I'm trying to finish all the books on my shelf that I've bought but never read | Currently reading 8 books | find me on storygraph @ backlogbooks! (main blog: takestheweatherpersonally)Tags: mary emma’s posts
The people have spoken! Backlogbooks 2025 Bingo Challenge will include the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, and the years 2000-2019! More bingo cards under the cut, but here's how to play!
There are five cards to choose from--the first goes in order, and all the others are random. You mark off boxes by reading books that were published in that year (or decade, for those boxes). Aim for a five across bingo, get the four corners, make another cute design, or, if you're hardcore, go for a full blackout card!
The rest of your engagement is up to you! I'd love to see book photos, reviews, recommendations, and other discussion! Personally, I'm going to try to put out recommendations for books that'll fit the challenge, either by genre or by publication year, and to post about the books I'm reading. The tag for this challenge is #backlogbooks bingo challenge so I'll check that out periodically to see how people are doing!
You can also join the storygraph challenge here :-)
adventures in physical media: i spent 22 dollars on 100 blank cds and am slowly but surely filling them with my favorite podcasts. The Silt Verses is up first, along with some of the best Shutdown Fullcast episodes
I also want The Behemoth on there but realized today that it doesn't exist! I can't get my podcast app to play or download it, and same goes for everywhere else online. However instead of giving up I have emailed the creator to see if he still has the files and would kindly Give Them To Me Please because I really do love that podcast, it hits such a specific emotion for me and I would be very sad to lose it
Also unintentionally emphasizing why this is important lol. I mean I can also save podcasts just by downloading them, but why do that when you could have the fun of trapping Carpenter and Faulkner in CDs?
adventures in physical media: i spent 22 dollars on 100 blank cds and am slowly but surely filling them with my favorite podcast. The Silt Verses is up first, along with some of the best Shutdown Fullcast episodes
I also want The Behemoth on there but realized today that it doesn't exist! I can't get my podcast app to play or download it, and same goes for everywhere else online. However instead of giving up I have emailed the creator to see if he still has the files and would kindly Give Them To Me Please because I really do love that podcast, it hits such a specific emotion for me and I would be very sad to lose it
Also unintentionally emphasizing why this is important lol. I mean I can also save podcasts just by downloading them, but why do that when you could have the fun of trapping Carpenter and Faulkner in CDs?
Good news! Rick Coste emailed me back, and it looks like The Behemoth is still out there, it's just on Spotify (I always forget spotify has podcasts when I'm looking for a podcast)
I'm going to have to get creative to actually download it separate from the spotify app, but happy to see it's still out there :-)
adventures in physical media: i spent 22 dollars on 100 blank cds and am slowly but surely filling them with my favorite podcasts. The Silt Verses is up first, along with some of the best Shutdown Fullcast episodes
I also want The Behemoth on there but realized today that it doesn't exist! I can't get my podcast app to play or download it, and same goes for everywhere else online. However instead of giving up I have emailed the creator to see if he still has the files and would kindly Give Them To Me Please because I really do love that podcast, it hits such a specific emotion for me and I would be very sad to lose it
Also unintentionally emphasizing why this is important lol. I mean I can also save podcasts just by downloading them, but why do that when you could have the fun of trapping Carpenter and Faulkner in CDs?
Happy New Year's Eve y'all... look at my very silly bingo card! (I did a thing! I have not been good at the doing of the things lately, so this is delightful for me)
This is for @backlogbooks 2025 Reading Challenge (aka bingo) and I would in fact recommend everything* on here, as anything I was not enjoying I flat out didn't finish. (Though an awful lot of them are well enough known you probably don't need my rec added to it? Adding it anyways. I was especially delighted by what if? and The Martian this year; probably because this is the sort of year that needed some whimsy. And science! Or Mad Science! in the case of Down Among the Sticks and Bones.)
But I digress! HAVE A BINGO Z! (because idk I got more than just a line or corners but couldn't quite manage the blackout 😅)
Behind the cut because List & Pictures:
1960s: Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie (aka A Haunting in Venice thanks to the Branagh movie)
1970s: All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot (audiobook version narrated by Christopher Timothy)
1980s: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1990s: A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly
2000: A Dance for Emilia by Peter S. Beagle
2004: Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood
*I will say that Earthly Delights was probably my least favorite thing on this list this year, though I'm equally sure if I'd read it a decade (or two) ago I would have adored it, so. ymmv on that one.
FREE SPACE (1920s): The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery (This is literally a book about an impulsive marriage of sort-of convenience? This is SO MY SORT OF THING, it's really great, and is SO IN KEEPING WITH THIS CHALLENGE, go read some old(er) fiction, it's great.)
2011: The Martian by Andy Weir
2015: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (audiobook narrated by the author)
2016: Every Heart a Doorway
2017: Down Among the Sticks and Bones
2018: The Girl in the Green Silk Gown
All three by Seanan McGuire -- I had a Seanan McGuire year, clearly. Started with Ghost Roads, ended with the entirety of Wayward Children.
2019: Sisters of the Vast Black by Lina Rather (I have literally been meaning to read this since it came out SIX YEARS AGO, and only this year, in search of bingo squares, did it occur to me to check if it was on hoopla, since my library didn't have it, and it WAS. Thank you, backlogbooks bingo.)
Bonus(es):
Sisters of the Forsaken Stars by Lina Rather (Our Lady of Endless Worlds #2, aka sequel to Sisters of the Vast Black, also on hoopla, because hoopla is GREAT, I cannot believe I didn't think to check there at any point in the last SIX YEARS, dear lords & ladies. 🤣)
Angel of the Overpass by Seanan McGuire (Ghost Roads #3, sequel to The Girl in the Green Silk Gown)
2014: (not part of the funny bingo Z but I did mark it off) what if? serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions by Randall Munroe as well as the sequel, what if? 2: additional serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions .
(audiobooks narrated by Wil Wheaton and this is a particularly good combination, 12/10, had me snickering in the car a lot)
I'm officially registered for a marathon this spring!! I'm very excited and a little scared! But also really proud just for getting this far--I did my first half marathon in November, and I've been working really hard on my endurance. I'm not a fast runner, but I can keep on running for a long time!
My mini goal for the past few weeks has been to finish the books I had in progress so I can start building up again, which means that right now I only have two books going and it feels like So Little
which is hilarious given how many years I was a "I could never read multiple books at the same time, I wouldn't be able to keep track" person
I wish storygraph had a way of telling me if someone's written a review of a book they finished before I hit "see full review", because I keep seeing low ratings and getting very interested in the gossip and then I click and there's no gossip
Thinking about not buying any books for the next three months (aside from possibly book club books, but also I think I can get all of them from the library? if I'm remembering right) so I can end the year with no fiction books on my physical tbr again
There's something really nice about going into January with a fresh slate in that way
It has been six days since this post and I have finished four books (two very short, one already in progress, and one which I spent the entire day with yesterday*, just to give context of like, I'm not superspeeding through books, I'm just spending a little more time reading than normal). I also took three off my shelf to be given away/sold depending on the vibes after reading through the first pages/descriptions of all the books on my shelf to see if they were still Speaking to me. Luckily two of those three were free finds, so no wasted money there and I don't have to feel guilty about giving up on them lmao. (The third I should've read more closely--I didn't realize it was an alien horror when I bought it. Alien horror works better on screen for me I think? idk)
In conclusion: I should now be able to easily finish off the fiction books I've got on my shelf before the end of 2025! Also I feel like having this goal helped shift me back into a fiction reading kind of mood, which was nice after a long stretch of more nonfiction focused reading
*the book I spent all day with yesterday, and then finished this morning, is Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, which emotionally destroyed me and which I love so much. I don't know what to do with this book because once again I have found myself in a situation where if I recommend this to people and they don't like it I'll be personally offended, so instead I'm just yelling incoherently about it on various webbed sites
December update! I have four fiction books left to read, one of which I'm over halfway through at the moment, so I'm definitely going to finish them before January! I think this will become an annual goal for me; the clean slate in January is very good mentally, and also it ensures that I stay mindful of the books I'm buying. For the first part of the year, I had a "best by" date for all of my books (two months after buying them), which I like in theory, but in practice it was a little stressful--I think this keeps the spirit of the rule without getting into the nitty gritty like that.
I did break the "no books except book club books" rule this Monday, but in my defense someone in my book club was selling some of their books and I got a hardcover horror book I'd been wanting to read for 10 dollars, so I feel fine about that lmao. Also, of the six (I think?) book club books I've had to do, I've only bought two of them and gotten the other four from the library, so that's been great! It's easier when we don't pick new releases
Anyway, hi! It's been a while! I miss booklr a lot, and want to figure out a way to interact with people more/be on more in the new year maybe? I've been very focused on my phone and scrolling habits recently and have gotten my phone time down significantly (usually under two hours, if not under an hour and a half, every day) which has been So Good for my mental health. I feel like if I go into the new year with those habits firmly established, adding back in internet time won't immediately spiral? But the hubris has gotten me before, so who's to say.
How are y'all doing? Any bookish goals for the end of the year? General vibe check?
I am going to try to add at least one non-manga book to my "Read Women December" list. I've been struggling with prose book reading recently, but I'm hoping I can get through at least one.
Thinking about not buying any books for the next three months (aside from possibly book club books, but also I think I can get all of them from the library? if I'm remembering right) so I can end the year with no fiction books on my physical tbr again
There's something really nice about going into January with a fresh slate in that way
It has been six days since this post and I have finished four books (two very short, one already in progress, and one which I spent the entire day with yesterday*, just to give context of like, I'm not superspeeding through books, I'm just spending a little more time reading than normal). I also took three off my shelf to be given away/sold depending on the vibes after reading through the first pages/descriptions of all the books on my shelf to see if they were still Speaking to me. Luckily two of those three were free finds, so no wasted money there and I don't have to feel guilty about giving up on them lmao. (The third I should've read more closely--I didn't realize it was an alien horror when I bought it. Alien horror works better on screen for me I think? idk)
In conclusion: I should now be able to easily finish off the fiction books I've got on my shelf before the end of 2025! Also I feel like having this goal helped shift me back into a fiction reading kind of mood, which was nice after a long stretch of more nonfiction focused reading
*the book I spent all day with yesterday, and then finished this morning, is Angel Down by Daniel Kraus, which emotionally destroyed me and which I love so much. I don't know what to do with this book because once again I have found myself in a situation where if I recommend this to people and they don't like it I'll be personally offended, so instead I'm just yelling incoherently about it on various webbed sites
December update! I have four fiction books left to read, one of which I'm over halfway through at the moment, so I'm definitely going to finish them before January! I think this will become an annual goal for me; the clean slate in January is very good mentally, and also it ensures that I stay mindful of the books I'm buying. For the first part of the year, I had a "best by" date for all of my books (two months after buying them), which I like in theory, but in practice it was a little stressful--I think this keeps the spirit of the rule without getting into the nitty gritty like that.
I did break the "no books except book club books" rule this Monday, but in my defense someone in my book club was selling some of their books and I got a hardcover horror book I'd been wanting to read for 10 dollars, so I feel fine about that lmao. Also, of the six (I think?) book club books I've had to do, I've only bought two of them and gotten the other four from the library, so that's been great! It's easier when we don't pick new releases
Anyway, hi! It's been a while! I miss booklr a lot, and want to figure out a way to interact with people more/be on more in the new year maybe? I've been very focused on my phone and scrolling habits recently and have gotten my phone time down significantly (usually under two hours, if not under an hour and a half, every day) which has been So Good for my mental health. I feel like if I go into the new year with those habits firmly established, adding back in internet time won't immediately spiral? But the hubris has gotten me before, so who's to say.
How are y'all doing? Any bookish goals for the end of the year? General vibe check?
I want to start a commonplace book for notes about what i'm reading and listening to and everything (thought about adding notes sections to my bullet journal, but I think it would get too cluttered for me to effectively plan--there's a reason I put my quick readers' advisory notes about books at the end of my bujo instead of slotting them in as I go)
But I'm very much torn about format--I just found out about Obsidian from a youtube video about annotating books, and I really love the fact that you can link notes together, and basically create your own personal wikipedia. It looks so incredibly cool! But I also know that I remember things best when I write them down physically, and I think I would really enjoy an actual physical notebook version
So now I'm stuck in the "which version of this idea do I do" part of the cycle instead of simply trying the new thing in one version or the other and then figuring out where to go from there
I may also do Secret Third Thing of course (trying them both out simultaneously despite the risk of immediately getting overwhelmed and not doing anything for a month)
As an update, I went with a physical notebook, and so far I think that's the best for me! As much as I genuinely love typing (and I Do Love Typing), I love the tactile aspect of a commonplace journal more, and also making notes in the margins is something i don't know how to replicate digitally
ultimately the truth about frankenstein is that we are all grotesque amalgamations of the best and worst parts of everyone who came before us. and sometimes the people who are supposed to love us because of and in spite of this will not. and we can kill them with hammers for that. and i think that’s beautiful
