketjk: cool

>81 rocketjk: I copied down an earlier version of this list. I would love to read through it

>82 Nickelini: more new books!

>83 dchaikin: You know...any excuse (however, at this point in my life I like to think I don't need an excuse...) So many books and authors calling to you....

I should atone for >57 thorold:, otherwise I'm surely due for a spell of bad Little Library karma. These are the last five little library finds I read. All at least moderately worthwhile, and there is quite a bit more where that came from, currently stuck on the TBR pile whilst I read in more directed ways:

—De ijsdragers by Anna Enquist — Boekenweek gift by one of my favourite Dutch writers
—The Garrick year by Margaret Drabble — an early Drabble I'd missed. Admittedly it was falling apart and needed major surgery before I could read it.
—Twee vrouwen by Harry Mulisch — not Mulisch at his best, it went back to whence it came after reading
—Ansichten eines Clowns by Heinrich Böll — reread, but I didn't have a copy any more
—The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

...and my first five added to LT:

Quest For Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game by Peter Hopkirk
A Book of railway journeys edited by Ludovic Kennedy
Flashman and the Tiger by George MacDonald Fraser
Lust, Or, No Harm Done by Geoff Ryman
Flashman And The Angel Of The Lord by George MacDonald Fraser

The first of about 1500 books I added on 17 April 2007!

I think I must have started building my LT library with Universal Import using data exported from an offline database I had been using before: that explains why there were so many books added on a Tuesday when I must have been working. And probably also why there is no obvious order to the addition. The export file clearly wasn't sorted by author or title or shelf-mark...

I'm more of a noob here than most of you, so my first five books added were late in 2012:

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg
Scandals and Scoundrels: Seven Cases That Shook the Academy by Ron Robin
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Two of those, Scandals and Scoundrels and Where'd You Go, Bernadette, I didn't care for that much, but the other three made up for that.

The last 10 books from independent publishers that I acquired:

Elena Knows & Salt Crystals, Charco Press
The She-Devil in the Mirror, New Directions
Navidad & Matanza, Open Letter
The Restless, The Feminist Press
Tentacle, And Other Stories
Pina, Restless Books
On Lighthouses, Two Lines Press
Bibliolepsy, Soho Press
The Years, Seven Stories Press

>88 ELiz_M: That’s a fab category; might borrow it, if u don’t mind…

>89 avaland: I got the idea for this list from a discussion on Kay's thread, so I don't mind at all. :)

Following Eliz_M's list this is my most recent ten books bought from independent publishers (mostly small). I did not include poetry in this list.

Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life / Ig Pub, US
Cancion / Bellevue Literary Press, US
Primeval and Other Times / Twisted Spoon, Prague, Czech Republic.
The Nature of Oaks, Timber Press, US
The Book of Reykjavik AND The Sea Cloak: And Other Stories / Comma Press (UK)
An Unusual Grief / Casava Republic Press, Abuja, Nigeria
The Tango of Death / Yuri Vynnychuk; Spuyten Duyvil Pub., Brooklyn, NY.
The Bad Immigrant and The Bead Collector / Interlink Books, US
Strange Beasts of China / Melville House, Brooklyn NY

My oldest books:
Romola. Two volumes bound as one 1863
Classic Myths In English Literature 1893
Donegal Fairy Stories 1900
Twenty-three and a half hours' leave 1918
Poems by Robert Burns--Reprinted from the Original Editions with Explanatory Notes 1919

clueless possibly unanswerable reader question: Where do university publishers fit the world of large corporate vs* independent publishers? I mean like Cambridge, or Columbia, or Texas A&M. etc. Are these a third corner of the publishing world? Should they each be considered separately, or it is reasonable to group them all together? Or are they essentially small independent academic publishers.

Anyway, I was going through my recent acquisitions looking for independent publishers and these three publishers came up.

*"vs" might be a provocatively manipulated choice of wording.

>88 ELiz_M: Boy, it's tough to tease out who owns what, but I'll give it a whirl. I'm excluding China's Publishing House and self-published. Please let me know if any are actually owned by the big five.

This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing (Soho Press)
The madwoman of Serrano (Dedalus Books)
Afterlives (Bloomsbury)
The Ultimate Tragedy (Dedalus Books)
The First Wife (Archipelago Press)
The Tuner of Silences (Biblioasis-Canadian)
Katalin Street (NYRB)
Love's Shadow (Bloomsbury)
Samurai (Oxford University Press—pending Dan's question)
Our Lady of the Nile (Archipelago Press)

Edited to fix typo

Some books I finished on my birthday(s)

Helping verbs of the heart, Peter Esterhazy
Fullblood Arabian, Osama Alomar
On modern art and Pedagogical sketchbook, both Paul Klee
Greta Garbo, Conrad Veidt 25. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, 27. Juni - 8. Juli 1975 (what a cheat!)
Wood, wire, and quill : an introduction to the harpsichord, Jan Albarda
Moomin, volume six, Lars Jansson
The Strange Case of Edward Gorey, Alexander Theroux

ehhh, enuff. Period covered: 2021 - 2001

Well, our thread is not unique: https://www.bookscrolling.com/

one example (looks a little hit and miss to me, but I haven't actually read any of these)

Top 28 Best Science And Nature Books From 2022

28.) And Finally: Matters of Life and Death written by Henry Marsh
27.) Before the Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond written by Laura Mersini-Houghton
26.) Birds and Us: A 12,000-Year History from Cave Art to Conservation written by Tim Birkhead
25.) Bitch: On the Female of the Species written by Lucy Cooke
24.) Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness written by Andrew Scull
23.) Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist written by Frans de Waal
22.) Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps written by Seirian Sumner
21.) Plume: World Explorer: World Explorer written by Alexander Maitland
20.) How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going written by Vaclav Smil
19.) Hysterical: A Memoir written by Pragya Agarwal
18.) Land Healer: How Farming Can Save Britain’s Countryside written by Jake Fiennes
17.) Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World written by Gaia Vince
16.) Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet written by George Monbiot
15.) Rewilding the Sea: How to Save our Oceans written by Charles Clover
14.) Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening written by Douglas Brinkley
13.) Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization written by Neil deGrasse Tyson
12.) Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us written by Rachel Aviv
11.) The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward written by Daniel H. Pink
10.) Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus written by David Quammen
9.) Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds written by Thomas Halliday
8.) The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions written by Greta Thunberg
7.) The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I written by Lindsey Fitzharris
6.) The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness written by Meghan O’Rourke
5.) The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us written by Steve Brusatte
4.) The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth written by Ben Rawlence
3.) What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions written by Randall Munroe
2.) An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us written by Ed Yong
1.) The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human written by Siddhartha Mukherjee

LIST: UNREAD BOOKS THAT ARE LITERALLY WITHIN ARM'S REACH FROM WHERE I SIT CURRENTLY*:

*Rules are that I can't stretch or lean over, I must have my back against the back of the recliner which must be in its most neutral position.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2023
Best Canadian Poetry 2023
The Selected Works of Audre Lord
On Witchcraft by Cotton Mather
The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler
Haven
Writing from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965
Force of Nature
Afterlives
An Unusual Grief
Babysitter
Goodnight Stranger
Double Blind, Sara Winokur
The Sixteen Trees of the Somme
Flights
Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale
Primeval and Other Times
Ain't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South
Cancion
Tango of Death
Thrust
Everland

These books are in the process of being read OR are awaiting the touch of fingers across their pages (although the selection triples if I just lean a little right...)

>97 avaland: Cool! All I can get to without moving significantly are:
- The captive mind
- Don Quijote and
- Dutch light

But wait: I’ve got an ipad on my lap…

(ETA: …and I’ve just realised that my reading glasses are on the sideboard, so I will have to move before reading any of those books anyway…)

Unread or dipped into on my desk:

The World of Urban Sketching by Stephanie Bower
The Forward Book of Poetry
Books and Libraries: Poems ed. by Andrew D. Scrimgeour
The Paris Review 241
The Paris Review 242
Seaweed: An Enchanting Miscellany by Miek Zwamborn
Lots of New Yorkers

Read and dipped into multiple times for decades, and seemingly needed more every day (last night I was so tired, and working so late, that I found myself having to look up a synonym for "thing"):
Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus

Cool. I don’t have anything untouched within reach of my morning reading spot. I have a late night spot - I may check it tonight.

>98 thorold: I suspect you could come up with a clever book list of your own. One can parse one's books in sooooo many ways.

>99 lisapeet: That sketching book is intriguing....

>100 dchaikin: Hey, this is just my clever list, I'm sure you could come up with a clever list -- examples: books both you and your spouse has read, or books I have that have all red covers, or chunksters over 800 pages in my library, books I've read/have that were first printed in the year I was born; Books I've read that I tried foisting on my adult children; fiction you have read set in 8 different wars....

>101 avaland: Yes, I've done a few above. If you've got a few thousand books knocking around the place, patterns are bound to emerge. While I think of something, here's the random list I got from clicking on my profile page:

—A Stone Boat by Andrew Solomon — a forgotten 1990s LGBT novel. I think it was about a pianist?
—Collected Poems by R. F. Langley — don't remember much about this either. It was a Poetry Book Society choice in 2000
—Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea by Robert K. Massie — didn't like this much, Massie is just so infuriatingly chatty. It seemed to be all about the buttons on the admirals' uniforms.
—The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain by Paul Theroux — Theroux is one of those travel writers who hates travelling, and he didn't have much fun visiting the British coast. I love Jonathan Raban's account in Coasting of how he and Theroux bumped into each other on this trip, and neither of them wanted to admit what he was doing. Sad to hear of Raban's recent death.
—Those Twentieth Century Blues by Michael Tippett — one of the best composer-memoirs ever. A lovely man, even if you don't like his music.
—The Makioka sisters by Junʾichirō Tanizaki — read recently and much enjoyed
—Mephisto: Roman einer Karriere by Klaus Mann— re-read recently and much enjoyed

>101 avaland: There are lots of urban sketching books around, and I love them. Aside from really enjoying the content, they're very aspirational for me... someday I'll have enough downtime to take my kit out and do some drawing and sketching of my own, even just in my back yard. I work from photos I take sometimes, but it's not the same as the plein air thing.

>101 avaland: my list of the moment - my 2023 “Ideas for Reading”. When a title interests and I really think I want to read it and I don’t want to forget it, i note it down. I refresh the list every Jan 1. So this is my 6+ week list - with minimal editing, although i’ll try adding touchstones

- Donald Howard’s Geoffrey Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World was considered the definitive biography when it was published in 1989, (dianelouise100)
- The Allegory of Love by C. S. Lewis. Good chapters on both Troilus and Criseyde and The Romance of the Rose. (dianelouise100)
- Joseph Blotner’s biography of Faulkner : Faulkner: A Biography (dianelouise100)
- Ginkgo by Peter Crane (sassylassy)
- The Holy Roman Empire by Friedrich Heels, 1968 (Marion Turner)
- *I Am I Am I Am by Maggie O’Farrel - memoir (raidergirl3 & arubabookwoman)
- Superinfinite: The Unique John Donne by ‪Katherine Rundell‬ (BLBera)
- The Turbulent London of Richard II by Ruth Bird (1949) (Marion Turner)
- *This Other Eden by Paul Harding (dianeham)
- A History of Balance by Joel Kaye (Marion Turner)
- Noopiming by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Yells)
- Chaucer reads Dante by Karla Taylor 1989 (marion turner) - LT has Chaucer Reads ""The Divine Comedy""
- It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth - GN with history if GN (anniemod)
- The Soaring Life of the Lark by John Lewis-Stempel (dianelouise100)
- Cotton comes to Harlem by Chester Himes (LolaWalser)
- A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes - his 1st book (LolaWalser)
- The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir (baswood)
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (left bank)
- Believer by David Axelrod (??)
- The Years by Annie Ernaux (??)

I never have books off the shelf unless I'm actively reading them! I feel out of place here now . . . :-)

Books that are retrieved by a search in my catalogue for the word “apple”:

William Tell told again by P G Wodehouse — obviously!
Days of awe by A M Homes (in my review I mentioned a scene where two characters are in bed, eating apples)
History of the hour by Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum — a comparison of hourglasses to Apple II’s as icons of new tech in my review
Right Ho, Jeeves by P G Wodehouse — ‘"it sounded as if Carnera had jumped off the top of the Eiffel Tower onto a cucumber frame" (Bertie crunching a piece of apple)’

…so why didn’t Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell come up, I wonder?

>104 dchaikin: "A History of Balance by Joel Kaye" costs $140!

>97 avaland: Only books I'm actively reading are on within reach at the moment as I recently cleaned off my couch-side table. They are The Captive Mind and The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy. Staring at me from the bench are five I borrowed from you, and the top shelf of the bookcase across from me are the books I've pulled from my shelves for the African Novel Challenge. Below that are recent purchases that I want to get to sooner rather than later.

>102 thorold: Let's see what my profile page has to offer:

The story of King Saul and King David by Lore Groszmann Segal
The colonel by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
The tea of Ulaanbaatar : a novel by Christopher R. Howard
The elected member by Bernice Rubens
Holes by Louis Sachar
The tuner of silences by Mia Couto

>107 dianeham: actually I vaguely remember seeing that. Crazy, right? I just assumed if I really wanted it, i’d search around and find a normally priced copy.

Here's my current list of "between books" (books I read one entry or chapter at a time--generally collections, magazines and anthologies of some sort--between the books I read straight through:

Spring Sowing by Liam O'Flaherty
Gaza Mom: Politics, Parenting and Everything in Between by Laila El-Haddad
Literature - Book Two edited by Thomas H. Briggs
No Cheering in the Press Box edited by Jerome Holtzman
The World's Greatest Romances (Black's Reader Services) edited by Walter J. Black
Good for a Laugh: A New Collection of Humorous Tidbits and Anecdotes from Aardvark to Zythum by Bennett Cerf
Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
Coronet - June 1, 1938 edited by Arnold Gingrich
Baseball 1963 edited by C.C. Spink
The Wonder Clock by Howard Pyle
Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey edited by Philip Van Doren Stern
Show: The Magazine of the Arts, March 1963

Books I’m discarding: (free to good homes:)

Molly Fox’s Birthday
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Shadow of the Wind
The Thirteenth Tale
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Garnet Hill
The Wrong Mother
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Giraffe
The Ministry of Special Cases
The Origins of the Brunists
The Forgotten Waltz
Sea of Poppies
The Punch
The Measure of Darkness
The Water Knife
A case of Exploding Mangoes

>103 lisapeet: I've always had too many creative impulses ....

>104 dchaikin: re the Paul Harding on your list, I would suggest you read his first two 'related' books first.

>112 avaland: oh. I didn’t know they should be read in order. I’ve read Tinkers, but not Enon. Ok, i can go there first

>111 dianeham: Are these books you've read and disliked, books you never see yourself reading, or books you've read and need the space?

I'm a librarian, now retired. I love lists! I love to read them and I love to make them.

After my book club read Miss Eliza's English Kitchen: a Novel of Victorian Cookery and
Friendship I compiled this list of books I have read and liked.

Novels with food/cooking theme
AFTERTASTE: A NOVEL IN FIVE COURSES by Meredith Mileti
EARTHLY DELIGHTS by Kerry Greenwood
FRIENDSHIP CAKE by Lynne Hinton
LARISSA’S BREADBOOK: TEN INCREDIBLE SOUTHERN WOMEN AND THEIR STORIES OF COURAGE, ADVENTURE, AND DISCOVERY by Lorraine Johnson-Coleman
LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY by Bonnie Garmus
LOVE & SAFFRON: A NOVEL OF FRIENDSHIP, FOOD, AND LOVE by Kim Fay
MIDNIGHT AT THE BLACKBIRD CAFÉ by Heather Webber
PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND OTHER FLAVORS by Sonali Dev
THE SCHOOL OF ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS by Erica Bauermeister

And one Non-Fic title, too good to miss
THE BEST COOK IN THE WORLD: TALES FROM MY MOMMA’S TABLE by Rick Bragg

Two for kids and everyone else
FANNIE IN THE KITCHEN: THE WHOLE STORY FROM SOUP TO NUTS OF HOW FANNIE FARMER INVENTED RECIPES WITH PRECISE MEASUREMENTS by Deborah Hopkinson.
THE OGRESS AND THE ORPHANS by Kelly Barnhill

Dare you to try this fantasy!
SUNSHINE by Robin McKinley

OK, here's an obscure list! This is a list of the books reviewed/noted in the March 1963 edition of Show: The Magazine of the Arts, which I've been reading through gradually over the past month or so.

The Great Hunger by Cecil Woodham-Smith (feature review by Norman Podhoretz)
A Favorite of the Gods by Sybille Bedford (BR)
A Month Soon Goes by Storm Jameson (BR)
Officer Factory by Hans Hellmut Kirst (BR)
The Fall of Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order, 1905-1922 by Edmond Taylor (BR)
1918 - The Last Act by Barrie Pitt (BR)
Dare Call it Treason by Richard M. Watt (BR)
Private Shaw and Public Shaw: A Dual Portrait of Lawrence of Arabia and George Bernard Shaw by Stanley Weintraub (BR)
Paris on the Seine by Blake Enrich (BR)
The Great Ascent by Robert L. Heilbroner (SS)
The Deadlock of Democracy by James MacGregor Burns (SS)
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (SS)
Aissa Saved by Joyce Cary (SS)
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (SS)
The Sand Peoples by Richard McKenna (SS)
Freedom in the Western World by Herbert J. Muller (SS)
Children of the A-Bomb by Dr. Arata Osada (SS)
Renoir, My Father by Jean Renoir (SS)
Moon Missing by Edward Sorel (SS)

(BR) = Books Roundup (four or five paragraph reviews)
(SS) = Show Selects (basically Briefly Noted capsule reviews)

>113 dchaikin: I suppose they don't have to be read in order...

>114 labfs39: some I read, some I didn’t read. I need room. Most of these are advance reader copies. Plus I’m having trouble see the print in books now. Although that might change since I was told I have cataracts.

Measure of Darkness was excellent as was Sea of Poppies.

>102 thorold: "..If you've got a few thousand books.." We do understand that problem....

>116 rocketjk: that is a cool snapshot

>116 rocketjk: That's one of my favorite "features" of reading older magazines - track down the books they review/recommend/mention. Some are still well known, some lead to discovering an author who I had never heard of and sometimes, the author had just dropped off anyone's list...

>116 rocketjk: I’m trying to discard books and you got me ordering new ones!

>120 dchaikin: Yes, isn't it? And Norman Poderhoretz really digs in on his review of The Great Hunger, which is about the Irish Potato Famine. He eventually morphs his outrage at the callousness of the British rulers of Ireland and the ways in which they prioritized the protection of markets and trade into a similar fury over the way such decisions things were still being made in 1963 (and of course still are in our own time).

>121 AnnieMod: ". . . discovering an author who I had never heard of and sometimes, the author had just dropped off anyone's list..."

Yes, isn't that the coolest?

>122 dianeham: "I’m trying to discard books and you got me ordering new ones!"

I think my work here is done for today. :)

The books I share with T.E. Lawrence:

The Sea and The Jungle by H. M. Tomlinson
The Aran Islands by J. M. Synge
The Children of Odin by Paraic Colum
I Fioretti del glorioso poverello di Cristo S. Francesco di Assisi by St. Francis
The Little Flowers of S. Francis of Assisi by St. Francis
The rime of the ancient mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
La Chanson de Roland by Roland
The Imitation of Christ by T. A. Kempis
Tess of the D'Urberville: a pure woman by Thomas Hardy
Ulysses signed lim. ed. no 36 by James Joyce
The tale of Beowulf by William Morris
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

I share the most titles with these legacy libraries:

Gillian Rose 139
Carl Sandburg 139
Astrid Lindgren 137
Ernest Hemingway 136

Huh.

>125 labfs39: I'll have to look in the morning. That's a great idea for a list. I know that Sandburg and Hemingway are both near the top of my "Books you share with . . . " lists.

The books I share with Susan B. Anthony

Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Iola Leroy by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

>125 labfs39: OK, here are my top five:

Carl Sandburg 261
Ernest Hemingway 239
Gillian Rose 120
Norman Mailer 113
Graham Greene 112

>127 Julie_in_the_Library:
The list of Legacy Libraries I share 4 books with is:
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Morris
Emily Dickinson
Dante
Marie Antoinette
W.H. Auden
George Patton

The books I share with Lena Horne are
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon F. Litwack
An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Young Andrew

The books I share with Jackie Gleason are
The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta by Albert Einstein
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

My top five:

Gillian Rose - 233 (who?)
Carl Sandberg - 200
Ernest Hemingway - 180
Ralph Ellison - 175
Eeva Liisa Manner - 159 (again, who?)

Follow up

Gillian Rose was a British philosopher and writer. She died of ovarian cancer at age 48 (1995)

Eeva-Liisa Manner (5 December 1921 – 7 July 1995) was a Finnish poet, playwright and translator.

Top 25 works in all Legacy libraries:

1. Holy Bible by God (82)
2. The Iliad by Homer (76)
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (71)
4. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare (70)
5. The Odyssey by Homer (66)
6. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (48)
7. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (45)
8. Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch (45)
9. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (43)
10. The Holy Bible: King James Version (KJV) by Anonymous (43)
11. The Complete Works of Horace by Quintus Horatius Flaccus (42)
12. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (41)
13. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (38)
14. The Complete Poetry of John Milton by John Milton (37)
15. Metamorphoses in translation by Ovid (37)
16. The Spectator by Joseph Addison (37)
17. Paradise Lost by John Milton (36)
18. The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne (36)
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (36)
20. A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson (34)
21. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (32)
22. The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses by François de Salignac de La Mothe- Fénelon (31)
23. The Sonnets by William Shakespeare (31)
24. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31)
25. The Works of Alexander Pope by Alexander Pope (30)

Books I share with JackieGleason:

Ragnarok: the age of fire and gravel by Ignatius Donnelly
Zen in the art of archery by Eugen Herrigel
Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds by Charles Mackay
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
The golden bough : a study in magic and religion by Sir James George Frazer

Books I have in my classroom library (high school science/math):

Wonder Women of Science: How 12 Geniuses are Rocking Science, Technology, and the World
Federal Bureau of Physics: Vol 1 + Vol 2,3 and 4 graphic novel series
When is a Planet Not a Planet: The Story of Pluto
The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet
Zap: Nikola Tesla Takes Charge
Clean Sweep: Frank Zamboni's Ice Machine
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos by Dava Sobel
The Planets by Dava Sobel
Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love by Dava Sobel
Longitude by Dava Sobel
How I Killed Pluto And Why it Had it Coming by Mike Brown
We Need to Talk About Kelvin
e=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation
Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character
The Quirks and Quarks Guide to Space: 42 Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein
Mission to Pluto: The First Visit to an Ice Dwarf and the Kuiper Belt
The Darkest Dark by Chris Hadfield
An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield

>133 raidergirl3: "we need to talk about Kelvin" lol

Lists are literally why I'm here. I already have a couple of lists of media, one of every movie I've seen ranked from best to worst, and another with all the albums I've heard. Unfortunately, my books list isn't impressive, which is why I'm taking a "75 book challenge" this year. I'll say this, though. At the top of my list is 20,000 Leagues, the Walter translation. And at the bottom is Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

French Crime books published in 1951

Un grand patron - Pierre Véry
La nuit du 12 au 13 - Steeman
Crimes à vendre - Steeman
L'Erreur de Cendrillon - Noel Vindry (Rochebrune)
Les Pistolets solitaires - Jacques Decrest
Vous n'y êtes por rien - Jacques Decrest
Le Grille qui tue - Léon Groc
Le Poisson Chinois pêche à la ligne - Jean Bommart
Le Poisson Chinois a tué Hitler - Jean Bommart
Le général n'a pas crie - Jean Bommart
Chasse couplée au Claire - Pierre Nord
Les Rendez-vous de Passy - Pierre Boileau
Le Mauvais Cheval - Thomas Narcejac
L'ombre et la proie - Boileau-Narcejac
Impasse du désir - Albert-Jean
Le valse de poisons - Francis Didelot
Le Juge et L'Assassin - Paul Darcy
La mort rôde par la maison - Paul Darcy
Une lame dans le dos - Paul Darcy
Fabienne et l'amour - Paul Darcy
Trois mortes au crépuscule - Joseph-Louis Sanclaume
Dans le beaux draps - Joseph-Louis Sanclaume
Tous dans le bain - J de Revel
Passons la monnaie - André Piljean
Je Déteste Lanzi - André Piljean
De la Viande à pas cher - Terry G Stewart
Jean Martin-Bontoux - Maurice Raphael
Dangereuses Étreintes - Ralph Bertis
Les souris ont la peau tendre - San-Antonio
Le Tueur en pantoufles - Frédéric Dard
On demande un cadavre - Maxell Beeting
Le Tueur aux gants blancs - Cornel Milk
28 minutes d'angoisse - Verne Goody
Monsieur 34 - Wel Norton
Signé tête de mort - Max Beeting
Du plomb pour ces demoiselles - Frédéric Dard
Accident de la route - Thomas Cervion
La mort bat la Campagne - Maurice-Bernard Endrébe
L'espionne s'évade - Jean Bruce
À coudes rabattus - Larry Saunders
Pas de bouches inutiles - Larry Saunders
Vous qui n'avez pas été tués - Igor B Maslowski
Les héros s'en foutent - André Héléna
Le Festival des Macchabées - André Héléna

>125 labfs39: etc.

My top five are:
Gillian Rose 279
Newton "Bud" Flounders 269
Ernest Hemingway 226
Eeva-Liisa Manner 216
Leonard and Virginia Woolf 186

Rose and Manner obviously come up for me as for others above because they are recent — I share some really trivial stuff with Rose, including the Oxford University Examination Decrees, whilst the overlap with Manner has a lot of poetry in it.

Bud Flounders was a famous collector of gay fiction, which probably explains why he comes up near the top of my list but not the others above.

Hemingway is one of my least-favourite writers, but of course we overlap on a lot of 20th century and earlier classics and Spanish Civil War stuff. The two most obscure books we share are Practical Flying and No men are strangers.

Since I’ve just read a couple off the “old” end of the TBR pile, here is my current list of books that have been waiting more than five years to be read:

— Yo el Supremo by Augusto Roa Bastos, since 2016-10-11
— The matter of revolution : science, poetry and politics in the age of Milton by John Rogers, since 2017-04-04
— How Milton works by Stanley Eugene Fish, since 2017-04-20
— Suite française by Irène Némirovsky, since 2017-06-15
— Hijo de hombre by Augusto Roa Bastos, since 2017-06-15
— Paradise by A. L. Kennedy, since 2017-07-26
— Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet: Mikrogramme 1924-1933 by Robert Walser, since 2018-02-02

Honourable mention to:
— De vriendschap by Connie Palmen, waiting since 2018-03-15, which will cross that five-year threshold in a few weeks if I don’t get to it first.

They are all books I want to read, it’s just a matter of other things shouting louder. And I think there’s also a tendency to forget about a book if you have so often taken something else off the pile before it. Sorting my TBR in acquisition date order does seem to help, though. Before I did that there were quite a few books that stayed on the pile for over ten years.

Novels by William Faulkner (1897-1962) - 19 novels

1926 - Soldiers' Pay
1927 - Mosquitoes
1929 - Sartoris (An abridged version of Flags in the Dust, published posthumously 1973)
*1929 - The Sound and the Fury (An appendix: "Compson 1699–1945")
*1930 - As I Lay Dying
1931 - Sanctuary
*1932 - Light in August
1935 - Pylon
*1936 - Absalom, Absalom!
1938 - The Unvanquished
*1939 - The Wild Palms (Faulkners original title: If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem)
^1940 - The Hamlet (Snopes 1)
*1942 - Go Down, Moses
1948 - Intruder in the Dust
1951 - Requiem for a Nun
1954 - A Fable (Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1955)
^1957 - The Town (Snopes 2)
^1959 - The Mansion (Snopes 3)
*1962 - The Reiver (Pulitzer Prize in 1963)

*on wikipedia's "Selected list of works"
^ books I own

Are you getting Faulkner ideas, Dan? He's a favorite of mine but I have a lot left to read!

List of birthday books that I received (or purchased with birthday money!)

Archipelago books:
Yann Andréa Steiner by Marguerite Duras
The Storm by Thomás González
Love by Hanne Orstavik
The Pastor by Hanne Orstavik (not finding that touchstone)
If You Kept a Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani
A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rytkheu
NYRB:
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives by Diane Johnson
Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki
A Posthumous Confession by Marcellus Emants
An African in Greenland by TéTé-Michel Kpomassie
Extras:
American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation by Eric Rutkow
The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
The Age of the Vikings by Anders Winroth
Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair
Queen Victoria: 24 Days that changed her life by Lucy Worsley

>140 japaul22: Darryl and Diane are reading Faulkner this year. I’m thinking about a 2024 plan. (A 2 yr plan, probably). But I might read something this year…

>141 japaul22: fun!

>141 japaul22: What a great haul! Of these I liked Love and Dream in Polar Fog, and loved The Blue Sky. I have An African in Greenland on my wish list.

>143 labfs39: The Blue Sky is definitely on that list from your review!

Decided to get back in the old time machine for another list. Here are the first 10 books I reviewed on LT as per my 2008 50-Book Challenge thread.

1: Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage by Noah Andre Trudeau
2: Bystander by Maxim Gorky
3: Modern Short Stories: The Uses of Imagination edited by Arthur Mizener
4: The Birth of the United States by Jim Bishop
5: Baseball for British Youth by Eric E. Whitehead
6: Felipe Alou . . . My Life and Baseball by Felipe Alou
7: From a Hard Rock to a Gem by Pamela M. Johnson
8: Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards 1987 edited by William Miller Abrahams
9: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
10: The Life of Our Holy Father Maximus the Confessor based on the life by his disciple Anastasius, the Apocrisiarios by Saint Anastasius of Sinai

The whole thread is here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/28494. I came so close to the 50-book goal that first year, finishing up at 49 books read. And, goodness, I hadn't lost the ability to write short reviews yet.

>145 rocketjk: but no reviews show up for Felipe Alou (#6). 🙁 His son was one of my favorite players (especially as a 1997 Marlin, and later as an Astro. Less so infamously as a Cub with a stolen foul ball.)

>146 dchaikin: My very short review is on the thread itself. But I'll save you the jump. Here's the whole thing:

"It was a fairly interesting account of Alou's childhood in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s and also of his early baseball career. There was also quite a bit of history on the pioneer of Latin American players in the major leagues which I assume was more the work of his 'as told to' partner in the venture, writer Herm Weiskopf."

All three of the Alou brothers, Felipe, Matty and Jesus, were cool. For a short period all three were together on the San Francisco Giants. One day (I think it was only one) the three of them all started in the outfield together. A major league first, as you'd imagine. Felipe's son, Moises, was a very solid player for around 15 years. Near the end of his career, he played on the Giants with his dad as manager (2005 and 2006). I just looked up his stats. He had a lifetime batting average of .303 and slugging percentage of .516. Even for the steroid era, which his career basically spanned, that's pretty darn good.

>147 rocketjk: no clue what he used. He wasn’t a power guy, more a skills hitter. But he still well could have been among the 50% or more players who used that stuff. No one was enforcing. But he has hof-numbers (if only he hadn’t kept switching teams).

Eta - ok, i have a clue: https://syndication.bleacherreport.com/amp/209546-the-steroid-list-revealed.amp....

>148 dchaikin: "He wasn’t a power guy, . . . "

332 HRs over his career, though, plus that .516 slugging pct I mentioned above. And, yes, that list you linked to.

>145 rocketjk: Ooh, good one. My first ten reviews, also in 2008, are

1. Victoria and Vancouver Island by Kathleen Thompson Hill
2. The book of Passover : a celebration by Benjamin Blech
3. Tisha: The Story of a Young Teacher in the Alaskan Wilderness by Robert Specht
4. A long way gone : memoirs of a boy soldier by Ishmael Beah
5. The Long Voyage (Witnesses to War) by Jorge Semprún
6. My father's paradise : a son's search for his Jewish past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar
7. The Broken Cord by Michael Dorris
8. The Resilient Child by George S. Everly
9. Year of wonders : a novel of the plague by Geraldine Brooks
10. Chosen By God: A Brother's Journey by Joshua Hammer

Writing things down on a list is supposed to lead to some sort of order, perhaps to clear the mind. I have been buying poetry books for years, mainly from second hand bookshops. Sometimes I would read a few poems out of a book and then put it on the shelf and forget about it. Sometimes I would just put it on the shelf completely unread. The result is I have a small bookcase full of unread poetry books.

I set about making a list of those mainly unread books; thinking I really ought get down to reading them. When I finished the list I felt overwhelmed. Where to start? Well lets start with the list:

Ackroyd Peter - Diversions of Purley
Adcock Fleur - Selected poems
Auden W. H. - Selected poems
Auden W. H. Nones
Ash John - Burnt Pages
Bell Robyn - Saw the hose
Berryman John - Selected poems
Berryman John - Berryman's sonnets
Betjemen John - Collected poems
Bridges Robert - Poems of...
Brooke Robert and Owen Wilfred Everyman
Browning - Selected poems
Bunting Basil - Complete poems
Byron Lord - The poetical works
Byron Lord - Don Juan
Cafavy C. P. - Collected poems
Coleridge Samuel Taylor - Poems
Coleridge Samuel Taylor - The poems of...
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Dickinson Emily - Everyman edition
Donne John - Penguin Poets library
Donne John - Selected poems
Durrell Lawrence - Collected poems
Eliot T. S. Selected poems
Eliot T. S. Selected poems
Enright D. J. Selected poems
Fanthorpe U. A. selected poems
Frost Robert - Selected poems
Fuller Roy - Buff
Ginsburg Allan - Selected poems
Ginsburg Allan - Howl
Goldsmith - The works of Goldsmith
Graves Robert - Selected by himself
Gray and Collins - Poetical works
Tom Gunn and Ted Hughes - Selected poems
Herrick Robert - Everyman
Hardy Thomas - Collected
Hegley John - Can dad come down soon
Henri Adrian - Collected Poems
Heine Heinrich - Everyman edition
Hobsbaum Phillip - Coming out fighting
Hofman Michael - Acrimony
Hopkins Gerald Manly - Poems and prose
Hughes Ted - Birthday letters
Hughes Ted - New selected poems
Hughes Ted - Wadwo
Hughes Ted - Collected poems
Jennings Elizabeth - Colected poems
Johnson Samuel - complete English poems
Keats John - Annotated English Poets
Larkin Philip - The Witsun Weddings
Larkin Philip - High Windows
Larkin Philip - Collected poems
Lawrence D. H. Collected poems
Lewis C Day - Poems selected by himself
Longfellow Henry - Poetical works
Lowell Robert - Poetical works
Lowell Robert - selected poems
McKendrick Jamie - The sirocco room
Milton John - Complete English poems
Muldoon Paul - Selected poems
Murray Les - Selected poems
Pattern Brian - Love poems
Pattern Brian - Grinning Jack
Plath Sylvia - Selected Poems
Pound Ezra - Selected poems
Pushkin Alexander - Everyman edition
Raleigh Sir Walter - Poems
Redgrove Peter - The man named East
Reid Christopher - In the Echoey Tunnel
Rilke Raine Marie - Sonnets to Orphus
Rochester Lord - Everyman edition
Roethke Theodore selected poems
Rosetti Christina - selected
Rosetti Daniel Gabriel - Poems
Scott Sir Walter - Poetical works
Shakespeare William - Sonnets
Shakespeare William - Poems
Shelley Percy Bysshe - Penguin poets library
Shelley Percy Bysshe - Poetical works
Skelton John - Everyman
Smith Stevie - A selection
Spenser Edmund - Minor poems
Spenser Edmund - Poems
Spenser Edmund - Faerie Queen
Stafford William - The way it is
Sydney Sir Philip - Poems
Tennyson Alfred Lord - Poetical works
Tennyson Alfred Lord - Poems
Thomas Dylan - Under Milkwood
Thomas R. S. everyman edition
Thwaite Anthony - Selected poems
Tomlinson Charles - Vineyard above the sea
Walcott Derek - Selected poetry
Watten Barrett - Frame
Watts Alister - Planet
Whitman Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wordsworth William - penguin poets library
Wordsworth William - The Prelude
Wordsworth William - The Prelude 1805
Wordsworth William - Works
Williams William Carlos - Paterson
Williams William Carlos - Selected poems
Wyatt Sir Thomas - Unpublished poems
Yeats W. B. - Selected poetry
Yevtushenko Yevgeny - Selected poems

Penguin Modern poets 1 Durrell-Jennings-Thomas
Penguin Modern poets 2 Amis-Moreas-Porter
Penguin Modern Poets 3 Barker-Bell-Causley
Penguin Modern poets 4 Holbrook-Middleton-Wevil
Penguin Modern poets 5 Corso-Ferlinghetti-Ginsburg
Penguin Modern poets 6 Clemo-Lucie-Smith- MacBeth
Penguin Modern poets 7 Murphy-Silkin-Tarn
Penguin Modern poets 8 Brock-Hill-Smith
Penguin Modern poets 9 Levertov-Rexworth-Williams
Penguin Modern poets 10 Henri-McGough-Pattern
Penguin Modern poets 13 Burkowski-Lammentra-Norse
Penguin Modern poets 14 Brownjohn-Hamburger-Tomlinson
Penguin Modern poets 15 Bold-Braethwaite-Morgan
Penguin Modern poets 16 Beeching-Guest-Mead
Penguin Modern poets 17 Jackson-Nutthall-Wanting
Penguin Modern poets 19 Ashbury-Harwood-Raworth
Penguin Modern poets 21 Smith-McCaig-Brown
Penguin Modern poets 25 Ewart-Ghose-Johnston
Penguin Modern poets 27 Ormand-Humphreys-Tripp

Penguin Modern Poets (2nd series) 1 Fenton-Morrison-Wright
Penguin Modern Poets (2nd series) 2 Maxwell-Imlah-Reading
Penguin Modern Poets (2nd series) 3 Duffy-Feaver-Boland
Penguin Modern Poets (2nd series) 13 Hoffman-Langley-Robertson

Book of Victorian Verse (Everyman)
Faber Book of 20th century women's poetry
101 Sonnets (Paterson)
Penguin book of contemporary British poetry
Forward Book of Poetry 1994
Forward of Poetry 1998
Forward Book of Poetry 1999
Forward Book of Poetry 2002
New Poetries II
The New American Poetry
Poems on the Underground
Poetry of the forties (Penguin)
The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart
Contemporary American Poems (Penguin)
Fifty American Poets
Albatross Book of Verse
First World War Poets (Penguin)
Japanese Verse (Penguin)
Children of the Albion Poetry of the underground in Britain
Faber Book of Modern Verse
Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse
Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse
Totell's Miscellany
The Palgrave Golden Treasury
The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics
The Golden Treasury of Additional poems
Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse
English Poetry 1400-1580
Silver Poets of the sixteenth century
Penguin book of English verse
English Verse Early Lyrics to Shakespeare
The Rattle Bag (Heaney and Hughes)

>151 baswood: it’s beautiful list, whether it’s generating some order or not.

Mysteries with very clever and engaging senior citizens as protagonists.

EXIT by Belinda Bauer
THE UNEXPECTED MRS POLLIFAX by Dorothy Gilman
ELIZABETH IS MISSING by Emma Healey
THURSDAY MURDER CLUB by Richard Osman
MARLOWE MURDER CLUB by Robert Thorogood
AN ELDERLY LADY IS UP TO NO GOOD by Helene Tursten

Anyone care to add to this list?

>141 japaul22: What a great birthday haul!

>151 baswood: What a great list !(though low on women poets:-) I understand the complusion! At some point space was less available and I decided to let go of a lot of the older volumes (bought like you did), and concentrate on the contemporary (judging from what I put in my LT library back in '06 I had made this decision before then (probably while working in the bookstore). I do like your postings as it's a nice revisit.

Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023 longlist (16 books):

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
Homesick by Jennifer Croft
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow
Pod by Laline Paull
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

Link (originally posted by ridgewaygirl) https://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/features/features/news/announcing-the-20...

(It’s a list of titles that challenge the touchstone system here. Most of these titles are not unique.)

Here's an interesting list, courtesy of the Utica Public Library, and with their own commentary at the end.

20 Classic Novels of the Harlem Renaissance
1923 Cane by Jean Toomer
1924 The Fire in the Flint by Walter White
1924 There is Confusion by Jessie Redmon Fauset
1926 Flight (Voices of the South) by Walter White*
1926 Nigger Heaven by Carl Van Vechten
1926 Tropic Death by Eric Walrond
1927 Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
1928 Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset
1928 Quicksand by Nella Larsen
1928 The Walls of Jericho by Rudolph Fisher
1929 Banjo by Claude McKay
1929 The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman
1929 Passing by Nella Larsen
1930 Black No More by George Schuyler
1930 Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
1931 The Chinaberry Tree by Jessie Redmon Fauset
1931 Slaves Today by George Schuyler
1932 The Conjure Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher
1934 Jonah’s Gourd Wine by Zora Neale Hurston
1937 Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

As with any "list" - there can never be a definitive list of classic books that is above criticism or discussion. This list was formed from cumulative research and is presented in good faith as a guide to 20 classic works of fiction from the Harlem Renaissance.

_______________________________________

* "Walter White’s Flight may be one of the least read ‘important’ books telling the story of black migration, urbanization, and segregation. . . . Bold and nuanced, Flight illuminates the inner workings of racism, classism, and sexism by following Mimi’s search for a space in which to be black and female in a modern world.”—Thadious M. Davis, author of Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance.

>157 rocketjk: fantastic list!

>157 rocketjk: "I couldn't find a touchstone for this one, and upon further poking around it seems there isn't a "copy" of this book in any LT library."

Actually... It is under the full name of the author Walter Francis White : Flight (Voices of the South) pulls it immediately (without the addition it is harder to find in the list - Flight IS a popular word for titles) :)

>151 baswood: I know the feeling. You read one or two poems out of the book on the train home, and think “this is wonderful, I should read it properly when I’m not distracted by all kinds of stuff…”, and then it disappears between a lot of other slim volumes on the poetry shelves.

And much the same happened when I used to get a parcel of three or four new poetry collections from the PBS four times a year. Typically one got read right away, the others were stashed for “later”.

But a great list, and quite a bit of overlap with mine! I can’t compete with that impressive list of Penguin Modern Poets, though, I’ve only got three or four of those.

>159 AnnieMod: "Flight IS a popular word for titles) :)"

Yes, and I looked through the entire list provided by the "Other Works" link the touchstone attempt provided, and the book wasn't there. Or I missed it. Anyway, sincere thanks for doing that digging. I've revised my post somewhat, although I decided to leave the Davis quote about Flight.

>161 rocketjk: I like the quote :)

I was surprised not to see the book in LT so went digging :) And because I knew Flight will be hard on the search, I first found the book, then used what it has and I knew it will match ;)

Florence has started a Club Read thread on Short Stories and Microfiction. Here is a list I posted there of my favorite collections (4* or more):

Single author collections:
Children of the Holocaust by Arnošt Lustig
Short Stories of Mark Twain ("The Diaries of Adam and Eve" is hysterical)
Say you're one of them by Uwem Akpan
The road by Vassily Grossman
Talking to the Enemy by Avner Mandelman
The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories by Tayeb Salih
The complete tales of Nikolai Gogol
The call of the wild, White Fang, The sea-wolf, 40 short stories by Jack London ("To Light a Fire" is one of my all-time favorites)
The Complete Prose Tales of Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin

Anthologies:
The Crazy iris and other stories of the atomic aftermath edited by Kenzaburō Ōe
Great Soviet short stories edited by F. D. Reeve

Runner's up:
Twenty stories by Turkish women writers by Nilüfer Mizanoğlu Reddy
A good man is hard to find and other stories by Flannery O'Connor
Stories from the vinyl cafe by Stuart McLean

>163 labfs39: I recognize a few of those collections....

>157 rocketjk: Have you read any of those from the Harlem Renaissance - sounds like a project to me.

>165 baswood: Embarrassingly, I have read only Their Eyes Were Watching God, and that only a couple of years back. I have Cane and Not Without Laughter on my shelves awaiting my attention. And I saw the movie version of Passing last year. So, yes, that does look like a project, and a good one. Possibly I'll work it in, but I've got my I.B. Singer read-through going now. What about you? Think you might do it?

>166 rocketjk: I’m on almost equal footing with you. I have also only read TEWWG, and I have Cane somewhere around here unread. And I think I have Passing as an ebook, unread. All the other titles are new to me.

>167 dchaikin: Me too. I've read both of the Nella Larsen novels and Their Eyes Were Watching God (which is a favorite of mine). I haven't even really heard of most of the rest of those.

I was trying to find another book last night and pulled out Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out of Commission - an anthology of very short personal essays/notes/something on books you may or may not have heard of. I have a feeling I will be reading some/a lot of these books.

Here is the list: https://neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=68 (someone helpfully transcribed the list already.

>169 AnnieMod: I think Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders was reviewed around here sometime. Maybe. Otherwise, I don't think i recognize any of the titles.

>169 AnnieMod: That looks like a delightfully random list. Not exactly “lost classics” in the general sense, though. I see quite a few books that are very well-known (e.g. The good soldier Svejk, Malina, The old wives’ tale, Pincher Martin, The third policeman), some obscure works by well-known writers, and some I have no clue about. Obviously the point of it is in the stories the contributors have about having “lost” that particular book.

>171 thorold: Most of the essays are about 2 pages long so not much there but yes - it is the personal connection which was the point of the project (it started as a magazine issue, then some of the essays plus some new ones made up the book). I still find the list interesting and I suspect people will find different things obscure (Pincher Martin is not a title I had ever heard of for example while you consider it well-known). The subtitle gives a better idea of how they define a "classic" :)

I generally like people to talk about a book that made a strong impression on them and consider important for them. I suspect that's how the book ended up on my shelves as well - I don't really remember when and how (but then books seem to breed in my house so who knows) :)

And delightfully random is the best type of list sometimes. Sometimes i pick up a NYRB or something similar just to read about a random selection of books. ;)

>170 dchaikin: Including mine :) I still remember that book fondly.

And in another type of list, the International Booker's long list is out:

Ninth Building by by Zou Jingzhi, translated by Jeremy Tiang
A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding by Amanda Svensson, translated by Nichola Smalley
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey
Pyre by Perumal Murugan, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan
While We Were Dreaming by Clemens Meyer, translated by Katy Derbyshire
The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier, translated by Daniel Levin Becker
Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Reuben Woolley
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund
Standing Heavy by GauZ', translated by Frank Wynne
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel
The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé, translated by Richard Philcox
Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated by Chi-Young Kim
Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches

I've read one (Pyre - review here if someone is interested: https://www.librarything.com/work/18118511/reviews/217194739 ) and for the first time ever, there is a Bulgarian nominee (Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter - which I had not read yet).

Had anyone read anything from the list?

>173 AnnieMod: No, but it appeals, the whole list. I’ve never gotten around to this list but always wish I could.

>169 AnnieMod: Of the neglected titles I've only read a few:

Good Soldier Svejk
The Highwayman
I Served the King of England

Anonymous Smut caught my eye.

>173 AnnieMod: I haven't read any of these.

I haven't heard of this before, but the longlist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction has been released. The criteria is "fiction books written by Canadian and U.S. women and non-binary writers, written and published in English in 2022"
(I am a huge Carol Shields fan)

Daphne Palasi Andreades, Brown Girls
Fatimah Asghar, When We Were Sisters
Andrea Barrett, Natural History: Stories
Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily Living
Francine Cunningham, God Isn't Here Today
Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Woman of Light
Liana Finck, Let There Be Light
Emma Hooper, We Should Not Be Afraid of the Sky
Gish Jen, Thank You, Mr. Nixon
Chelene Knight, Junie
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, What We Fed to the Manticore
Tsering Yangzom Lama, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies
Suzette Mayr, The Sleeping Car Porter
Alexis Schaitkin, Elsewhere
Namwali Serpell, The Furrows: A Novel

>175 labfs39: "Anonymous Smut caught my eye."

Mine too 0 it is called just "Smut" in the book - the first lines of the 3 page essay are "It had no title, and, as far as I ever knew, no author. As it came into my hand, there was no title page; it was a carbon"... (and so on and so on)

As far as I see, there is no actual book recommendation here, not even an author name - the only entry that does not specify a book but he talks of a few stories he read in that format - without titles or authors: see the lines above. It is exactly what you think it is about - the story/memories take place in the 1940s so think on acceptable literature at the time and the meaning of smut in those days.

>176 raidergirl3: It's its first year - it was initially announced in February 2020 and then the world stopped. I was glad to see them finally getting the first longlist out this year.

>176 raidergirl3: Interesting! I hadn't heard about this new prize, but it's right up my alley. Thanks for posting!

>176 raidergirl3: Sounds interesting!

A comment by AndreasJ in another thread (https://www.librarything.com/topic/349444# ) made me pull up my long-running list of "books to chase up", some of the entries on which must have been there for more than ten years. The oldest of the 47 unread items (things I never found or more likely lost interest in before I got to them) are:

— William May's Stevie Smith and Authorship (Oxford English Monograph)
— Laurence Housman, The unexpected years (memoir 1937)
— The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot by Carl-Johan Vallgren
— Korparna (the ravens) by Tomas Bannerhed
— Place of the Heart, by Steinunn Sigurdardottir
— Stockholm, city of dreams, by Per Anders Fogelström (I think these all came from a Guardian top-ten of Nordic fiction compiled by Sjón)
— Sabri Louatah, Savages - 4 part epic about France’s first Arab president.
— Mishima: The Sea of Fertility tetralogy (Spring Snow 1969, Runaway Horses 1969, The Temple of Dawn 1970, and The Decay of the Angel 1971)
— H M Enzensberger - Requiem für eine romantische Frau
— Poort van de zon - Ilyas Anis Kuri

>169 AnnieMod: Thats a great list of neglected books. I have only read The Good Soldier Svejk

>180 thorold: Thats an obscure list although I have heard of Stevie Smith. Mind you I have not heard of any of the books on raidergirl3's list either.

List of Gotham Book Prize Finalists (for books set in and about New York City):

Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen
Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
The Deceptions by Jill Bialosky
Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham
An Honest Living by Dwyer Murphy
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman
The Sewing Girl's Tale by John Wood Sweet
Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofana
Three Muses by Martha Anne Toll
Trust by Hernan Diaz

>183 ELiz_M: I see an overlap there with >176 raidergirl3:'s Carol Shields prize list: Activities of Daily Living. Maybe it will be a book to follow.

Here is a list of science fiction books published/written in 1951 that I have read. In the words of Boris Johnson this is a world beating list.

Ray Bradbury - The illustrated man 5 stars
L Sprague du camp - Rogue Queen 3 stars
Arthur C Clarke - Prelude to Space
Hal Clement - Iceworld (read and reviewed) 3.5 stars
Philip Jose Farmer - The lovers) 3stars
Austin Hall - The Blind Spot ( 2.5 stars
Robert A Heinlien - The Green Hills of Earth 3.5 stars
Robert A Heinlien - The Puppet masters 3.5 stars
Clifford Simak - Time and Again 3.5 stars
Philip Wylie - The Disappearance 4 stars
John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids 5 stars
Leigh Brackett - People of the Talisman Shadow over Mars 3 stars
Fritz Leiber - Gather Darkness 3 stars
H P Lovecraft - The Haunter of the dark 5 stars
Isaac Asimov - Stars like Dust 2 stars
Robert Spencer Carr - Beyond Infinity 3 stars
Arthur Koestler - The age of Longing
Lewis Padgett and C L Moore - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and the fairy chessman 3.5 stars
William F Temple - four sided triangle 4 stars
Jack Williamson (Will Stewart) - Seetee ship 3 stars
Stanley Mullen - Kinsmen of the Dragon 3.5 stars
L Ron Hubbard - Typewriter in the sky/Fear 3 stars
Raymond F Jones - Renaissance 3.5 stars
The Frederic Brown Megapack 3.5
Sam Merwin jnr - The House of Many Worlds 3 stars
Malcolm Jameson - Bullard of the Space Patrol - 2.5 stars.
Lord Dunsany - The Last revolution 2.5 stars.

Here's are this year's nominees for the JJA (Jazz Journalists Association*) Jazz Book of the Year Award:

Holy Ghost: The Life And Death Of Free Jazz Pioneer Albert Ayler by Richard Koloda
On That Note: A Memoir of Jazz, Tics, and Survival by Michael Wolff (no touchstone)
Sight Readings: Photographers and American Jazz, 1900–1960 by Alan John Ainsworth
Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins by Aidan Levy
Bill Frisell, Beautiful Dreamer: The Guitarist Who Changed the Sound of American Music by Philip Watson
Ain't But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story by Willard Jenkins
The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender edited By James Reddan, Monika Herzig, Michael Kahr (no touchstone)
Becoming the Instrument: Lessons on Self-Mastery from Music to Life by Kenny Werner

(* of which I am a past member!)

That's an interesting list - I hope Aiden Levy does justice to The Saxophone Colossus.

Holy Ghost - Albert Ayler also looks interesting

I am not sure about the Kenny Werner book. He signed a CD for me that I bought when he appeared here in Marciac a few years back. I am not sure that I would be in tune with his Effortless Mastery approach to music.

>187 baswood: " I am not sure that I would be in tune with his Effortless Mastery approach to music."

To be fair, the title says "Self-Mastery," not "Effortless Mastery." I don't know that self mastery is ever represented as being effortless. Though maybe you're referring to something he said when you met him.

>188 rocketjk: Yes he does bang on about effortless mastery. I understand the concept, but can't think how it might apply to me.

>189 baswood: Ah, I see. The only "effortless" I can lay claim to is effortless sloth.

>190 rocketjk: LOL

That's a good one.

I might be out of bounds, but this is a list of my 12 favorite living novelists, in alphabetical order:

Javier Cercas (Spain)
Annie Ernaux (France)
Percival Everett (USA)
Aminatta Forna (Scotland)
Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia)
Abdulrazak Gurnah (Tanzania)
Karl Ove Knausgaard (Norway)
Hilary Mantel (England)
Sarah Moss (England)
Haruki Murakami (Japan)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya)
Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru)
Jesmyn Ward (USA)

>192 kidzdoc: Such a difficult list for me to create. Questions that stymie me are how to compare a children's author with an adult one. Or a graphic novelist with a poet. Or a sci fi writer with a historical fiction writer. Then there is the question of favorite for what purpose. My favorite author when I need entertainment, the one I think writes the best, the one I have read the most? My head swims at the thought. How did you develop your list?

>193 labfs39: I'll give you a ridiculously simple answer, Lisa: the authors whose books I enjoy the most. I think it was easier for me to create this list, as the overwhelming majority of the novels I read fall into the "literary fiction" category (although that seems to be a contestable category).

>194 kidzdoc: Lol, ask a silly question... True, I do think you have lots of apples and few oranges, so to speak. I love how geographically and ethnically diverse your reading is and always has been. An inspiration.

>195 labfs39: I don't think your question was silly at all, Lisa!

Recommendations from several longtime members of LibraryThing, especially Club Read, past and present, particularly avaland, rebeccanyc, FlossieT, lriley, deebee1 and akeela, have been a major influence on the novels I currently read.

A great list. Sorry to say, though, that Hilary Mantel passed away last year.

>197 rocketjk: Oh, right! I knew that, but forgot; thanks for correcting me, Jerry. Let's see...I'll replace Hilary Mantel with Haruki Murakami.

>192 kidzdoc: Interesting list

Annie Ernaux would be on my favourite list of living authors, but the only other one on your list that I have read is Haruki Murakami. Your list shows an incredibly wide range of reading.

>197 rocketjk: You Gotta Laugh (don't take this the wrong way, just my silly sense of humour)

>199 baswood: Thanks, Barry. I'm very curious to see the favorite author lists of other members of this group.

>192 kidzdoc: That's a very literary list. But then I am not surprised. Mine shifts and changes and contains a lot more low-brow authors but let's try:

Jeffrey Archer (UK)
Sebastian Barry (Ireland)
Javier Cercas (Spain)
C. J. Cherryh (USA) - SF
Peter F. Hamilton (UK) - SF
Dave Hutchinson (UK) - SF
Ragnar Jónasson (Iceland) - Crime
Mark Pryor (USA) - Crime
Ian Rankin (UK) - Crime
Daniel Silva (USA)
Jane Smiley (USA)
Edward St. Aubyn (UK)

Ask me again in a week, some of those would have shifted and maybe someone else would have risen.

Looking at the list, I like some of these authors for vastly different reasons (noone will argue that Silva's prose is brilliant on the linguistic level but that is not necessary for him to be in my top 12 for example). I can probably pull favorite 12 in the crime and SF categories alone and still miss a lot of my favorites...

Inspired by a conversation on my own CR thread about my monthly in-person reading group, here is the list of books that the group has read since our beginning in January, 2021.

YHR stands for Your Humble Reporter. Those are the books that were my selections.

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar (novel)
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen (history)
The Comedians by Graham Greene (novel) - YHR
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson - (biography)
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende - (novel)
The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan
A Promised Land by Barack Obama - (memoir)
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (sociology)
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson (history)
The Human Stain by Philip Roth (novel) - YHR
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (novel)
The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power (memoir)
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen (biography)
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (novel)
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (novel)
1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei (memoir)
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (novel) - YHR
Dead Dead Girls by Neksa Afia (novel)
The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn (memoir)
The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (history)
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (novel)
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (poetry)
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (history)
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (novel)
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (short stories) - YHR

I count:
11 novels
2 poetry collections
1 short story collection
4 histories
2 biographies
4 memoirs
1 sociology study

So that's 12 Fiction, 2 Poetry, 12 Non-fiction. A pretty good mix, all in all!

>202 rocketjk: This is a much easier list for me to compile. Although I only joined in October, I have a copy of the spreadsheet on which they've tracked their selections since 1996. I'll use the same date range as Jerry, Jan. 2021:

Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In by Phuc Tran (memoir, Maine author)
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (fiction)
The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd (fiction)
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (memoir)
The End of October by Lawrence Wright (fiction)
Spoonhandle by Ruth Moore (fiction, Maine author)
Writers and Lovers by Lily King (fiction, Maine author)
The Silent Patient Alex Michaelides (fiction)
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (fiction)
All That She Carried Tiya Alicia Miles (nonfiction, I recently acquired but haven't read yet)
The Lively Lady by Kenneth Roberts (historical fiction, Maine author)
The Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley (fiction, Ojibwe)
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh (fiction)
A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline (fiction, Maine author)
Deacon King Kong by James McBride (fiction)
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family Robert Kolker (I want to read this one, about a family with six schizophrenic members)
The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeon-seo Lee (memoir, I've read)
People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn (nonfiction, I want to read)

here's where I joined:

The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein (memoir)
Radar Girls by Sara Ackerman (fiction)
Almost Maine by John Cariani (fiction, DNF for me)
The Double Helix by James D. Watson (nonfiction)
Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King (fiction, Maine author)
Moon in Full by Marpheen Chann (memoir, Maine author, my pick)

14 novels
1 short story collection
5 memoirs
1 science
1 history
1 medical study
1 history of antisemitism

7 by Maine authors

Edited to adjust number

>203 labfs39: That looks like a great group to be a part of.

My wife is part of a women's book group here that goes back about 25 years. She is the newest member at about 7 years. She felt honored when these longtime friends invited her to join their group. As a matter of fact, most of the guys in my group are married to members of that women's group. Our group was formed as a zoom group during covid, inspired by our wives. Nothing new about that last part. I'd always said I would never be in a book group unless I got to choose the book every month. I just don't like interrupting my own reading flow with books other people want me to read. But then it was covid and a group of friends inviting me to participate in a new group, and I thought saying yes to that invitation was more important than my reading selection grumpiness. I've never wavered from that decision.

12 favorite living authors

Margaret Atwood Canada
Ann Patchett USA
Kazuo Ishiguro Uk
Haruki Murakami Japan
J.M. Coetzee South Africa/Australia
Mieko Kawakami Japan
Louise Penny Canada - mysteries
Claire Keegan Ireland
Connie Willis USA - scifi
Roger Robinson Trinidad - Poetry
Susan Faludi USA - nf/feminist
Patrick Modiano France

>201 AnnieMod: Nice list, Annie. From your list we share Javier Cercas as a favorite, and I've also read at least two books by Sebastian Barry and Edward St. Aubyn; both have the potential to move into my top dozen list.

>204 rocketjk: I like your list as well, Diane. I've read eight of your favorite 12 authors: Atwood, Ishiguro, Murakami, Coetzee, Kawakami, Keegan, Robinson and Modiano. Of those Ishiguro, Coetzee and Robinson come closest to cracking my top 12, and Roger Robinson would easily make my list of favorite living poets, along with Natasha Trethewey, Toi Derricotte, and Warsan Shire.

>206 kidzdoc: i’m going to look up those poets, thanks. Robinson is really good.

International Booker Short list

1. Boulder by Eva Baltasar is translated by Julia Sanches from the original Catalan (1st time a book from this language is on the list.)
2. Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov is translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel (1st time a book from this (!) language is on the list.)
3. The Gospel According to the New World by Maryse Condé, translated by her husband Richard Philcox. (Condé, at 89, has become the oldest person to be nominated for the prize.)
4. Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim
5. Standing Heavy by GauZ’, translated from French by Frank Wynne
6. Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel,
translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.

Following up on >155 dchaikin:, the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023 shortlist (6 books):

Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
Pod by Laline Paull
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy

https://womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/2023-prize

>209 dchaikin: For the first time ever, I am actually prepared for the shortlist. I’ve read Demon Copperhead and The Marriage Portrait, I have an e-copy of Fire Rush, I just got Trespasses from the library and my final Book Depository birthday order arrived today with Pod and Black Butterflies. If there are Book Gods, they are smiling down favourably on me this week.

>210 Yells: LOL. Score!

>210 Yells: impressive! 🙂 (You have till June 14!)

>209 dchaikin: there is a List in Lists for people reading the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Come join!
https://www.librarything.com/list/44469/all/2023-Womens-Prize-for-Fiction-Longli...

From this week's Guardian, The Top Ten Books About Being Poor in America:

1. The Other America by Michael Harrington (1962)
2. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
3. Evicted by Matthew Desmond
4. Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan M. Metzl
5. The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
6. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
7. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
8. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
9. There There by Tommy Orange
10. The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez

What do you think? Have you read any of these? Are there others you would add?

>214 arubabookwoman: Having read Caste, I'm not sure I'd agree that it's really about being poor in America, per se. I'd perhaps replace that book with The New Jim Crow. Not having read most of the books named, I can't judge their places on this list. Others I'd suggest, whether for a Top Ten or an expanded list, are:

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska
Nickled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
Black Boy by Richard Wright

Maybe The Beans of Egypt, Maine?

>214 arubabookwoman: completely agree with Evicted. Mixed on Caste and There There (which are more about racism and identity than poverty, although poverty plays a role). I haven’t read the others.

>215 rocketjk: Call It Sleep is one of my favorite books--I've read it 3 or 4 times. The Jungle, Nickle and Dimed, and Black Boy were excellent too. I haven't read Hungry Hearts (though I do own another book by this author, The Bread Givers), but it is available on Kindle now for $0, so I "bought" it.
>216 labfs39: That's a good one too.
>217 dchaikin: Evicted was a memorable and eye-opening read for me. I own Caste but haven't gotten to it yet. Haven't read There There.

>218 arubabookwoman: For our purposes here, Hungry Hearts and The Bread Givers are probably both appropriate. The former is a short story collection and the latter a novel, I believe.

Another excellent book whose presence on the original list I'd question is The Sum of Us. The book's subtitle gives a clue as to why I feel that way: "What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together." Obviously, racism and poverty are inextricably intertwined, yet McGee's book is about how everyone in America is impacted by racism, not explicitly about how racism causes poverty, which I would expect if we're trying to find the top ten books about "being poor in America." To reiterate, The Sum of Us is an excellent, well-written book from which I learned an awful lot.

Pulitzer prize. Anything interest? Any recommendations?

https://www.pulitzer.org/news/2023-pulitzer-prize-announcement?fbclid=IwAR2pyX_L...

Books, Drama and Music
Fiction
"Demon Copperhead," by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper)

"Trust," by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books)

Finalist:

"The Immortal King Rao," by Vauhini Vara (W. W. Norton & Company)

Drama
"English," by Sanaz Toossi

Finalists:

"On Sugarland," by Aleshea Harris

"The Far Country," by Lloyd Suh

History
"Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power," by Jefferson Cowie (Basic Books)

Finalists:

"Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America," by Michael John Witgen (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press)

"Watergate: A New History," by Garrett M. Graff (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

Biography
"G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century," by Beverly Gage (Viking)

Finalists:

"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

"Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century," by Jennifer Homans (Random House)

Memoir or Autobiography
"Stay True," by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

Finalists:

"Easy Beauty: A Memoir," by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster)

"The Man Who Could Move Clouds: A Memoir," by Ingrid Rojas Contreras (Doubleday)

Poetry
"Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020," by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Finalists:

"Blood Snow," by dg nanouk okpik (Wave Books)

"Still Life," by the late Jay Hopler (McSweeney’s)

General Nonfiction
"His Name is George Floyd," by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa (Viking)

Finalists:

"Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern," by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books)

"Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction," by David George Haskell (Viking)

"Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation," by Linda Villarosa (Doubleday)

Music
"Omar," by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels

Finalists:

"Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)," by Tyshawn Sorey

"Perspective," by Jerrilynn Patton

The composers in the music category are an interesting group, none of them fitting the traditional Pulitzer mold. Rhiannon Giddens is best known as a performer and historian of Appalachian folk music; her collaborator, Michael Abels, has worked mostly as a composer of flim scores. Tyshawn Sorey moves between jazz and classical, with lots of overlap, and would probably be annoyed to have his music described in terms of genre at all. Jerrilynn Patton, who usually performs and records as Jlin, is principally an electronic musician, but "Perspective" is a piece for percussion ensemble.

>222 KeithChaffee: this is great! Thanks. I don’t know anything about these musicians

For myself, I’m intrigued by Stay True. I listened to Trust. It wasn’t earth-shattering for me, but I thought it was good, clever, successful, entertaining…a little like Case Study.

>222 KeithChaffee: "Rhiannon Giddens is best known as a performer and historian of Appalachian folk music"

She's a treasure, although I should say that I've just barely begun to explore her career and work. I first learned of her through my interest in Layla McCalla, whom I saw at the Monterey Jazz Fest of all places (because she's not really a jazz musician). As I was going through McCalla's discography, I came upon Rhiannon Giddens for their work together (and with Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah) on the album, Songs of Our Native Daughters. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Our_Native_Daughters). More simply, this is her with Paul Simon singing his song, "American Tune."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZTWSJFuuAY I need to go listen to "Omar" soon. I didn't even know of it.

Looks as if Patton’s “Perspective” is the only one of the three that’s been recorded.

>221 dchaikin: >222 KeithChaffee: >224 rocketjk:

Very happy to see Giddens mentioned. She is superlative. A few examples:

At the Purchaser’s Option
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVrTf5yOW5s

La Vie en Rose
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kl64j0-fieY

Spanish Mary (with New Basement Tapes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZgrLpvj3-0

Wayfaring Stranger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Z4PAZX9Bs

I Know I’ve Been Changed (with her sister)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSHLXE-LHHo

S’iomadh Rid (The Dhith Om / Ciamar A Ni Mi)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RtT0obOS80

St. James Infirmary Blues (with Yo-Yo Ma)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8EMo-_6ynI

Snowden’s Jig (Genuine Negro Jig)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nliiRDmBbEQ

The Carolina Chocolate Drops (of which she was a member) won a Grammy for the album Genuine Negro Jig.

EDTA: RocketJK's mention of Layla McCalla. Here she is with the Carolina Chocolate Drops (and Giddens) setting the house afire with “Jackson.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htnKJYbihgA

>221 dchaikin: In the History category, I read Watergate by Garrett M. Graff, and it was excellent. I thought I knew everything I needed to about Watergate, but not so.

Saw this referenced on Litsy and I'm intrigued, so I am leaving it here for my future self.

Short Perfect Novels according to Tookie, a character in Erdrich's The Sentence:

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Sula by Toni Morrison
The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad
The All of It by Jeannette Haien
Winter in the Blood by James Welch
Swimmer in the Secret Sea by William Kotzwinkle
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
First Love by Ivan Turgenev
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Fire on the Mountain by Anita Desai

>228 ELiz_M: Too Loud a Solitude is one of my all-time favorite books.

>214 arubabookwoman:
I highly recommend the award-winning Random Family. It opened my mind and changed my perspective on the difficulty of escaping the cycle of poverty.
Another suggestion: Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America by Paul Tough.

>226 dypaloh:
I'm a huge fan of Rhiannon Giddens. Her beautiful and varied music includes folk, old-time music, bluegrass, country, gospel, blues, jazz, soul, R&B, Celtic, and Americana.
Thanks for that great list.

The Booker Prize longlist for 2023:

- Paul Murray (Irish) – The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton) - no audio, 656 pages

- Martin MacInnes (British) – In Ascension (Atlantic Books) - 13:38, 512 pages

- Paul Harding (American) – This Other Eden (Hutchinson Heinemann) - 6:08 - 224 pages

- Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ ̀(Nigerian) – A Spell of Good Things (Canongate) - 12:40 - 352 pages

- Tan Twan Eng (Malaysian) – The House of Doors (Canongate) - audio Oct 17, 321 pages

- Paul Lynch (Irish) – Prophet Song (Oneworld) - no audio, 320 pages

- Elaine Feeney (Irish) – How to Build a Boat (Harvill Secker) - 9:22 - 304 pages

- Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (British) – All the Little Bird-Hearts (Tinder Press) - no audio - 304 pages

- Sebastian Barry (Irish) – Old God’s Time (Faber & Faber) - 8:34 - 273 pages

- Jonathan Escoffery (American) – If I Survive You (4th Estate) - 8:01 - 272 pages

- Siân Hughes (British) – Pearl (The Indigo Press) - 6:41 - 224 pages

- Sarah Bernstein (Canadian) – Study for Obedience (Granta Books) - audio Aug 22 - 208 pages

- Chetna Maroo (British) – Western Lane (Picador) - 4:21 - 176 pages

The prize page release summary:

The 13 longlisted books explore universal and topical themes: from deeply moving personal dramas to tragi-comic family sagas; from the effects of climate change to the oppression of minorities; from scientific breakthroughs to competitive sport. The list includes:

- 10 writers longlisted for the first time, including four debut novelists
- Three writers with seven previous nominations between them
- Writers from seven countries across four continents
- Four Irish writers, making up a third of the longlist for the first time
- A novel featuring a neurodiverse protagonist, written from personal experience
- ‘All 13 novels cast new light on what it means to exist in our time, and they do so in original and thrilling ways,’ according to Esi Edugyan, Chair of the judges

>233 dchaikin: "A novel featuring a neurodiverse protagonist, written from personal experience"

Do you know which that is?

I am collecting Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires adventure novels and thought it'd be fun to share the list of all the books in the series with you. (Taken from wiki). Especially since I just recently came back from France with more Verne in my hands (in a particular edition I love from the 1960s) I wanted to check to see which books I own now. Those books will be in bold.

Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1863)
Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, 1866)
Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864, revised 1867)
De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865)
Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (In Search of the Castaways, 1867–68)
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, 1869–70)
Autour de la lune (Around The Moon, 1870)
Une ville flottante (A Floating City, 1871)
Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais (The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa, 1872)
Le Pays des fourrures (The Fur Country, 1873)
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1873)
L'Île mystérieuse (The Mysterious Island, 1874–75)
Le Chancellor (The Survivors of the Chancellor, 1875)
Michel Strogoff (Michael Strogoff, 1876)
Hector Servadac (Off on a Comet, 1877)
Les Indes noires (The Child of the Cavern, 1877)
Un capitaine de quinze ans (Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen, 1878)
Les Cinq Cents Millions de la Bégum (The Begum's Millions, 1879)
Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine (Tribulations of a Chinaman in China, 1879)
La Maison à vapeur (The Steam House, 1880)
La Jangada (Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon, 1881)
L'École des Robinsons (Godfrey Morgan, 1882)
Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray, 1882)
Kéraban-le-têtu (Kéraban the Inflexible, 1883)
L'Étoile du sud (The Vanished Diamond, 1884)
L'Archipel en feu (The Archipelago on Fire, 1884)
Mathias Sandorf (Mathias Sandorf, 1885)
Un billet de loterie (The Lottery Ticket, 1886)
Robur-le-Conquérant (Robur the Conqueror, 1886)
Nord contre Sud (North Against South, 1887)
Le Chemin de France (The Flight to France, 1887)
Deux Ans de vacances (Two Years' Vacation, 1888)
Famille-sans-nom (Family Without a Name, 1889)
Sans dessus dessous (The Purchase of the North Pole, 1889)
César Cascabel (César Cascabel, 1890)
Mistress Branican (Mistress Branican, 1891)
Le Château des Carpathes (Carpathian Castle, 1892)
Claudius Bombarnac (Claudius Bombarnac, 1892)
P’tit-Bonhomme (Foundling Mick, 1893)
Mirifiques Aventures de Maître Antifer (Captain Antifer, 1894)
L'Île à hélice (Propeller Island, 1895)
Face au drapeau (Facing the Flag, 1896)
Clovis Dardentor (Clovis Dardentor, 1896)
Le Sphinx des glaces (An Antarctic Mystery, 1897)
Le Superbe Orénoque (The Mighty Orinoco, 1898)
Le Testament d'un excentrique (The Will of an Eccentric, 1899)
Seconde Patrie (The Castaways of the Flag, 1900)
Le Village aérien (The Village in the Treetops, 1901)
Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin (The Sea Serpent, 1901)
Les Frères Kip (The Kip Brothers, 1902)
Bourses de voyage (Travel Scholarships, 1903)
Un drame en Livonie (A Drama in Livonia, 1904)
Maître du monde (Master of the World, 1904)
L'Invasion de la mer (Invasion of the Sea, 1905)

The posthumous additions to the series:
Le Phare du bout du monde (Lighthouse at the End of the World, 1905)
Le Volcan d’or (The Golden Volcano, 1906)
L’Agence Thompson and Co (The Thompson Travel Agency, 1907)
La Chasse au météore (The Chase of the Golden Meteor, 1908)
Le Pilote du Danube (The Danube Pilot, 1908)
Les Naufragés du "Jonathan" (The Survivors of the "Jonathan", 1909)
Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz (The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, 1910)
L’Étonnante Aventure de la mission Barsac (The Barsac Mission, 1919)

Short stories in the series (The Voyages series includes two short story collections and seven individual short stories that accompanied one of the novels in the series.).
The short story collections are:
Le Docteur Ox (Doctor Ox, 1874)
Hier et Demain (Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1910) (posthumous, with stories completed or modified by Michel Verne)

And the individual short stories:
Les Forceurs de blocus (The Blockade Runners, published with A Floating City, 1871)
Martin Paz (Martin Paz, published with The Survivors of the Chancellor, 1875)
Un drame au Mexique (A Drama in Mexico, published with Michael Strogoff, 1876)
Les révoltés de la Bounty (The Mutineers of the Bounty, published with The Begum's Millions, 1879)
Dix heures en chasse (Ten Hours Hunting, published with The Green Ray, 1882)
Frritt-Flacc (Frritt-Flacc, published with The Lottery Ticket, 1886)
Gil Braltar (Gil Braltar, published with The Flight to France, 1887)

>234 dianeham: not yet

>235 lilisin: that’s so cool!

>232 dchaikin: I was so excited to discover recently that Tan Twan Eng had a new book out and then I find it on the Booker longlist. Squee!

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the London Review Bookshop they invited twenty writers close to their hearts to choose the five books they think we need to navigate the next twenty years.

Ali Smith
After Midnight by Irmgard Keun, translated by Anthea Bell
Radical
Attention by Julia Bell

Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi

Inventory of a Life Mislaid by Marina Warner

Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser

Amia Srinivasan
Republic by Plato, translated by Desmond Lee

Another Country by James Baldwin

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

The Companion Species Manifesto by Donna Haraway

An Apartment on Uranus by Paul Preciado

Andrew O'Hagan
Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, translated by Christine Donougher

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Selected Stories 1968-1994 by Alice Munro

Ann Carson
Iliad by Homer

Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Richard Sieburth

Stevie Smith: A Selection by Stevie Smith

You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There by Elizabeth Taylor

X by John Cage

Celia Paul
The Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray

White Girls by Hilton Als

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann

Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie

Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal

Claire Louise Bennet
La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft

Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector, translated by Stefan Tobler

Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda, translated by Martha Tennent

Alphabet by Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied

Deborah Levy
Orlando by Virginia Woolf

The Last Interview: And Other Conversations by James Baldwin and Quincy Troupe
Beloved by Toni Morrison

Modern Nature by Derek Jarman

K-Punk by Mark Fisher

Denise Riley
The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins

Milkman by Anna Burns

Édouard Louis
Light in August by William Faulkner

Cassandra by Christa Wolf, translated by Jan van Heurck

The Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray 

My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid

Decreation by Anne Carson

Geoff Dyer
A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

A Start in Life by Anita Brookner

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty

Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley

Hisham Matar
Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips
Border
Districts by Gerald Murnane

Poems: 1962-2020 by Louise Glück

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Isabel Waidner
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delaney

The Book of Frank by CAConrad 

Surge by Jay Bernard

Last Night a Beef Jerk Saved My Life by D. Mortimer

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Glass

Lola Olufemi
Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima

A Question of Power by Bessie Head

Letters Against the Firmament by Sean Bonney

Tuesday or September or The End by Hannah Black

Abolition Geography by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Mary Beard
Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

Annals by Tacitus, translated by Cynthia Damon

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Black and British by David Olusoga

Burning the Books by Richard Ovenden

Mendez
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson

Bread and Roses: Gender and Class Under Capitalism by Andrea D’Atri

Lote by Shola von Reinhold

Assembly by Natasha Brown

Olga Tokarczuk
Complete Poems by Enheduanna, translated by Sophus Helle

The Bible (King James Version)

Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated by Charles Martin

The Quran translated by M.A. Abdel Haleem

The Arabian Nights translated by Husain Haddawy

Olivia Lang
Paradise Lost by John Milton 

Civilisation and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud, translated by David McLintock 

Modern Nature by Derek Jarman

Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman 

The Garden Jungle by Dave Goulson

Patricia Lockwood
Down Below by Leonora Carrington

Generations: A Memoir by Lucille Clifton

Fair Play by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal
Guston
in Time by Ross Feld

Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Ruby Tandoh
Stoner by John Williams

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

White Girls by Hilton Als

The Language of Cities by Deyan Sudjic

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman

Stuart Lee
The Trial by Franz Kafka, translated by Idris Parry

I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek

This is Memorial Device by David Keenan

We Need New Stories by Nesrine Malik

Ashes to Admin by Evie King

Wow, that's a fantastic list of books! I'm going to spend some time with it and add some titles to my wishlist.

How cool. Great list!

That is indeed a great list, though it's scary for me how few of those books I've read.

Interesting--2 books by Elizabeth Taylor, neither of which I've read, though I've read and loved several by her. And The Lover was cited twice, as was White Girls. Hmmm.

What a great list! I would gladly read straight through it, if I had that kind of time to devote to a reading project.

I attended my favorite event of the year last Sunday-- the Brooklyn Book Festival. There is a literary marketplace with hundreds of booths manned by various independent publishers. I use the event to discover and stock up on translated literature. The list of books I wanted to buy:

Archipelago Books:
Newcomers: Book Two by Lojze Kovacic
The Last Pomegranate Tree* by Bachtyar Ali
The Storm by Tomás González

Catapult Books / Counterpoint Press / Soft Skull Press:
These letters end in tears by Musih Tedji Xaviere
The coin by Yasmin Zahra

Deep Vellum:
Fem* by Magda Cârneci
Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Europa Editions:
All Your Children Scattered by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse
Disoriental by Négar Djavadi
Opium and Other Stories* by Géza Csáth

The Feminist Press:
Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu
Sweetlust by Asja Bakić
Women Without Men* by Shahrnush Parsipur

Gaudy Boy:
Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan*
The Infinite Library and Other Stories by Victor Fernando R. Ocampo
Picking off new shoots will not stop the spring: Witness poems and essays from Burma/Myanmar

Graywolf Press:
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga
Voyager: Constellations of Memory by Nona Fernández

New Directions:
Battle Songs by Daša Drndić
The Employees by Olga Ravn
War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets
You Glow in the Dark by Liliana Colanzi

New Vessel Press:
Allmen and the Dragonflies by Martin Suter
The Good Life Elsewhere* by Vladimir Lorchenkov
Moving the Palace by Charif Majdalani
Who Is Martha? by Marjana Gaponenko

Restless Books:
Blood Red* by Gabriela Ponce
The Body Papers by Grace Talusan
Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić
Checkpoint by David Albahari
Land of Love and Ruins by Oddný Eir
Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener
Silence of the Chagos by Shenaz Patel
Temporary People* by Deepak Unnikrishnan
The Underground by Hamid Ismailov

Seven Stories Press:
The Censor's Notebook by Liliana Corobca
Sacrifices by Rodrigo Blanco Calderon

Transit Books:
Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü
Mansour's Eyes by Ryad Girod
Septology by Jon Fosse
Swallowing Mercury* by Wioletta Greg

Two Lines Press:
Elektrik by various
Cuíer Queer Brazil by various
Home New Arabic Poems by various
No Edges Swahili Stories by various
Lake Like a Mirror* by Ho Sok Fong
A Spare Life by Lidija Dimkovska

World Editions:
Abyss by Pilar Quintana
The Disoriented by Amin Maalouf
Planet of Clay* by Samar Yazbek
This World Does Not Belong to Us by Natalia García Freire

.

Wow! Did you have a wheelbarrow to haul all those books home?

>245 ELiz_M: Assuming the ones in the photo are the books you actually came home with, that's a great selection out of an incredibly tempting list. I read Planet of Clay a few years ago and thought it was sad, strange, but effective.

Sorry we didn't make it to the event. Our weekend got filled up with family and friends. Plus, the bookshelves here in our temporary NYC abode got filled up in about 10 minutes after we bought them. Sounds like there would have been some sore temptations for us. Glad you had fun and came home with such a great bundle.

>245 ELiz_M: wow

>245 ELiz_M: So many great presses publishing translated lit. Envious of your browsing and your purchases!

>246 Dilara86:, >247 lisapeet: Yes, the picture is of the 16 books I did buy.

>248 rocketjk:, >249 dchaikin: Yep, I sure hope they are as good as they looked!

I read OscarWilde87's review of Steve Jobs' biography, which he loved, and started thinking of the best biographies I have read. For this list, I am only considering biographies, not autobiographies or memoirs. Here's what I've come up with:

Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
Admiral of the Open Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus by Samuel Eliot Morison

Partial lives
Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough

Targeted biographies
Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy by Ben Macintyre
Madame Fourcade's Secret War by Lynne Olson
The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone

What are your favorites?

(Huh, I'm noticing that while four/half are about women, only 2/a quarter are by women authors.)

As I was adding yet another book to my wishlist this morning, thanks to Rachel/rachbxl, I noticed in my tag list that some folks are particularly dangerous to my reading hopes and plans. Here's a list of the worst offenders:

rec by arubabookwoman: 37
rec by rebeccanyc: 36
rec by avatiakh: 30
rec by kidzdoc: 23
rec by JustJoey/Trifolia: 19
rec by cushlareads: 19
rec by SassyLassy: 16
rec by RidgewayGirl: 15
rec by Steven03tx:13
rec by markon: 10

**Note that this is a very imprecise count as 1. I sometimes delete the rec tag after I read the book and 2. I don't always add the tag, especially if more than one person has recommended it. It also doesn't reflect all the books that I want to read that aren't available in English translation thanks to my LT friends who are multilingual.

Do others track recommendations?

Fantastic! I have a tag “LT-inspired”, but it’s not by person…and I’m not super consistent about using it. Still, 200+ books there: https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=dchaikin&tag=LT-Inspired&c...

ETA - i’ve read 137 of them: https://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=dchaikin&tag=LT-Inspired&c...

>252 labfs39: i’ve read a lot of biographies. I would like to answer. But I’ll need some spare time. 🙂 No promises.

>252 labfs39: I don't read a lot of biographies, but Robert Caro's multi volume bio of LBJ is magnificent. (I have one volume left to read). I didn't think I would be interested, but it covers so much of 20th century American history, as well as somewhat making sense of a complex and seemingly contradictory man.

>252 labfs39: ok Lisa, about my favorite biographies...I currently have 59 books read and tagged "Biography". But I also scanned through my books and created a new tag, "biographical sketches", for those books the dwell a bit on some specific interesting personalities but aren't really biographies. I tagged 17 books that ways, all ones I've read. It turns out I like these books a lot.

Straight biographies:

My very top two favorites are:
- Véra : Mrs Vladimir Nabokov by Stacy Schiff
- Woman of Rome : A Life of Elsa Morante by Lily Tuck

Four others are worth mentioning because I think about them all the time:
- Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max
- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (more of a journalistic sketch than a biography)

Books with "biographical sketches"

Eight of my all-time favorite books fall in this category:
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
- A Train in Winter: A Story of Resistance, Friendship, and Survival by Caroline Moorehead
- The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David G. McCullough
- One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson
- Stonehenge (Wonders of the World) by Rosemary Hill
- The Trophies of Time : English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century by Graham Parry
- The Clockwork Universe : Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick

>252 labfs39: I’m not a huge biography reader, but I very much enjoyed James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon by Julie Phillips. Sheldon was an SF writer who published most of her work under the Tiptree pseudonym. Even if you’re not an SF reader and don’t know anything about her writing, Sheldon lived a fascinating life that reads like a history of women’s roles in 20th-century America.

I went through the books listed in my Biographies tag, and my list of "favorites" is pretty long:

History/Science/Politics:
Walk With Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer by Kate Clifford Larson
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of his Theory of Evolution by David Quammen
Naked to Mine Enemies: the Life of Cardinal Wolsey by Charles W. Ferguson
Madame Curie by Eve Curie
The Norton Book of Women's Lives by Phyllis Rose (short biographies of great women)

Authors/Actors/Musicians:
Groucho: the Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx by Stefan Kanfer
Twenty Thousand Roads: the Ballad of Gram Parsons and his Cosmic American Music by David N. Meyer
Chekhov by Henri Troyat
James Baldwin: a Biography by David Adams Leeming
Joseph Conrad by Albert J. Guerard
Lion of Arles: A Portrait of Mistral and His Circle by Tudor Edwards

Baseball:
Satchel: the Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye
Casey: the Life and Legend of Charles Dillon Stengel by Joseph Durso
Diz: The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball During the Great Depression by Robert Gregory

Just for fun (fun for me, anyway!), here is a list of the books I've purchased since my wife and I moved to New York City in June. I've been trying to keep the book buying down to a dull roar, as my father used to say, due to the limited space in our current apartment. These are more or less in chronological order by purchase. R means I've already read and reviewed the book on my CR thread.

Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the New York Times Photo Archives by Dana Cadedy
Purchased at a Harlem-themed gift store on Lennox Avenue. R

The Slave by Isaac Singer
Purchased at a Jewish religious gift and book store on upper Broadway for my twice-yearly read-through of Singer’s novels in chronological order. R

Books purchased during the lovely LT meetup & Strand Bookstore ramble:
* The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns edited by Dohra Ahmad (I've started this anthology via my "Between Books" custom.)
* New Writing from the Middle East edited by Leo Hamalian
* Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas R

Books purchased at Revolution Books, a Communist-leaning bookstore on upper Lennox Avenue in Harlem. The first two were from the outside bargain table.
* Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether
* The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War by Mark Danner
* No Sweet Without Brine by Cynthia Manick (Poetry)

Two books purchased at the gift store of the incredible Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, also on upper Lennox Avenue. The center includes a contemporary art gallery and a research room that is technically part of the NY City Library system.
* The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Langston Hughes (poetry)
* Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (poetry)

Jonah Bondi Wise by Sam Cauman
This is the biography of a Jewish community leader, purchased from the bargain rack of the NYC branch of Shakespeare Books, the famous Parisian English-language bookstore.

Two books purchased at the iconic Sisters Uptown Bookstore on upper Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem.
* For the Strength of Harlem: Pleas Tusant Pearson by Janell Pearson. A biography of a Harlem community leader previously unknown to me, written by his daughter.
* Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt (short stories)

Purchased at the Albertine Bookstore, located inside the beautiful French Embassy building next to Central Park. The store features both French- and English-language selections.
* The Present Hour and In a Piece of Broken Mirror by Yves Bonnefoy (poetry)
* Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery

Guban by Abdi Latif Ega. The author is a neighbor of mine and told me about this book he’d written about 15 years ago. I immediately ordered it online. It's a novel about Sudan that I'm looking forward to reading.

Purchased at various small bookstores during a Greenwich Village walkabout I went on recently.
* Iraq + 100: The First Anthology of Science fiction to Have Emerged from Iraq edited by Ḥasan Balāsim
* Combo USA: Eight Lives in Jazz by Rudi Blesh
* An Arab Melancholia by Abdellah Taia

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead. At a sidewalk bookstall close to the Columbia University campus, I met a very interesting fellow who told me that he was teaching a class on "Jazz Literature" at the college. As we discussed various African American authors, I confessed that I had yet to read any Colson Whitehead. He told me that Sag Harbor was his favorite of Whitehead's work. Since the bookstall had a copy, I bought it.

Thats a great list Jerry - perhaps you will encourage us all to make a list of books bought or acquired over the last few months. I can imagine some lists being very long.

Some very interesting books on your list, but perhaps the weirdest is Iraq + 100

>261 baswood: Thanks! And yes, Iraq + 100 was really intriguing, and I definitely could not resist it.

I hit 101 books read from the 1001 Books To Read Before You Die list and thought I'd share. It's not a list I purposely seek out to read new books but it is a list I cross off titles when I happen to read a title included. (Since this is a simple copy paste from Excel I didn't bother fixing the formatting of author name or adding touchstones.)

Little Women Alcott Louisa May
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Angelou Maya
The Twilight Years Ariyoshi Sawako
Alias Grace Atwood Margaret
The Handmaid’s Tale Atwood Margaret
Pride and Prejudice Austen Jane
Le Père Goriot Balzac Honoré de
Silk Baricco Alessandro
Labyrinths Borges Jorge Luis
Ficciones Borges Jorge Luis
Jane Eyre Brontë Charlotte
Shirley Brontë Charlotte
Wuthering Heights Brontë Emily
The Outsider Camus Albert
In Cold Blood Capote Truman
Don Quixote Cervantes Saavedra Miguel de
The Woman in White Collins Wilkie
Heart of Darkness Conrad Joseph
Robinson Crusoe Defoe Daniel
Great Expectations Dickens Charles
A Tale of Two Cities Dickens Charles
The Nun Diderot Denis
Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky Fyodor
The Idiot Dostoevsky Fyodor
Rebecca du Maurier Daphne
The Count of Monte-Cristo Dumas Alexandre
The Three Musketeers Dumas Alexandre
La Reine Margot Dumas Alexandre
The Lover Duras Marguerite
Woman at Point Zero El Saadawi Nawal
Invisible Man Ellison Ralph
Silence Endo Shusaku
The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald F. Scott
One Hundred Years of Solitude García Márquez Gabriel
The Roots of Heaven Gary Romain
Memoirs of a Geisha Golden Arthur
Lord of the Flies Golding William
Tess of the D’Urbervilles Hardy Thomas
The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne Nathaniel
The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway Ernest
Les Misérables Hugo Victor
The Hunchback of Notre Dame Hugo Victor
A Pale View of Hills Ishiguro Kazuo
A Thousand Cranes Kawabata Yasunari
Ignorance Kundera Milan
Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence D.H.
Uncle Silas Le Fanu Sheridan
The Dispossessed Le Guin Ursula K.
To Kill a Mockingbird Lee Harper
The Monk Lewis M.G.
The Call of the Wild London Jack
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas Machado de Assis Joaquim Maria
Death in Venice Mann Thomas
Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin Charles Robert
A Woman’s Life Maupassant Guy de
All the Pretty Horses McCarthy Cormac
Blood Meridian McCarthy Cormac
After the Quake Murakami Haruki
1Q84 Murakami Haruki
Almost Transparent Blue Murakami Ryu
The Water Margin Nai'an Shi
Their Eyes Were Watching God Neale Hurston Zora
Fear and Trembling Nothomb Amélie
The Things They Carried O’Brien Tim
Nip the buds, shoot the kids Oe Kenzaburo
Animal Farm Orwell George
Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell George
Burmese Days Orwell George
All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque Erich Maria
Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys Jean
Rashomon Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The Little Prince Saint-Exupéry Antoine de
The Catcher in the Rye Salinger J.D.
Frankenstein Shelley Mary
The Tale of Genji Shikibu Murasaki
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark Muriel
Of Mice and Men Steinbeck John
The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck John
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Stevenson Robert Louis
Treasure Island Stevenson Robert Louis
Dracula Stoker Bram
The River Between Thiong'o Ngugi wa
Anna Karenina Tolstoy Leo
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain Mark
Around the World in Eighty Days Verne Jules
Journey to the Centre of the Earth Verne Jules
The Birds Vesaas Tarjei
The Castle of Otranto Walpole Horace
The Island of Dr. Moreau Wells H.G.
The Time Machine Wells H.G.
The War of the Worlds Wells H.G.
The Invisible Man Wells H.G.
Jacob’s Room Woolf Virginia
Native Son Wright Richard
Day of the Triffids Wyndham John
The Midwich Cuckoos Wyndham John
A Dream of Red Mansions (Story of the Stone) Xueqin Cao
Kitchen Yoshimoto Banana
Thérèse Raquin Zola Émile
Amok Zweig Stefan
Chess Story Zweig Stefan

Quite a milestone! Congrats

ETA: Have folks here seen the listchallenges.com site? You can mark the books you've read off their list. Here's one for the 1001 Books list (all editions combined up to 2018). You can also create your own lists, see how you compare to others who have taken the quiz, or print your results. Fun for list makers.

>263 lilisin: Yes, great list. I've only read 23 of those on your list. I don't know how many I've read off the remainder of the 1001 list, though. Good work!

>263 lilisin: good stuff!

>264 labfs39: that link was fun. (But it doesn’t give me a list of what I clicked. 😕)

>266 dchaikin: But it doesn’t give me a list of what I clicked. Hmm, it should have. I was able to save a pdf of my list...

Thanks everyone! I do like a list with bookcovers so did the quiz as well and I now have a few books I want to add to my wishlist so I see new additions to the list coming up promptly. Also, I really need to just read all the Jane Austen and Bronte sister books now. I read Shirley recently and really enjoyed myself so I'm just wasting good reading time by not getting to those books.

>268 lilisin: We are doing the Brontes in November over in the Monthly author group - so if you think that a nudge will help, come join us: https://www.librarything.com/topic/353543 :)

Time magazine's list of the 100 must-read books of 2023:

https://time.com/collection/must-read-books-2023/

>253 labfs39: I do track recommendations and book bullets, though I only started fairly recently, and like others, I'm not the most consistent at tagging. So far, all of my tagged book bullets are still on my tbr, though I'm sure that some of my read books from the laster few years were, in fact, book bullets.

>263 lilisin: >264 labfs39: I've read 54 of the ListChallenge version of the 1001 list.

>270 KeithChaffee: I’m now wondering what is most books i’ve read from any single year

Ok, I followed up. I’ve read 39 books from three separate years (2003, 2009 and 2011). That’s my max from any single year.

>253 labfs39: I track recommendations too, however, in no very organized fashion. Some make it to my LT list, others are on scraps of paper.
My list would recognize all those names plus a few more, including yours!

books. After watching the Booker prize ceremony, I got all excited on the buzz. Late that night I ordered five books from the long list, including the winner. They arrived today in two shipments, all quite lovely. And I'm buzzing again. :)

These are what came today:
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
Pearl by Siân Hughes  
How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (the winner)

>276 dchaikin: Nice haul! I’ve read most of the list, including these ones. Pearl and Prophet Song ranked highest for me but there really isn’t a bad one in the bunch. Enjoy!

Of these 25, I’ve read 4

https://bookriot.com/best-classic-books/

>278 dchaikin: Only 6 for me. Kind of an odd list, I think. And I say that because of the six I've read, I don't think I'd put any of them on a list of only 25 "best classics".

>279 japaul22: right. I agree. It’s quirky.

>278 dchaikin: Usually those lists of Classic books to read are heavily US/UK English male writers, so it appears to try to be a more diverse, -authors, language, countries, history, than those lists.
I received and read the Tevyah book with the YA Sync free summer books and it was quite delightful. Just adding my reccommendation here.

>281 raidergirl3: That's the first thing I noticed too, the diversity. Opens the question yet again about what constitutes a classic and to whom.

>278 dchaikin: Which are the ones you've read, Dan? I've read Sappho, Scarlet Pimpernel, Grapes of Wrath, Night, and Master & Margarita. I think I've read a couple of others, but won't count them since it would have been ages ago.

I’ve read 4, but…

1001 Nights was in the original version (in translation), which did not include Aladdin, Ali Baba or Sindbad. Those were separate Arabic tales that were added by the 19th century translators, if I remember correctly.

I Am a Cat, I think

Grapes Of Wrath, ages ago

The Master And Margarita, the only one without a caveat

The four I’ve read are Sappho, Night, Master & Margarita and Like Water for Chocolate. And I recommend them all. Outside Night, there are really enjoyable reads.

>278 dchaikin: I've only read a few of those books. I understand and really appreciate the insistence on diversity in the list, but, regardless, do we really agree that Like Water for Chocolate is a classic?

>281 raidergirl3: Interesting. I've read the collection Tevye's Daughters, which I assume has many of the same stories as the volume included here. I would never have thought of Sholom Aleichem's stories as YA literature per se, though I do think they are suitable for teens to read.

I was able to put the list to text (took a little work…but I didn’t convert to caps. Sorry.)

BEST CLASSIC BOOKS: MYTHS, LEGENDS & FOLKTALES

-THE RĀMĀYANA OF VĀLMĪKI (CA. 6TH CENTURY BCE)
-ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS (CA. 13TH CENTURY)
-THE POETIC EDDA (CA. 10TH CENTURY)
-LE MORTE D’ARTHUR BY SIR THOMAS MALORY (1485)

BEST CLASSIC BOOKS: POETRY & DRAMA

-THE POETRY OF SAPPHO (CA. 6TH CENTURY BCE)
-FAUST BY JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1808)
-THE ESSENTIAL GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1945)
-A RAISIN IN THE SUN BY LORRAINE HANSBERRY (1959)

BEST CLASSIC BOOKS: SHORT FICTION

-TEVYE THE DAIRYMAN AND THE RAILROAD STORIES BY SHOLEM ALEICHEM (1894)
-THE COLLECTED STORIES OF STEFAN ZWEIG (1900)
-LOVE AND LIFE BEHIND THE PURDAH BY CORNELIA SORABJI (1901)
-STORYTELLER BY LESLIE MARMON SILKO (1981)

BEST CLASSIC BOOKS: NOVELS

-THE JOURNEY TO THE WEST BY WU CHENG’EN (16TH CENTURY)
-THE SCARLET PIMPERNEL BY BARONESS ORCZY (1905)
-I AM A CAT BY NATSUME SŌSEKI (1905)
-HOME TO HARLEM BY CLAUDE MCKAY (1928)
-PASSING BY NELLA LARSEN (1929)
-THE GRAPES OF WRATH BY JOHN STEINBECK (1939)
-LOVE IN A FALLEN CITY BY EILEEN CHANG (1943)
-NIGHT BY ELIE WIESEL (1958)
-THE MASTER & MARGARITA BY MIKHAIL BULGAKOV (1967)
-WILD THORNS BY SAHAR KHALIFEH (1976)
-THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS BY ISABEL ALLENDE (1982)
-LOVE MEDICINE BY LOUISE ERDRICH (1984)
-LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE BY LAURA ESQUIVEL (1989)

>285 rocketjk: regarding Like Water for Chocolate - it’s charming and literary and has some influence, especially in the 1990’s, but today too. It’s not in my top 2 novels for the 1980’s. And there are many other more influential novels from that decade.

>286 dchaikin: Ever get the feeling you are living in an alternative universe: I have only read one of those books.

What a strange list! I'm always intrigued at how different people value different things. I have read 7 off this list (1001 Nights, Passing, Night, Master and Margarita, House of Spirits and Like Water for Chocolate) and while I enjoyed each one, I am not sure I would rank them all 'the best' (well, except Master and Margarita - that is definitely on my top ten list of best books ever). But I guess that is the inherent problem with any 'best' list, there are just way too many great books out there; ones that bring light to an important issue, ones that are brilliantly written, ones that maybe aren't brilliantly written but are unique and groundbreaking etc. Any best list is really just what one particular group finds noteworthy about what is available to them in their language.

Sorry for the ramble - I love lists and also love trying to figure out why certain things are or aren't on said list :)

>286 dchaikin: 6 for me, all in the novels section unsurprisingly. (Passing, Grapes of Wrath, The Master & Margarita, The House of the Spirits, Live Medicine, Like Water for Chocolate) I get the idea of choosing books that are theoretically more widely enjoyable but I agree that I’m not sure all of rheee qualify as anywhere near classics, and I also wouldn’t say a couple of them were enjoyable at all!

>285 rocketjk: I've only read a few of those books. I understand and really appreciate the insistence on diversity in the list, but, regardless, do we really agree that Like Water for Chocolate is a classic?

Yes. One of my favourite books of all time, and one I reread. It was published in 1989 and I think it holds up 30+ years later