September 2023 Goodreads TBR Shelf Clean-Up

Howdy, y’all! It’s time for my September 2023 Goodreads TBR Shelf Clean-Up. I wonder if this will help me reduce the number of books on my TBR. Who am I kidding? I’m a reader; of course, I will forever add books. In August 2023, I had 604 books. Today, I have 610. That is a small increase. Will my September 2023 Goodreads TBR shelf clean-up help that number drop any lower?

I saw this Goodreads TBR Clean-Up post at Megan’s Book Stacks and knew I had to try it, and Megan found it over at MegaBunnyReads.

Click the titles to go to the Goodreads page for the book, and the image will take you to Amazon.

How It Works:

• Go to your Goodreads want-to-read shelf.
• Use a random number generator to pick a number between 1 and however many books are on the list.
• Go to that book and look at the four after it for a total of 5.
• Read the synopses of the books.
• Decide: keep it, or should it go?
• Discuss here.

Books To Be Read: 610

Starting Number: 36, it looks like I’m going through the books I added in December 2020

Shelf Sorted: Date Added

Let’s get this September 2023 Goodreads TBR Shelf Clean-Up underway!

Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

“History is just one damned thing after another.”

Behind the seemingly innocuous façade of St Mary’s, a different kind of historical research is taking place. They don’t do ‘time-travel’ – they ‘investigate major historical events in contemporary time’. Maintaining the appearance of harmless eccentrics is not always within their power – especially given their propensity for causing loud explosions when things get too quiet.

Meet the disaster-magnets of St Mary’s Institute of Historical Research as they ricochet around History. Their aim is to observe and document – to try and find the answers to many of History’s unanswered questions…and not to die in the process. But one wrong move and History will fight back – to the death. And, as they soon discover – it’s not just History they’re fighting.

Follow the catastrophe curve from 11th-century London to World War I, and from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria. For wherever Historians go, chaos is sure to follow in their wake….

My Thoughts

I’m not sure where I heard of this book, as this was before I started blogging. But something about it grabs my attention and, most importantly, my imagination.

KEEP

The Wartime Sisters by Lynda Cohen Loigman

Two estranged sisters, raised in Brooklyn and each burdened with her own shocking secret, are reunited at the Springfield Armory in the early days of WWII. While one sister lives in relative ease on the bucolic Armory campus as an officer’s wife, the other arrives as a war widow and takes a position in the Armory factories as a “soldier of production.” Resentment festers between the two, and secrets are shattered when a mysterious figure from the past reemerges in their lives.

My Thoughts

I love reading historical fiction. After reading The Matchmaker’s Gift by Lynda Cohen Loigman last year, I want to read more by her. It helps that I own a copy of this as well.

KEEP

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.

My Thoughts

Like I said, I love reading historical fiction. And I can’t believe I haven’t read this one yet. It feels like it’s on all of the must-read lists.

KEEP

Circling the Sun by Paula McLain

Brought to Kenya from England as a child and then abandoned by her mother, Beryl Markham is raised by both her father and the native Kipsigis tribe who share his estate. Her unconventional upbringing transforms Beryl into a bold young woman with a fierce love of all things wild and an inherent understanding of nature’s delicate balance. But even the wild child must grow up, and when everything Beryl knows and trusts dissolves, she is catapulted into a string of disastrous relationships. Beryl forges her own path as a horse trainer, and her uncommon style attracts the eye of the Happy Valley set, a decadent, bohemian community of European expats who also live and love by their own set of rules. But it’s the ruggedly charismatic Denys Finch Hatton who ultimately helps Beryl navigate the uncharted territory of her own heart. The intensity of their love reveals Beryl’s truest self and her fate: to fly.

My Thoughts

It’s another historical fiction that I own. While that doesn’t mean I have to read it, I appreciate the fact this isn’t set in Europe or the US like so many historical fiction novels tend to be.

KEEP

The Little Bookshop of Lonely Hearts by Annie Darling

Once upon a time in a crumbling London bookshop, Posy Morland spent her life lost in the pages of her favorite romantic novels.

So when Bookend’s eccentric owner, Lavinia, dies and leaves the shop to Posy, she must put down her books and join the real world. Because Posy hasn’t just inherited an ailing business, but also the unwelcome attentions of Lavinia’s grandson, Sebastian, AKA The Rudest Man In London™.

Posy has a cunning plan and six months to transform Bookends into the bookshop of her dreams – if only Sebastian would leave her alone to get on with it. As Posy and her friends fight to save their beloved bookshop, Posy’s drawn into a battle of wills with Sebastian, about whom she’s started to have some rather feverish fantasies…

Like her favorite romantic heroines, will she get her happy ever after, too?

My Thoughts

What, I found something on my TBR that’s not historical fiction? (sarcasm!!) This book was on my Spring TBR but got lost in the shuffle of ARCs. The book is compared to those by Jenny Colgan, who I love reading. How can I not want to read it?

KEEP

Wrap Up

And that is my September 2023 Goodreads TBR Shelf Clean-Up. It doesn’t look like I cleaned my shelf up much! Out of the five books, I’m keeping all of them.

This was fun. I may do it now and then to help keep my shelf realistic. In the past, I just added books without really thinking about it. Will I stop doing that? Of course not! What kind of animal do you think I am?

What do you think? Have you tried doing something like this to see if you can get your TBR under control?

Are you looking for some more ideas to read? Check out my monthly reading wrap-ups.