So once more I'm going to be having a very ambitious TBR. I need to be more selective on the start of the month. Normally I make a list and then I decide to run for the mills and deviate, picking books along the way that might or night not fall in my monthly TBR. So my intent is to make a specific schedule and actually stick to it.
I hope to at least get to through the full list this time, so far I have not completed a monthly TBR once in 2023.
In efforts to stick to my time management strategy the books have been scheduled weekly so in theory I will be able to track it better. I will not be setting the books in order of reading but grouping them in categories.
This is an ongoing yearly challenge hosted in GoodReads you can find the 2023 on the Theme Page.
Theme: Finish/Catch up series.
I do have an ongoing personal challenge to read series each month and the end goal of completing 12 series for the year, I do have a lot of options to pick from. But the specificity here helps- only the final book in a series or the last published work.
Gilded by Marissa Meyer
The last book in the duology is Cursed.
Book description: Before the Endless Moon, when the Erlking means to capture one of the seven gods and make a wish to return his lover, Perchta, from the underworld, Serilda and Gild attempt to break the curses that tether their spirits to Adalheid's haunted castle. But it soon becomes clear that the Erlking's hunger for vengeance won't be satisfied with a single wish, and his true intentions have the power to alter the mortal realm forever. Serilda and Gild must try to thwart his wicked plans, all while solving the mystery of Gild's forgotten name, freeing the ghosts kept in servitude to the dark ones, and trying to protect their unborn child.
Frank Kittridge by S.J. Morden
The last book in the duology: No Way.
Book description: In the sequel to the terrifying science fiction thriller, One Way, returning home from Mars may mean striking a deal with the very people who abandoned him.
They were sent to build a utopia, but all they found on Mars was death.
Frank Kitteridge has been abandoned. But XO, the greedy--and ultimately murderous--corporate architects of humanity's first Mars base made a costly mistake when they left him there: they left him alive. Using his skills and his wits, he's going to find a way back home even if it kills him.
Another end of a duology, Sands of Arawiya by Hafsah Faizal - We Free the Stars
Book description: The battle on Sharr is over. The dark forest has fallen. Altair may be captive, but Zafira, Nasir, and Kifah are bound for Sultan’s Keep, determined to finish the plan he set in motion: restoring the hearts of the Sisters of Old to the minarets of each caliphate, and finally returning magic to all of Arawiya. But they are low on resources and allies alike, and the kingdom teems with fear of the Lion of the Night’s return.
Buzz wordathon
This is a yearly challenge created by Keyla from Books and Lala you can find it in youtube and GoodReads too.
Theme: Weather Words
Rain: A Natural and Cultural History, Cynthia Barnett
Book Description: Rain is elemental, mysterious, precious, destructive.
It is the subject of countless poems and paintings; the top of the weather report; the source of the world's water. Yet this is the first book to tell the story of rain.
Cynthia Barnett's Rain begins four billion years ago with the torrents that filled the oceans, and builds to the storms of climate change. It weaves together science—the true shape of a raindrop, the mysteries of frog and fish rains—with the human story of our ambition to control rain, from ancient rain dances to the 2,203 miles of levees that attempt to straitjacket the Mississippi River.It offers a glimpse of our "founding forecaster," Thomas Jefferson, who measured every drizzle long before modern meteorology. Two centuries later, rainy skies would help inspire Morrissey’s mopes and Kurt Cobain’s grunge. Rain is also a travelogue, taking readers to Scotland to tell the surprising story of the mackintosh raincoat, and to India, where villagers extract the scent of rain from the monsoon-drenched earth and turn it into perfume.
What the Winds Knows, Amy Harmon
Book description: In an unforgettable love story, a woman’s impossible journey through the ages could change everything…
Anne Gallagher grew up enchanted by her grandfather’s stories of Ireland. Heartbroken at his death, she travels to his childhood home to spread his ashes. There, overcome with memories of the man she adored and consumed by a history she never knew, she is pulled into another time.
The Ireland of 1921, teetering on the edge of war, is a dangerous place in which to awaken. But there Anne finds herself, hurt, disoriented, and under the care of Dr. Thomas Smith, guardian to a young boy who is oddly familiar. Mistaken for the boy’s long-missing mother, Anne adopts her identity, convinced the woman’s disappearance is connected to her own. As tensions rise, Thomas joins the struggle for Ireland’s independence and Anne is drawn into the conflict beside him. Caught between history and her heart, she must decide whether she’s willing to let go of the life she knew for a love she never thought she’d find. But in the end, is the choice actually hers to make?
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Book description: Scarlett O'Hara, the beautiful, spoiled daughter of a well-to-do Georgia plantation owner, must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of the poverty she finds herself in after Sherman's March to the Sea.
A classic historical fiction. I might even try to watch the movie after finishing the book. I think I have not experienced either one yet.
Literally Dead Book Club
This is also created and ran by Kayla from Books and Lala. The list can be found in YouTube and GoodReads.
The Only One Left by Riley Sager
Book description: At seventeen, Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope
Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.
Stabbed her father with a knife
Took her mother’s happy life
It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything.
“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead
Classics
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
Book Description: Through six turbulent months of 1934, 17-year-old Cassandra Mortmain keeps a journal, filling three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries about her home, a ruined Suffolk castle, and her eccentric and penniless family. By the time the last diary shuts, there have been great changes in the Mortmain household, not the least of which is that Cassandra is deeply, hopelessly, in love.
For the Emily Fox book Channel.
For July- August the pick is Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Book description: Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.
Also this will be used for the challenges-
Around the world: Russia
Translated works
The other one was created by Erinbarton over in Storygraph Group
I can select the order in whatever order, I love that open card.
Persuasion, Jane Austen
Book description: Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emma, completing it in August 1816. She died, aged 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December that year (but dated 1818). Persuasion is linked to Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume and published together, but also because both stories are set partly in Bath, a fashionable city with which Austen was well acquainted, having lived there from 1801 to 1805. Besides the theme of persuasion, the novel evokes other topics, such as the Royal Navy, in which two of Jane Austen's brothers ultimately rose to the rank of admiral. As in Northanger Abbey, the superficial social life of Bath-well known to Austen, who spent several relatively unhappy and unproductive years there-is portrayed extensively and serves as a setting for the second half of the book. In many respects Persuasion marks a break with Austen's previous works, both in the more biting, even irritable satire directed at some of the novel's characters and in the regretful, resigned outlook of its otherwise admirable heroine, Anne Elliot, in the first part of the story. Against this is set the energy and appeal of the Royal Navy, which symbolises for Anne and the reader the possibility of a more outgoing, engaged, and fulfilling life, and it is this worldview which triumphs for the most part at the end of the novel.
Moving on to my personal challenges:
AUTHOR
MATT HAIG
I am carrying over the books from June, I did not manage to get to them on time.
Father Christmas and me
Book description: It isn't always easy, growing up as a human in Elfhelm, even if your adoptive parents are the newly married Father Christmas and Mary Christmas.
For one thing, Elf School can be annoying when you have to sing Christmas songs everyday - even in July - and when you fail all your toy-making tests. Also it can get very, very cold.
But when the jealous Easter Bunny and his rabbit army launch an attack to stop Christmas, it's up to Amelia, her new family and the elves to keep Christmas alive. Before it's too late.
How to Stop Time - this is also a ReRead for me.
Book Christmas: "The first rule is that you don't fall in love, ' he said... 'There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. If you stick to this you will just about be okay.'"
A love story across the ages - and for the ages - about a man lost in time, the woman who could save him, and the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live
Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary 41-year-old, but owing to a rare condition, he's been alive for centuries. Tom has lived history--performing with Shakespeare, exploring the high seas with Captain Cook, and sharing cocktails with Fitzgerald. Now, he just wants an ordinary life.
So Tom moves back to London, his old home, to become a high school history teacher--the perfect job for someone who has witnessed the city's history first hand. Better yet, a captivating French teacher at his school seems fascinated by him. But the Albatross Society, the secretive group which protects people like Tom, has one rule: never fall in love. As painful memories of his past and the erratic behavior of the Society's watchful leader threaten to derail his new life and romance, the one thing he can't have just happens to be the one thing that might save him. Tom will have to decide once and for all whether to remain stuck in the past, or finally begin living in the present.
JOHN GRISHAM
The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town
Book description: John Grisham's first work of non-fiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, in his most extraordinary legal thriller yet.
In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A's, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory.
Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits - drinking, drugs and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept 20 hours a day on her sofa.
In 1982, a 21-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder.
With no physical evidence, the prosecution's case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to Death Row.
If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty this book will disturb you. I you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you.
Playing for Pizza
Book description: ick Dockery was the third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. In the AFC Championship game against Denver, to the surprise and dismay of virtually everyone, Rick actually got into the game. With a 17-point lead and just minutes to go, Rick provided what was arguably the worst single performance in the history of the NFL. Overnight, he became a national laughingstock and, of course, was immediately cut by the Browns and shunned by all other teams.
But all Rick knows is football, and he insists that his agent, Arnie, find a team that needs him. Against enormous odds Arnie finally locates just such a team and informs Rick that, miraculously, he can in fact now be a starting quarterback–for the mighty Panthers of Parma, Italy.
Yes, Italians do play American football, to one degree or another, and the Parma Panthers desperately want a former NFL player–any former NFL player–at their helm. So Rick reluctantly agrees to play for the Panthers–at least until a better offer comes along–and heads off to Italy. He knows nothing about Parma, has never been to Europe, and doesn’t speak or understand a word of Italian. To say that Italy holds a few surprises for Rick Dockery would be something of an understatement.
STEPHEN KING
Gwendy's Magic Feather
Series: The Button Box #2
Author: Richard Chizmar and Stephen King
Book description: Something evil has swept into the small western Maine town of Castle Rock on the heels of the latest winter storm. Sheriff Norris Ridgewick and his team are desperately searching for two missing girls, but time is running out to bring them home alive.
In Washington D.C., thirty-seven-year-old Gwendy Peterson couldn't be more different from the self-conscious teenaged girl who once spent a summer running up Castle Rock's Suicide Stairs. That same summer, she was entrusted or some might say cursed with the extraordinary button box by Richard Farris, the mysterious stranger in the black suit. The seductive and powerful box offered Gwendy small gifts in exchange for its care and feeding until Farris eventually returned, promising Gwendy she'd never see the box again.
One day, though, the button box shows up without warning and without Richard Farris to explain why, or what she's supposed to do with it. The mysterious reappearance of the box, along with the troubling disappearances in Castle Rock, leads Gwendy home again...where she just might be able to help rescue the missing girls and stop a madman before he does something ghastly.
Gwendy's Final Task
Series: The Button Box #3
Author: Richard Chizmar and Stephen King
Book Description: When Gwendy Peterson was twelve, a mysterious stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous. Pushing any of its seven colored buttons promised death and destruction. Years later, the button box entered Gwendy’s life again. A successful novelist and a rising political star, she was once again forced to deal with the temptation that box represented. Now, evil forces seek to possess the button box and it is up to Senator Gwendy Peterson to keep it from them at all costs. But where can you hide something from such powerful entities?
In Gwendy’s Final Task , “horror giants” (Publishers Weekly) Stephen King and Richard Chizmar take us on a journey from Castle Rock to another famous cursed Maine city to the MF-1 space station, where Gwendy must execute a secret mission to save the world. And, maybe, all worlds.
SERIES
Vinland Saga Omnibus, Makoto Yukimura
Vol 7: Deaths and Decisions
Description: His army starving for resources, King Canute schemes to confiscate Ketil's farm. Ketil and his sons become fugitives, barely escaping the capital aboard Leif Ericson's ship, but Canute follows in pursuit with his best men. Upon Ketil’s return, he finds his beloved slave Arnheid has helped her former husband, a runaway who has killed many of Ketil’s bodyguards, escape. Beset by betrayal on all sides, there may be no way out for Ketil, but Thorfinn finally has his freedom. Yet, the son of Thors feels bound to Denmark by his unfinished business with Canute.
Vol 8: Troubled water
Description: Free at last, Thorfinn sets off on an expedition to Vinland, to establish a place free of war and slavery. In an effort to fund his project, Thorfinn visits Iceland where Halfdan, a wealthy man who shared a dark history with his late father, awaits. Meanwhile, the marriage between Halfdan's son Sigurd and Leif's relative Gudrid is well under way, but Gudrid dreams of being a sailor not a bride. A battle soon breaks out as Gudrid attempts to escape aboard Leif's ship. With Sigurd hot on their tail, Thorfinn and the crew press eastward to the city of Miklagard, picking up an orphaned baby and a dog along the way.
Vol 9: Fighting for a Future
Description: Thorfinn and his crew are on their way to Greece, the first leg of their expedition to Vinland. Having landed near Bergen, in Norway, Thorfinn is attacked by a bear, only to be saved by a fierce huntress named Hild. While sharing a meal together, Hild recounts how her village and family were massacred many years ago—a story Thorfinn knows quite intimately. Now, Thorfinn must face Hild and his own violent past in order to press forward. As his journey progresses, Thorfinn encounters more factions that do not share his vision, and a war in the name of Vinland may be looming on the horizon.
Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
Anny of Windy Poplars
Description: Thorfinn and his crew are on their way to Greece, the first leg of their expedition to Vinland. Having landed near Bergen, in Norway, Thorfinn is attacked by a bear, only to be saved by a fierce huntress named Hild. While sharing a meal together, Hild recounts how her village and family were massacred many years ago—a story Thorfinn knows quite intimately. Now, Thorfinn must face Hild and his own violent past in order to press forward. As his journey progresses, Thorfinn encounters more factions that do not share his vision, and a war in the name of Vinland may be looming on the horizon.
House of M
House of M Civil War, Christos Gage,
Andrea Vito (Illustrator)
Book Description: The biggest House of M story is revealed: how did Magneto take over the world? He began life as a penniless refugee, but rose to conquer the entire planet! Witness Magneto's first battle with the Sentinels...the tragic end of his marriage...and his fight against Apocalypse for leadership of all mutants!
Collects: Civil War: House of M #1-5.
House of M Masters of Evil, Christos N. Gage
Illustrator: Manuel Garcia
Book description: House of M returns! You've seen how the mutants and the heroes were changed in the world ruled by Magneto...but what about the villains? Their story stands revealed at last as The Hood assembles a gang of the deadliest Sapien super-criminals: Madame Masque, The Absorbing Man, Titania, The Wrecking Crew, Nitro, Constrictor, The Sandman, Crossbones, and more! At first, their goal is simple: get rich and get away with it. But their very first job may lead somewhere none of them expected...and incur the wrath of the House of M itself!
Collects: House of M: Masters of Evil #1-4.
Comments