Recs if you like How High We Go in the Dark...

Need a gift for your extremist family member, but they already have a red baseball cap AND a Don't Tread on Me shirt? Were you told "Don't bring up politics at family dinner" and need some safe books to discuss instead? Well we have a full menu for you to choose from! Each just for fun book comes with our guarantee: No real world political messages under the 100% fictional plot! 😉 (Taking Recommendations!)

forced into unending sleep or perilous insomnia, repeating tedious daily routines until your body rots, watching as your skin starts to glow or your hands sprout scales - these novels feature illnesses that are far from typical

if you enjoyed / find yourself enjoying my strange plagues quest, you’ll find all quest books and even more suggestions for further reading within the niche here!!!

a collection of novels that use allegory, dystopia, and satire to examine power, control, propaganda, surveillance, and the fragility of truth. blurring the lines between fiction and reality, these stories reflect the political anxieties of both their own eras and ours.

as always welcome to suggestions !

i don’t need to explain to anyone why the proliferation climate fiction has skyrocketed over the past few years. this new wave of climate fiction, from 2020-present (ongoing), refuses to exclude climate catastrophe from depictions of or changing world. these works are grounded in present and future realities, the speculative less ‘speculative’, and more predictive.

If we are going to do Qwordy's the Hardest Reading Challenge You'll Ever Do 3.0 - we should probably get some Pagebound badges along the way! I'm specifically going to be adding books from Quests and readalongs that go past the July start date and match at least one of these title prompts: Periodic Table, Familial Terms, Rainbow of Words (also Joseph's coat), Numerical Titles, Titular Counting 5+, Pun in the Title, and First & Last Name in the Title. Recommendations welcome!

Books in this list are in at least two quests. Thus helping to earn more badges. Books will span different genres. Once I scan through all the quests, I plan to further organize the list. I am thinking of creating a seperate list and moving the books with three or more quests to the new list and keeping the two badge books in this list. Are there other ways you would organize a list this big?

An on-going attempt to track Asian authors in my Interested/TBR (and hopefully Finished) categories. Books are generally fiction/lit fic/fantasy with some memoirs. Authors span West to East Asia, the Asian diaspora, and mixed-race folx.

Post-apocalyptic/end of the world stories that are more about the people surviving than the larger details of the collapse.

spotlighting some incredible books by Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander authors

Books that have been shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. I compiled this list because the criteria (and Le Guin's works) resonate with me:

"The Prize will be given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work, including but not limited to: hope, equity, and freedom; non-violence and alternatives to conflict; and a holistic view of humanity’s place in the natural world."

sagas that span centuries

as always, open to suggestions!

Books that use climate change as a major force or backdrop.

Books that are just as good as the cover promises. AKA: Fantastic book covers that also happen to be fantastic books! List will be added to in the future because I can’t leave well enough alone. (Suggestions welcome, leave it in the comments.)

Novels with intriguing titles (that I read or that sound interesting) in English (either originally or translated); a mix of genres. Mostly 4+ words in the title, with some select 3-word-titles but no shorter ones. No parts of series except for the first book.

Nominees for the Ursula K Le Guin Prize for for Fiction, awarded since 2022 for imaginative fiction. (Mostly I have made this because they're always really great picks and I want to work my way through all of them.)

when the cover is absolutely doing its job correctly

(gorgeous, funny, and uniquely fitting covers, all in one)

speculative and climate fiction about where we’re going