Decluttering my Goodreads TBR #7

 

Happy Wednesday, everyone! It has been a minute and a half since I did one of these posts, and it seemed like time to do one. So here’s the SEVENTH!!! round of decluttering my Goodreads TBR. Last time was a major failure, so let’s hope this one is better! Read parts one, two, three, four, five, and six here!

This was started by Lia @ Lost in a Story and is a good way to organize your Goodreads to-read list!

It works like this:

• Go to your goodreads to-read shelf.
• Order on ascending date added.
• Take the first 5 (or 10 (or even more!) if you’re feeling adventurous) books
• Read the synopses of the books
• Decide: keep it or should it go?

Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint

Welcome to the music clubs, the waterfront, the alleyways where ancient myths and magic spill into the modern world. Come meet Jilly, painting wonders in the rough city streets; and Geordie, playing fiddle while he dreams of a ghost; and the Angel of Grasso Street gathering the fey and the wild and the poor and the lost. Gemmins live in abandoned cars and skells traverse the tunnels below, while mermaids swim in the grey harbor waters and fill the cold night with their song.

Charles De Lint is a Canadian fantasy writer, and I’ve actually started one of his books before and had to put it down because it was my best friend’s mom’s and I didn’t want to steal it. His writing is incredibly descriptive and immersive and I definitely want to try him again.

Verdict: keep

---

Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions by Neil Gaiman 

In the deft hands of Neil Gaiman, magic is no mere illusion… and anything is possible. In this, Gaiman’s first book of short stories, his imagination and supreme artistry transform a mundane world into a place of terrible wonders — a place where an old woman can purchase the Holy Grail at a thrift store, where assassins advertise their services in the Yellow Pages under “Pest Control,” and where a frightened young boy must barter for his life with a mean-spirited troll living beneath a bridge by the railroad tracks. Explore a new reality — obscured by smoke and darkness, yet brilliantly tangible — in this extraordinary collection of short works by a master prestidigitator. It will dazzle your senses, touch your heart, and haunt your dreams.

Neil Gaiman’s short stories are some of my favourites of his writing, so I definitely want to keep this.

Verdict: keep

---

Love Is the Higher Law by David Levithan

The lives of three teens—Claire, Jasper, and Peter—are altered forever on September 11, 2001. Claire, a high school junior, has to get to her younger brother in his classroom. Jasper, a college sophomore from Brooklyn, wakes to his parents’ frantic calls from Korea, wondering if he’s okay. Peter, a classmate of Claire’s, has to make his way back to school as everything happens around him.

Here are three teens whose intertwining lives are reshaped by this catastrophic event. As each gets to know the other, their moments become wound around each other’s in a way that leads to new understandings, new friendships, and new levels of awareness for the world around them and the people close by.

Okay this sounds incredibly interesting, but being realistic, idk if I’ll ever read it. SO I’m going to add it to my “read soon or remove” shelf on Goodreads.

Verdict: added to “read soon or remove”

---

The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

A seven-year-old girl puts a nail gun to her grandmother’s neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry.

Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger’s Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioral patterns and an outsider’s fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh’s Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh’s Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father.

Sooooo this also sounds fascinating. BUT it has fairly low ratings on Goodreads. So, I’m going to add it to the same shelf as the previous one.

Verdict: added to “read soon or remove” (edit: JK it was already on there lmao)

---

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Based on a true story, “The Book of Negroes” tells the story of Aminata, a young girl abducted from her village in Mali aged 11 in 1755, and who, after a deathly journey on a slave ship where she witnesses the brutal repression of a slave revolt, is sold to a plantation owner in South Carolina, who rapes her. She is brought to New York, where she escapes her owner, and finds herself helping the British by recording all the freed slaves on the British side in the Revolutionary War in The Book of Negroes (a real historical document that can be found today at the National Archives at Kew).Aminata is sent to Nova Scotia to start a new life, but finds more hostility, oppression and tragedy. Separated from her one true love, and suffering the unimaginable loss of both her children who are taken away from her, she eventually joins a group of freed slaves on a harrowing odyssey back to Africa, and ends up in London as a living icon for Wilberforce and the other Abolitionists. “The Book of Negroes” is a pageturning narrative that manages to use Aminata’s heart-rending personal story to bring to life a harrowing chapter in our history.

This is on my list of books I have to read this year, so it’s definitely a keep!

Verdict: keep

Total

Keep: 3
Delete: 0
Added to “read soon or remove”: 2

Total kept: 23
Total deleted: 6

I’m still the worst at this!!!! Please help!! Let me know if you’ve read any of these, and if they’re worth it or not!

Ally xx

---

Twitter // Goodreads // Buy me a coffee!