Because sometimes I need to take another step back and parse just what the hell I am reading. Multiple projects going at this point with multiple books checked out or en route. Anything I have actually started is in bold. I started to notice that a lot of what I am reading or planning to read right now has to do with themes of memory and the importance thereof.

Black History Month Is Every Month!  Slavery, Jim Crow, Abolitionists, and “The Negro”

Outgrowth from making February’s Black History Month display, because I kept swiping books for myself.  I also finally read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which kicked off a Harriet and Louisa Jacobs mini-kick, and the complete Logan Family series by Mildred D. Taylor.

• 100 amazing facts about the Negro         
• Reminiscences
• Understanding Jim Crow : using racist memorabilia to teach tolerance and promote social justice          
• Watermelons, nooses, and straight razors : stories from the Jim Crow Museum
• The Grimkes : the legacy of slavery in an American family          
• Master slave husband wife : an epic journey from slavery to freedom
• Behind the scenes, or, Thirty years a slave and four years in the White House
• They knew Lincoln         
• Lincoln in the Bardo : a novel

The Giver Quartet

Because Gathering Blue is my March pick for the 2023 Mass Books Reading Challenge.  I finished The Giver yesterday.  Wow.  I could have sworn I read that book twice as a kid, but if I did, why didn’t I remember the ending?

• Gathering Blue
• Messenger
• Son

ComCat One-offs: B-listers and impulse borrows

Because every time I try to weed my to-read list on Goodreads I find rando books I suddenly need to bring in, if only so I can finally cross them off: ie. books 1-4, following.  Also, I keep finding rando books that aren’t on my to-read list but I suddenly want them anyway: books 5-8. At least they should all be pretty quick.

• Paknadel & Trakhanov’s Turncoat           
• This damned band         
• Claudine             
• Legend. Volume one, Defend the grounds
• The girl that can’t get a girlfriend            
• Dragonslippers : this is what an abusive relationship looks like
• Cinema panopticum
• The number : 73304-23-4153-6-96-8

***Not Quite Yet, Please***

I posted about these before and I’m still interested, but the others feel more pressing right now. Ended up returning Rust & Stardust and five books about Tokugawa Era. At least I can still say I read all the Mildred Taylor books.

Ōoku: The Inner Chambers

• Ancillary reading about the Tokugawa Era
• 19 volume series

Downer Grownup Historical Fiction About Children

• Before We Were Yours
• Rust & Stardust
• Sold on a Monday
• The Children’s Blizzard

Realistic or Nonfiction Graphic Novel Reading Project

• The Best We Could Do
• Hostage
• Clyde Fans
• They Called Us Enemy
• Are You Listening?
• The Waiting
• Voices in the Dark

Still trying to get my to-read list on Goodreads below 1300 books (“shooting for 1200 if I do get it below 1300” – ha!) Titles can be got rid of by either reading them or deleting them outright, if it turns out they no longer pique my interest. You know, it *was* up around 1420 at one point back in January or December, but I went on a purge and it dipped as low as the 1330s. Now it just keeps migrating upward. This morning I had got it down from 1360 to 1355, but it’s just back at 1360 again.

Whatever.

The funny thing is, whenever I go looking for books that I feel comfortable deleting, I find these oddball titles that wouldn’t be at the top of my to-read list, except that I suddenly find myself thinking,

“I don’t want to delete this, but if I don’t read it now, then when?”

And before I know it there’s a fresh new hold in ComCat.

Incoming:

·         This Damned Band (Paul Cornell)
·         Turncoat (Alex Paknadel)
·         Claudine (Riyoko Ikeda)
·         Legend Vol. 1: Defend the Grounds (Samuel Sattin)