#this is my TBR shortlist for 2023

[artemismatchalatte]

Here is my 2023 tbr shelf! I own copies of these books and these were on the top of my want-to-read.

It's mostly classics, lgbt lit, women's lit, and feminist theory with some nonfiction and other books thrown in. :)

[oswlld]

ive decided recently that im making myself commit to a full reading year for 2023. i really like what i have going on with my watchlist and plan to apply a similar system for my tbr. so far, i think i can manage one book and one collection of short stories/poem a month, ✨HOWEVER✨ i have no idea where i want to start.

i had a tendency to juggle two/three books at one time, which ended up with me having more dnfs than completed ones. not that anything i picked was particularly bad or boring, but having worked in publishing (esp in a position that led to severe burnout) made me feel like it was a chore when it should have been a source of comfort or enjoyment.

wanna get back into that without waiting for The Book to reel me in, yk?

in order to figure out what i want to read this year, i’ve decided to sample my nightstand and take it from there. i have 21 books that i have to cut down to 11 by the end of the month. got no real barometer for how many pages to start, but sufficient enough for me to really get a vibe before i move on. 

i will keep the sample list updated throughout the month and see where this goes. tbh, i hope this system sticks!

READ || PASS - The Starless Sea, Erin Morganstern ON THE FENCE? || PASS - Kaikeyi, Vaishnavi Patel READ || PASS - The King of Infinite Space, Lyndsay Faye READ || PASS - Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead READ || PASS - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid ON THE FENCE? || PASS - Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner READ || PASS - Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr (a dnf im picking up again) READ || PASS - Scythe, Neal Shusterman READ || PASS - The Gravity of Us, Phil Stamper READ || PASS - The Regional Office is Under Attack!, Manuel Gonzales READ || PASS - Superminds, Thomas W. Malone READ || PASS - Circe, Madeline Miller ON THE FENCE? || PASS - Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo (a dnf im picking up again) ON THE FENCE? || PASS - I'll Give You the Sun, Jandy Nelson READ || PASS - Babel, R. F. Kuang READ || PASS - The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemisin READ || PASS - Illuminae, Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff (a dnf im picking up again) READ || PASS - Originals, Adam Grant READ || PASS - The Forgetting Time, Sharon Guskin READ || PASS - The Atlas Six, Olivie Blake (a dnf im picking up again)

NOTE: i have an idea what will be on my shortlist for the short stories/poems, but i wont be tracking it as rigorously as the above; theres just no way i can turn off that part of my brain that wants to juggle stories, so this is my solution.

[consistentsquash]

will you do more years of slash?

Hiya! thanks for checking on the years of slash lists <3

My 2001 to 2023: 23 fics from 23 years Femslash Recs List is up to date. Definitely going to update for 2024 after the year finishes :D

I didn't update a fic for 2023 on my 2001 to 2022: 22 fics from 22 years Slash Recs List for a couple of reasons. The year was super productive for HP slash. 12000 HP slash fics got completed in 2023. My shortlist has like 200 fics. So it's just taking me more time to finish my TBR. From the fics I checked out so far nothing really stood out to me as something which fits on that list. So I am just going to continue my search :D

For me the fics on my years of slash lists usually add something new to the fandom not just in that year it got completed but also overall in my reading experience. So I definitely want to select a fic which matches the quality/novelty/special vibes of the other fics on the list if that makes sense. Fingers crossed I can find that one fic for 2023.

ask box definitely open for fic recs + thoughts on why a fic is special for the year and also compared to the overall fandom experience.

[alexsfictionaddiction]

The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023 Winner is Announced!

It’s here -the winner of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced last night and to be quite honest, I am delighted with the result! It was a very strong shortlist and I’m not sure how the judges decided between the vast majority of them but it is now over.

The winner is...

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver!

I read this incredibly enchanting, immersive, special feat of literature in October without really knowing how I’d get along with it. I haven’t read David Copperfield and know very little about that story, so I didn’t know whether I’d really get everything that Kingsolver was trying to tell me in this novel. It’s also a pretty hefty book, so I won’t pretend that I wasn’t slightly intimidated by because of that too. I had multiple reasons to leave it on my TBR but on a cold autumnal night, something told me to just take the plunge and pick it up.

I can honestly say that I will never forget Demon as a character. His story is relentlessly bleak but his relationships with his friends bring a wealth of light into his life and the pages of the book. The setting of Lee County, Virginia and the horrors of the opoid crisis that ripple far beyond the addicts themselves are so vivid and I was completely captivated by Kingsolver’s wonderful prose and expert storytelling ability. 

I’m pretty sure I said in each of my Women’s Prize posts this year that it was a clear winner for me and I’m so happy that the judges could see it for the amazing book that it is. It did win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year too and I know there was some talk amongst Women’s Prize followers that its Pulitzer win could dampen its chances of winning the Women’s Prize too. Again, I’m overjoyed that it obviously didn’t come into the decision making!

Demon Copperhead’s win also makes Barbara Kingsolver the first ever woman to win the prize twice, having first won in 2010 with The Lacuna. I am yet to read any of her other books but I will be doing some research into them to try and find any that interest me. I ladored her writing in Demon, so I have no doubt that she’ll have some others that I love just as much.

If you haven’t picked up the very worthy winner of the Women’s Prize 2023, you simply have to because I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy it. I know its size might look scary and the fact that it’s won more than one literary prize might even amplify its intimidation levels for some but it really is a beautiful, insightful, thought-provoking novel. You should know by now that I am not a big ‘high brow literature’ reader, so the fact that I loved it should tell you that it is very accessible for popular fiction readers who love character-driven, epic life stories.

I have to say that I am really sad that the Women’s Prize season is now over. It’s a time of year that my nerdy, bookish heart looks forward to all year and having pretty much completed the longlist for the first time this year (I’m about to complete the last one -yay!), I’m already getting pumped to do it all again! 

Next year, there will be a non-fiction Women’s Prize running alongside the fiction one. Promoting women’s non-fiction is an amazing thing for them to be doing but I think I would have preferred them to run it at a different time of year. Having both of them at the same time could mean that one overshadows the other and that one of them (probably the new non-fiction one because fiction tends to have a wider readership anyway) will get lost. We don’t know the number of books that will be longlisted for the non-fiction prize yet but if it’s 16 like its fiction sister, that’s 32 books to read in around a three month period?! I will be waiting to see the longlist of both prizes before deciding exactly what I’m going to be reading from each or whether I just concentrate on one next year. I’d like to read at least some of the non-fiction list but I may end up being highly selective with it -we’ll see!

What do you think of the Women’s Prize winner this year? Have you read the fantastic Demon Copperhead? What are your thoughts on next year’s new Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction? Are you excited for it? Let me know!

Until next time, happy reading!

-Love, Alex x

[alexsfictionaddiction]

The Women’s Prize For Fiction 2023 Longlist Is Here!

I’m pretty sure that anyone who was reading my blog around this time last year will know that I follow the Women’s Prize for Fiction very closely. In fact, it’s the only book prize that I ever want to make the effort to read as much of the longlist as I can. So, this time of year is like bookish Christmas to me and I have been SO excited over the last couple of weeks during the build-up to this announcement. 

For those of you who don’t follow it, the Women’s Prize for Fiction is an annual book prize given to a book written in English by a woman over the last year. The eligibility criteria is as follows:

It must be a full-length novel (no short story collections or novellas).

It must have been originally written in English (no translations).

It must have been published in the UK between 1st April of the year before the prize and 31st March of the year of the prize (so, this year’s eligibility period was between 1st April 2022 and 31st March 2023).

So, here is this year’s longlist!

I’m A Fan by Sheena Patel. Published by Rough Trade Books on 9th June 2022. Pod by Laline Paull. Published by Corsair on 7th April 2022. The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie. Published by 4th Estate on 7th March 2023. Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks. Published by Vintage on 2nd March 2023. Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova. Published by Atlantic Books on 7th July 2022. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo. Published by Vintage on 7th April 2022. The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff. Published by Allen & Unwin on 2nd March 2023. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell. Published by Tinder Press on 30th August 2022. Homesick by Jennifer Croft. Published by Charco Press on 23rd August 2022. Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh. Published by Penguin on 2nd March 2023. Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris. Published by Duckworth on 5th May 2022. Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. Published by Bloomsbury on 14th April 2022. Memphis by Tara M. Stringfellow. Published by John Murray on 7th April 2022. Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes. Published by Mantle on 15th September 2022. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Published by Faber and Faber on 18th October 2022.

I’ve watched a lot of prediction videos and I was pretty sure I had a good idea of what books we’d see on this list. Having just watched the official announcement of the 16 books on the longlist, I am FLABBERGASTED at how wrong everyone was! 

Demon Copperhead is the only one I’ve already read and it definitely deserves to be there. Cursed Bread, Fire Rush and The Bandit Queens are on my TBR for this month anyway. I have copies of Trespasses, Stone Blind, The Marriage Portrait, Memphis, Glory, Pod and I’m A Fan, so will be getting to them as soon as I can. There are quite a few books on here that I’ve never even heard of, so that’s very exciting!

While I am quite sad not to see some of the popular predictions on here (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Nightcrawling, A Spell For Good Things, Birnam Wood, Really Good Actually, The Rabbit Hutch), I am really intrigued to see how I get on with these books.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on 26th April, so I’ll be aiming to get as much of the longlist read before then as possible. The winner will be announced on 14th June, so you’ve got plenty of time to read them all before then, if that sounds like fun!

So, what do you think of the longlist? How many have you read? How many do you plan on reading? Are you as surprised as I am?! Now, go and read all the books, my lovely readers!

-Love, Alex x

[artemismatchalatte]

My 2023 TBR shortlist

I figured that I would compile my TBR posts- they were getting a little endless so instead I decided on these 30. I'm also currently in grad school so I'm probably going to have tons of other things to read but these are my choice reads, unrelated to school.

Also had these bookmarks that I can use to cross off the books as I read through them!

Yes, I purposely picked mostly lgbt books or books written by women too. I got the four Japanese lit translated books (Kitchen, Convenience Store Woman, Strange Weather in Tokyo, and Before the Coffee gets Cold) as well as Care of by Ivan Coyote for Christmas but the rest of these books were already on my owned tbr before.

I'm probably going to set my reading goals at 75 books for 2023 since I'll be in grad school and working on my own writing projects too. I count what I read in school towards the goal as well.

Bookblr, Good luck with your own 2023 reading goals!

[artemismatchalatte]

More original bookblr and other content coming! I have some ideas which I will be posting in the next few days.

I have at least two new memes and a new bookblr photoshoot-a shorter one post version of my 2023 TBR- I made a shortlist of 30 books instead because the other pictures were going on and on.