HEY SO YOU REMEMBER THAT TIME I SAID I HAD EXTRA SHELF SPACE? YEAH THAT DIDN’T EVEN LAST SIX MONTHS π€ͺπ
Fortunately I am a Problem SolverTM, and it dawned on me that I still have a couple of boxes left from the mid-autumn unhaul and that I might as well put one of them to good use. Thus I now have space on my shelves again because most of my 2021 TBR is in a box at the foot of the bookcase. The ones I love will go back on the bookcase; the rest will live in the box until the next unhaul. My anticipated five-stars are currently living on the bookcase, because I had lots of space on my shelves and only so much room in the box.
Anyway.
This year’s TBR is extensive because I want to read, at a minimum, every book I bought or received in 2020, plus a few whose arrival dates are a bit fuzzy. The 2020s are the must reads; planned rereads and fuzzy dates associated with those rereads are listed separately and are lower priority; and books I’m pretty sure have been sitting around for at least a year are listed as nice-to-haves but aren’t exactly critical, because if they’ve already been sitting for a year they can sit a little longer. This is, now that I think about it, literally the best thing about books: they don’t expire. Actually this post almost got bundled into my 2020 reading round-up, but then I realized exactly how long the list was going to get and thought better of it. I would’ve started the list sooner but kept putting it off because I was absolutely convinced that I was going to read most, if not all, of the books I bought in November and December. Obviously that hasn’t happened, or I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now.
I originally had these in order by title, but then my OCD barged in and pointed out that books by the same author would be separated if I did that, so now they’re listed in alphabetical order by author surname. (Also, if you ever see me whining about how I have absolutely nothing to read, point me to this list.) My usual instinct is to list these kinds of things in the order I want to read them, but if I did that we’d be here all day.
NOTE: These lists do not include the books I am currently reading.
Must Read
- The African Trilogy β Chinua Achebe
- The Travelling Cat Chronicles β Hiro Arikawa
- A Ladder to the Sky β John Boyne
- Daughter of Black Lake β Cathy Marie Buchanan
- The Master and Margarita β Mikhail Bulgakov
- Aphasia β Mauro Javier CΓ‘rdenas
- Dragon Springs Road β Janie Chang
- The Library of Legends β Janie Chang
- Bestiary β K-Ming Chang
- Piranesi β Susanna Clarke
- The Alchemist β Paulo Coelho
- The Binding β Bridget Collins
- All Who Go Do Not Return β Shulem Deen
- The Death of Vivek Oji β Akwaeke Emezi
- Silence β ShΕ«saku EndΕ
- The Woman in the Water β Charles Finch
- Outlander β Diana Gabaldon
- Transcendent Kingdom β Yaa Gyasi
- The Library of the Unwritten β A.J. Hackwith
- The Archive of the Forgotten β A.J. Hackwith
- Strange Candy β Laurell K. Hamilton
- The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts β Joshua Hammer
- The Mercies β Kiran Millwood Hargrave
- Beowulf: A New Translation β Maria Dahvana Headley
- The Silence of Bones β June Hur
- Black Leopard, Red Wolf β Marlon James
- A Brief History of Seven Killings β Marlon James
- Little Gods β Meng Jin
- The Stationery Shop β Marjan Kamali
- The House in the Cerulean Sea β TJ Klune
- The Devil in the White City β Erik Larson
- Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things β Jenny Lawson
- The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin β Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Three-Body Problem β Cixin Liu
- The Dark Forest β Cixin Liu
- To Hold Up the Sky β Cixin Liu
- The Paper Menagerie β Ken Liu
- The Kingdom of Back β Marie Lu
- The Lost Vintage β Ann Mah
- Wolf Hall β Hilary Mantel
- Deacon King Kong β James McBride
- Migrations β Charlotte McConaghy
- Echo North β Joanna Ruth Meyer
- A Secret History of Witches β Louisa Morgan
- Harrow the Ninth β Tamsyn Muir
- World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other AstonishmentsΒ β Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- A Promised Land β Barack Obama
- Becoming β Michelle Obama
- Hamnet β Maggie O’Farrell
- The Housekeeper and the Professor β YΕko Ogawa
- The Memory Police β YΕko Ogawa
- There There β Tommy Orange
- Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why β Alexandra Petri
- The Forgotten Kingdom β Signe Pike
- A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II β Sonia Purnell
- Eartheater β Dolores Reyes
- Blindness β JosΓ© Saramago
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue β V.E. Schwab
- Space at the Speed of Light β Becky Smethurst
- An Unkindness of Ghosts β Rivers Solomon
- The Bone Shard Daughter β Andrea Stewart
- The Book of Eels β Patrik Svensson
- The Color of Air β Gail Tsukiyama
- Vinegar Girl β Anne Tyler
- Kristin Lavransdatter β Sigrid Undset
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous β Ocean Vuong
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration β Isabel Wilkerson
- Braised Pork β An Yu
Lower Priority
- Life After Life β Kate Atkinson
- A God in Ruins β Kate Atkinson
- The Curse of Chalion* β Lois McMaster Bujold
- Paladin of Souls* β Lois McMaster Bujold
- The Hallowed Hunt β Lois McMaster Bujold
* My plans did not originally include these two, but I just got them in hardcover and I was planning on a buddy read of The Hallowed Hunt anyway, so why the hell not?
Nice to Have
- The Bear and the Nightingale β Katherine Arden
- Jane Eyre β Charlotte BrontΓ«
- House of Salt and Sorrows β Erin A. Craig
- Frantumaglia β Elena Ferrante
- The Eyre Affair β Jasper Fforde
- Legally Correct Fairy Tales β David Fisher
- The Familiars β Stacey Halls
- The Odyssey β Homer
- The Age of Orphans β Laleh Khadivi
- The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories β H.P. Lovecraft
- Death Need Not Be Fatal β Malachy McCourt
- Lolita β Vladimir Nabokov
- Look at the Harlequins! β Vladimir Nabokov
- Pale Fire β Vladimir Nabokov
- The Snowman β Jo NesbΓΈ
- Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children β Ransom Riggs
- The Words β Jean-Paul Sartre
- A Dictionary of Maqiao β Han Shaogong
- The Book Thief β Markus Zusak