January TBR Reduction Challenge
Helloooo
Are you ready to play a game?
No not Thermonuclear War or Tic-Tac-Toe (that is an in-joke for the older generations) but the 2024 TBR Reduction Challenge! This month’s categories
Randonly Choose A Book by Someone You’ve Never read Before
We tend to want order in our lives, lists, challenges and so for this month I want you to instead start thinking of a TBR not as a task list that never ends or shortens but what it is - your library of unread tempting books and just get to know that you can ignore the rules you have set yourself and just pick a book up. For actual fun!
A new name, something only a little is known about and it’s a gamble - you may love it or loathe it but you’ll finally have read it! It may be treasured or let go of. A new year is not a bad place for a step into the Unknown
For me its Animals At Night By Naomi Booth which was on a random shelf and title jumped out at me. Fourteen Short Stories and I know nothing else!
A woman feeding a baby late at night listens to the animal sounds in the city around her. A grieving widow encounters an injured jellyfish on a deserted beach. A young woman can’t shake the image of dying hare she finds at the side of the road. A dairy farmer hears her herd bellow with fear at night. 'Animals at Night' is Naomi Booth’s first collection of short stories. Collected here are stories that illuminate the strange nocturnal meetings between humans and other animals.
Now there is the stretch goal and its a familiar one
I give you permission to read the last book to enter your TBR pile of last year
Like the main challenge our FOMO can stop us treating ourselves to our most recent pick ups at a bookshop. Why can’t you read what you just a few days ago thought was a cool sounding book?
This is the thing that tends to make TBR piles grow so why not break the habit? For me its
The Snow Ghost And Other Tales from Vintage Classics
Enter the haunted world of Ancient Japan in this spine-tingling collection of ghostly tales told and retold across the centuries.
From Goblin infested caves and haunted Tombs, to vengeful spirits and strange, sinister happenings, Ancient Japan was a country and culture that lived with between realms: the world of everyday and the world of supernatural.
It was a time and place where men could be brought down by karmic forces or lured into deadly danger by ghostly apparitions, and where the land held sorrowful secrets or stories that long-awaited an opportunity to reveal them and seek reparation.
The Snow Ghost and Other Tales brings together some of the best and scariest tales that endured across centuries of folk lore in one new beautiful hardback collection. Finally commited to writing during the turn of the twenieth cenutry by a unique set of folklorists, the ghost stories presented in this new anthology will transport readers to a time of magic and mystery, and let them relish in the spine-tingling traditions of Japanese culture largely lost now to modernity.
Hard to resist that cover and I like wintry ghost stories. I’m not familiar with the myths so thought it would be intersting 27 short tales await me
Tell me what are your picks?
