Want to Read

Want To Read 2022

At the start of the year, I pick out a reading list covering a lot of topics and genres, aiming for a diverse group of authors. I don’t read solely from the list but use it as a pool for what to read next throughout the year. I get on the waiting list at the library for a lot of these titles so they’ll just land in my Kindle periodically, and group them in with hard-copy requests.

Non-Fiction: Memoir | Justice | Society | Self-help | History | Art
Fiction: Sci-fi | Fantasy | Romance | Other

Non-Fiction

Memoir

  • English Pastoral: An Inheritance – currently reading
  • Modern Whore: A Memoir – got and 😳 not gonna read 😂
  • Gentrifier: A Memoir – DNF
  • Upstream: Selected Essays – DNF
  • Maybe You Should Talk to Someone – DNF

Justice

  • What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition by Dabiri, Emma
  • The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
  • Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals
  • This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century
  • Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change
  • Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
  • When We Fight, We Win: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World – DNF
  • Making Our Way Home: The Great Migration and the Black American Dream by Imani, Blair – enjoyed but DNF

Society

  • Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness – read 1/22
  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants – currently reading
  • Out of Office – bought a copy
  • Debt: The First 5,000 Years
  • The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
  • What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World
  • Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
  • Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food – DNF but what I read was good!

Self-Help

  • IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives – currently reading
  • Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World – currently reading
  • The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life
  • Making Conversation: Seven Essential Elements of Meaningful Communication

History

  • Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Weatherford, Jack
  • This Place: 150 Years Retold

Art

  • There and Back: Photographs from the Edge – currently reading
  • Making Comics
  • Faithful and Virtuous Night

Fiction

Sci-fi

  • Hunt the Stars by Mihalik, Jessie – read 4/22
  • Children of Time
  • Remnant Population
  • Lilith’s Brood
  • First Light
  • The Calculating Stars
  • Pixels of You
  • A Memory Called Empire – DNF
  • The Word for World Is Forest – DNF
  • A Psalm for the Wild-Built – DNF

Fantasy

  • A Spindle Splintered by Harrow, Alix E. – read 1/22
  • Absynthe by Brendan Bellecourt – read 4/22
  • Eighty Days – read 5/22
  • Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher – read 5/22
  • Havesskadi – read 6/22
  • The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang – read 7/22
  • Iron Widow – read 7/22
  • What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher – currently reading
  • No Man’s Land – own on Kindle
  • Ring Shout
  • The Maleficent Seven
  • Neverwhere
  • Strange Beasts of China
  • Not Your Sidekick
  • Deal with the Devil
  • The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
  • The Automatic Detective
  • The Dragon of Ynys
  • Bluebird by Pierlot, Ciel – tried to start, will try again later
  • Under the Whispering Door – tried to start, will try again later
  • A Strange and Stubborn Endurance by Meadows, Foz – DNF
  • The Once and Future Witches – DNF
  • The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Hossain, Saad – DNF
  • Where the Drowned Girls Go – DNF

Romance

Sci-fi Romance
Fantasy Romance
  • Electric Idol by Robert, Katee – read 2/22
  • A Marvellous Light – read 3/22
  • A Duel With The Vampire Lord by Kova, Elise
  • Always Practice Safe Hex
  • Shadow of the Swan
  • Unhallowed
  • Sweet Ruin
  • Restless Spirits – own on Kindle
  • Subversive – own on Kindle
Historical Romance
Contemporary Romance

Other

  • Mexican Gothic
  • Sad Janet – DNF
  • Matrix – DNF

Books I Own But Haven’t Read Yet

Nonfiction

  • Out of Office by Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel
  • Pastoral Song by James Rebanks
  • Wallet Activism by Tanja Hester
  • Mad & Bad by Bea Koch
  • Alone on the Wall by Alex Honnold
  • Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic by Daniel Harris
  • Command and Control by Eric Schlosser
  • Daring Greatly by Brene Brown

Art and Design Books

  • There and Back by Jimmy Chin
  • Street Art and the War on Terror by Xavier A. Tàpies and Eleanor Mathieson
  • Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors by Yoshitake
  • On Book Design by Richard Hendel
  • Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
  • The Designer’s Dictionary of Type by Sean Adams
  • The Book by Keith Houston
  • The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky

Fiction

  • Embedded by Dan Abnett

Comics

  • Shout Out published by Toronto Comix
  • Lackadaisy by Tracy Butler

6 replies on “Want to Read”

I love having my own website.
I’ve been thinking it a lot lately and over the past year or so as I’ve gotten into the IndieWeb. It dawned on me recently, as I kanban away my tasks to do, that I basically never need to add tasks on my website to my to-do list, because that’s what I do for fun. I don’t need a reminder, because I look forward to it — it’s more that I have to be careful not to get sucked into website stuff when I need to be doing other things 😂 (Here I am, after my evening screen cutoff time, blogging away… *whistles innocently and ignores the clock*)
The more I use my own website, the more I realize I can use it for. I loved this mind garden as soon as I started it, and at this point can’t picture not having it. As I started tracking my reads, it dawned on me that my own website was a better place to log my annual reading than Goodreads, and would give me a lot more control over what I paid attention to. I’m testing out tracking my TBR list on here too, though I haven’t quite gotten it pinned down yet. That’s fine, this is mine, so I can experiment as much as I want! I decided I miss other people having blogrolls, so I set one up. Right now I’m tracking my NaNoWriMo progress here instead of on the NaNo website, and it’s been a fun change from the official site’s focus on word count to reflecting on each day’s experience. I appreciate that the IndieWeb community is pulling me further down this route and helping me think bigger about what a website can be.

Replied to IndieWeb Pop-Up: Personal Libraries (indieweb.org)

Personal Libraries is a IndieWebCamp Pop-ups 2022 session focused on the design and use of personal websites with relation to displaying one’s books online, status updates about reading, and generally talking about books in a Goodreads-like social media manner.

When we log reads and write reviews on our personal websites instead of silos, how can we meet others who’ve read the same books and find out what books our network is reading?
Notes and thoughts from the IndieWeb Pop-Up “Personal Libraries”

Sharing what we’re reading and finding other readers online
From session facilitated by Maggie Appleton
2 different discovery challenges:

get recommendations from people you trust / see what people in your network are reading
find people to talk about the books you’re reading with

Various types of collective commentary and discussion:

“slow read” – asynchronous co-reading
shared doc for group commentary or annotation
combination – live event with shared doc that’s either open before the event to start highlighting things for discussion or afterwards for people to add on more thoughts

Key question: are people interested in discussing books for the social aspect or for learning? (May be a distinguishing feature between fiction and non-fiction readers)
Tummler = someone (paid) who gets audience members to participate (because no one wants to be the first one on the dance floor) –> online groups and communities can benefit from someone serving this role — social ‘lubricant’ and initiator
BookWyrm could be a platform for connecting with other readers
Posting our reading data to facilitate connection
If we’re going to aggregate reading data from personal websites, it needs to be in a useful format. I went through my current year reading list and added microformats for ‘p-author’ (I had p-title already) and ‘h-cite book’ as a class to the div. I briefly considered tagging my reviews h-review but I’m not sure how to do that in WordPress and not sure how valuable it is to bother figuring out. I can’t be fussed to include ISBN / ASIN — with a manual process there’s a limit to the amount of data I’m willing to look up and port over.
Some things I’m planning to adjust about my reading logs:

post on micro.blog when I start reading something
add a started reading date on my currently reading list
hotlink book cover from Open Library (heck, if they want to give their blessing for hotlinking I’ll save myself the storage)
consider linking to book on Open Library instead of Goodreads for reviews
take a photo of books I read on paper

Added 2/26/22:
I like Maggie Appleton’s suggestion of starting with our antilibraries as a way to share what books we’re interested in reading so others can find people to read along with. I haven’t been happy with my want to read page, so I’m going to rethink the format and whether I can make it more useful. I think there’s also consideration to the kinds of books I’d like to discuss with others: nonfiction or fiction or both? I’m not into literary analysis / book group kind of questions but do like discussing what I liked and didn’t like about a novel, thinking about craft and storytelling and worldbuilding.
I quickly looked into WordPress Open Library plugins and didn’t really see anything quite right. I might try out WP Books Gallery although I’m not sure adding everything manually to a plugin is a big improvement to adding everything manually to a page.