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It’s time for another seasonal TBR post! Although I am not the type to plan what I am going to read and stick to it, I do find these posts quite fun to see what I am vibing with at the moment, and look back at what I did actually read from last time. I restrict my TBR lists to books I have bought, so all of these I already own as eBooks or physically.

Books I read off my Autumn TBR

1. ✅ Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse #8) by James S.A. Corey
2. ✅ I Cheerfully Refuse by Lief Enger

and I am currently reading

3. ✅ White Noise by Don deLillo

So 3/10. I did attempt to read Kushiel’s Dart but I couldn’t get through the first chapter.

Staying on the list

➡️ 1. Sea of Tranquillity by Emily St. John Mandel

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal–an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

I’m trying to stay in a sci-fi/speculative zone, if I want something more modern (and written by a woman) it’ll be this.

➡️ 2. The Launch Date by Annabelle Slater

Grace Hastings’s dream job at the popular “true love” dating app, Fate, has turned into a nightmare. Her boss is a leech, her career is stagnating, and her fiancé has just brutally dumped her. Her hope for finding her own love story is waning, and she feels like a fraud for promoting a concept she no longer believes in. When the company’s CEO offers her an opportunity to earn a big promotion, she resolves to fight her imposter syndrome to show she deserves a seat at the table.

The opportunity? To launch a brand-new app focusing on IRL dating and genuine connection.

The problem? She must develop and test-drive a series of “first dates” with the other person gunning for the job: notorious socialite playboy and Grace’s biggest work rival, Eric Bancroft.

During their disastrous hikes, dangerous cooking classes, and steamy yoga sessions, they begin to realize their stark differences may just be surface level and Eric might just be the perfect person to challenge Grace’s perceptions of love, dating culture, and self-worth.

If I want a break from sci-fi and the heavier stuff I have to read, it’ll be this fluffy romance.

➡️ 3. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick

Jason Taverner woke up one morning to find himself completely unknown. The night before he had been the top-rated television star with millions of devoted watchers. The next day he was just an unidentified walking object, whose face nobody recognised, of whom no one had heard, and without the I.D. papers required in that near future.

When he finally found a man who would agree to counterfeiting such cards for him, that man turned out to be a police informer. And then Taverner found out not only what it was like to be a nobody but also to be hunted by the whole apparatus of society.

It was obvious that in some way Taverner had become the pea in in some sort of cosmic shell game—but how? And why?

I think I’m sticking with this as the most likely Dick to start with.

➡️ 4. How To Be Perfect by Michael Schur

Most people think of themselves as “good,” but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “good” or “bad”—especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people.

Schur starts off with easy ethical questions like “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?” (No.) and works his way up to the most complex moral issues we all face. Such as: Can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? How much money should I give to charity? Why bother being good at all when there are no consequences for being bad? And much more. By the time the book is done, we’ll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, we’ll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day.

I am going to do it! FINALLY! I will read this thing. I have it all planned out. I’ve written myself a little curriculum (I am inspired), and I’m going to schedule time to focus on it and make sure I get the most out of reading it.

New Additions

🆕 5. The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey

After a very different outcome to WWII than the one history recorded, 1979 England is a country ruled by a government whose aims have sinister underpinnings and alliances. In the Hampshire countryside, 13-year-old triplets Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents at the Captain Scott Home for Boys, where every day they must take medicine to protect themselves from a mysterious illness to which many of their friends have succumbed. The lucky ones who recover are allowed to move to Margate, a seaside resort of mythical proportions.

In nearby Exeter, 13-year-old Nancy lives a secluded life with her parents, who dote on her but never let her leave the house. As the triplets’ lives begin to intersect with Nancy’s, bringing to light a horrifying truth about their origins and their likely fate, the children must unite to escape – and survive.

I am really intrigued about this, even more so since I cropped up on Mona Awad’s recommendations list.

🆕 6. Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

While on her daily walk with her dog in the woods near her home, Vesta comes across a chilling handwritten note. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body. Shaky even on her best days, Vesta is also alone, and new to the area, having moved here after the death of her husband. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown who was Magda and how did she meet her fate?

If I want to go back to the ‘weird girl’ lit, I’ll go for this one from my Vintage Classics Weird Girl Lit series (lol it was published in 2020)

🆕 7. Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

All her life, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the destruction of planet Earth. Raised on Gaea Station alongside the last scraps of humanity, she is one of the best warriors of her generation, the sword of a dead planet.

Then Command assigns her brother to certain death and relegates her to the nursery to bear sons, and she knows she must take humanity’s revenge into her own hands. Alongside her brother’s brilliant but seditious friend and a lonely, captive alien, Kyr must escape from everything she’s ever known. If she succeeds, she will find a universe far more complicated than she was taught and far more wondrous than she could ever have imagined

I have it, so I’ll read it as another sci-fi book, but… I saw that Unresolved Textual Tension did a Roasting Bad Books episode on it, which is 2 hours… so I’m worried. I don’t always agree with their takes, though!

🆕 8. Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock and roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Another band getting noticed is The Six, led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.

I’ve had this for ages and it might make a nice light fluffy break!

🆕 9. Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks

A five-time Moth GrandSLAM winner and bestselling novelist shows how to tell a great story — and why doing so matters. Whether we realize it or not, we are always telling stories. On a first date or job interview, at a sales presentation or therapy appointment, with family or friends, we are constantly narrating events and interpreting emotions and actions.

In this compelling book, storyteller extraordinaire Matthew Dicks presents wonderfully straightforward and engaging tips and techniques for constructing, telling, and polishing stories that will hold the attention of your audience (no matter how big or small). He shows that anyone can learn to be an appealing storyteller, that everyone has something “storyworthy” to express, and, perhaps most important, that the act of creating and telling a tale is a powerful way of understanding and enhancing your own life.

I usually try to avoid “self-help” or productivity books, but.. I came across this mentioned in some YouTube video (the algorithm took me on a journey after I got into all those personal curriculum videos), and it sounded really interesting, and maybe something I can work on to help me feel less boring and like I never have anything interesting to say. In the very least, I think it could be a fun exercise.

🆕 10. The Good Place and Philosophy: Everything is Forking Fine! by Kimberly S. Engles

Explicitly dedicated to the philosophical concepts, questions, and fundamental ethical dilemmas at the heart of the thoughtful and ambitious NBC sitcom The Good Place.

Navigates the murky waters of moral philosophy in more conceptual depth to call into question what Chidi’s ethics lessons–and the show–get right about learning to be a good person Features contributions from The Good Place‘s philosophical consultants, Pamela Hieronymi and Todd May, and introduced by the show’s creator and showrunner Michael Schur (Parks and Recreation, The Office) Engages classic philosophical questions, including the clash between utilitarianism and deontological ethics in the “Trolley Problem,” Kant’s categorical imperative, Sartre’s nihilism, and T.M Scanlon’s contractualism Explores themes such as death, love, moral heroism, free will, responsibility, artificial intelligence, fatalism, skepticism, virtue ethics, perception, and the nature of autonomy in the surreal heaven-like afterlife of the Good Place. Led by Kimberly S. Engels, co-editor of Westworld and Philosophy

I’m going to read How To Be Perfect, then I’m going to read this collection of essays and re-watch The Good Place! Then I will decide if I want to delve into more Philosophy, or decide it’s not something I’m interested in pursuing further.