I'm about to finish my semester and, since I've been taking a lot of walks lately, I figured I should listen to some audiobooks. In particular, I'd love some suggestions for nonfiction audiobooks. I recently read Boom Town by Sam Anderson, a sort of pop history about Oklahoma City and its basketball team, and I listened to Silver Screen Fiend, by Patton Oswalt, about his addiction to movies.

Are there any audiobooks you recommend? Preferably they would be good books that also have particularly good audio versions (well-produced).

Thanks!

What is this?

See here for full details on the event.

Post Your Update

• How did your week go?
• What books did you get through?
• How did you feel about them?
• What's up next for you?

Also, given that this is the last update thread:

• How was the month overall?
• Did you enjoy the event?
• Any breakthroughs, standouts, or lessons learned?
• If we did something like this again, what would you change or want to see?

What is this?

See here for full details on the event.

Post Your Update

• How did your week go?
• What books did you get through?
• How did you feel about them?
• What's up next for you?

(Optional!) Focuses for Week 4 (Last Week!)

• ANYTHING GOES!

Let's burn through these backlogs!

What is this?

See here for full details on the event.

Post Your Update

• How did your week go?
• What books did you get through?
• How did you feel about them?
• What's up next for you?

(Optional!) Focuses for Week 3

• Books with an aggregate review score of less than 4.0/80% on Goodreads, LibraryThing, or any other review aggregator
• Books that someone else recommended to you
• Non-fiction books

Let's burn through these backlogs!

What is this?

See here for full details on the event.

Post Your Update

• How did your week go?
• What books did you get through?
• How did you feel about them?
• What's up next for you?

Focuses for Week 2

• Books in a genre you don't normally read
• Books that you own physical copies of
• Books with more than 400 pages

Let's burn through these backlogs!

What is this?

First off, this is NOT an April Fool (I promise!). I know that many of us will be stuck at home for this month, I know that many of us could likely use something to pull our attention away from the news, and I know that many of us have accumulated quite the to-read list of books. As such, I'm thinking it could be fun for us to tackle those lists together and collectively clean up our clutter! Let's all burn through our backlogs!

The goal isn't necessarily to completely clear them, just to put a dent in them.

How does it work?

Your "backlog" is all those books you've been meaning to get around to read, but never have yet! For the purposes of this event, an item can be removed from your backlog in one of three ways:

• Finished: you completed the book

• Moved On: you tried it out, but it didn't hold your interest or wasn't for you

• Removed: you are choosing to remove this from your backlog without reading it, likely because it no longer interests you, but really for any reason at all

Use this thread to talk about your backlogs, plan for the month, and once you start reading, inform us of any backlog downsizing and their associated categories. Give us a list of the books you removed. Tell us why you moved on from what you were just reading. Gush about how a particular item held your interest long enough to see it through. The goal of this isn't to read every book you own; it's to explore what you already have in the way that's best, and most meaningful, for you. If you're not enjoying a book, dump it and move on!

If you're not sure what you might write, take a look at a previous backlog post for games to get an idea. Also if you want to keep track of statistics or anything else like that, go for it!

What's the timeline?

I will post an update thread weekly, each Wednesday, for the four weeks of April. At the end of the month, I think it would be neat to tally how many collective books we all removed from our backlogs, as well as what the best finds were from our collective digging into our libraries. I expect we'll turn up some good hidden gems, as well as interesting insights.

Each week, I'll also include some "focus" areas which can help narrow down choices for what to read. Those are just recommendations for fun, however. Read whatever you like, whenever you like, however you like! If it's in your backlog, then it's automatically a good choice!

Do I need to sign up?

You don't have to do anything to officially join or participate in the event other than post in these threads! Participate in whatever way works for you. Also, because this is ongoing, it is okay to make more than one top-level post if you're updating the thread with new information.

Focuses for Week 1:

• Books that have been on your to-read list for more than a year
• Books that have single-word titles
• Books that are less than 200 pages

Let's burn through these backlogs!

Meta Note: I am also running this same event for ~games as well. I am not active in the other media-focused communities on Tildes, but I encourage someone(s) to pick this up and run it concurrently for ~movies, ~tv, ~anime, and/or ~music (and any other places you think it might fit). I like the idea of it being sitewide, with people participating in their media format(s) of choice. Any runners for those groups have my full permission to steal this wholesale, tweak it for their target group, and post it there.

I just finished binging The Habitat, the awesome podcast about NASA's simulated mission to Mars. And I'm feeling the urge to read something along those lines: fiction or true stories and indulge my fascination with space (and things coming from it) and how that relates to contemporary imagination.

Any suggestions?

I'm reading a book right now that I am finding fascinating, but I don't want to forget the thoughts and ideas presented in each chapter by the end. I was wondering what you all do when reading books like this. In college, I would usually jot down a few notes on the chapter I was reading, but I always found the act of interrupting my reading to write to be very disruptive.

• Do you take notes and highlight directly in the book, or use another notebook or software?
• Do you take notes as you go, or wait until the end of a chapter or section?

I want to arrive at a system that works well for me, so I'm looking for suggestions here.

Understandably, my interest has piqued on this topic cluster (as I'm sure it has for many others), and I should have more time than usual to read in the coming weeks. I also am spending far too long jumping around aimlessly to assorted news articles and would like to tame that nervous energy into a more focused approach on longer writings.

While I'm interested in non-fiction primarily, I'm also open to fiction suggestions. Also, anything that lands in the ballpark of what we're dealing right now with the novel coronavirus fits (though it certainly doesn't have to be specific to coronavirus, nor COVID-19).