Mid-Month Reading Update: Reread City

Plus, all the good links I've collected over the past three months!

Hi, bookish friends.

I hope you had yesterday off, and I hope you had a cozy and relaxing long weekend, like I did. It was cold and snowy where I live; perfect reading weather.

Today’s newsletter will be a quick one — I have a mid-month reading update for you, and then a nice big list of links I’ve gathered since I sent my last pre-Substack newsletter in early November.

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What I’ve read so far this month

I’m a little behind where I wanted to be by this point in January, but I did frontload my month with big books, so I don’t have the TBR sweats just yet. I’ve also had to frontload it with rereads because I somehow find myself leading THREE book clubs this month. One of them is this Thursday at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, NY. If you’re local, join us in the store at 5 PM!

• Come and Get It by Kiley Reid: I opened 2024 with the hotly anticipated sophomore novel by the author of Such a Fun Age. (You know, the one that shocked — and sort of confused — the world by getting longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020.) You can read my review here, but TLDR, I was lukewarm on it. I do think if you loved Such a Fun Age, you might like this one too.

• Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang: This was one of my favorite reads of 2022, and it was a delight to revisit in preparation for the BSB book club later this week. I still say this is one of the smartest and most impactful uses of fantasy to reflect reality that I’ve ever seen.

• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout: Olive!! How we love you. I reread this cozy but deeply felt Pulitzer winner in a single snowy day this past weekend, which was absolutely the right choice. I’m leading a discussion on it for my alma mater’s continuing education program next Tuesday, and I already know it’s going to be great.

• House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City, #1) by Sarah J. Maas: It’s. Almost. Time. CC3 will be here in two weeks! And boy, am I glad I decided to reread the first two. There’s so much packed into these books, and I had forgotten pretty much all the important details.

What’s left on my TBR this month

• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, which comes out a week from today

• Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, both for this month’s Booker of the Month book club discussion

• House of Sky and Breath (Crescent City, #2) by Sarah J. Maas

• The Future by Naomi Alderman

• Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

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Links, links, links!

• “What 35 Years of Data Can Tell Us About Who Will Win the National Book Award,” a fascinating look at the impact of the diversity of the judging panel, from Public Books.

• “How Dungeons & Dragons Helps Build Empathy” from Lit Hub. Yes.

• “Is Reading the Hottest Thing You Can Do as a Single Person?” The New York Times gets it.

• “The best book covers of 2023 are the ones you’ll never see,” a super-cool look at the book cover designs that didn’t make the final cut, from Fast Company.

• “Remember What Spotify Did to the Music Industry? Books Are Next.” An opinion piece on Spotify’s royalties policy for audiobooks from Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, for the New York Times (gift link because this one’s important, pls read).

• In case you’re still in end-of-year-wrapup mode (or especially if you find it overwhelming and ignore all of them), Lit Hub has published its annual tally of all the books that got mentioned in major publications’ “best of” lists: “The Ultimate Best Books of 2023 List.”

• And if you’re ready to move into 2024, here are the two lists I read in detail to populate my most-anticipated Bookshop.org shelf: The Milions’ “Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2024 Preview” and “Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024.”

• Literary titan Lauren Groff is opening a bookstore in Florida to combat book banning called The Lynx. She’s running an Indiegogo campaign right now to get it off the ground. If you can, please consider supporting it! There are tons of great perks; I chose a mug, but there are also insanely cool things like signed books and 1:1 sessions with famous authors.

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As always, thanks for sharing your corner of the internet with me! It would mean a lot if you were to take a second to like this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, too.

Finally, if you like this newsletter, please send a few friends my way.

See you on Instagram!

— Deedi (she/her)