2025 & 2026 Reading Challenge discussion

Hi everyone!

Time to nominate books for January! The theme is Self.

~Please remember to state a connection to the theme when you nominate.

~Books we have read less than three years ago are not eligible. To see which books are not eligible, see this google sheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

~ Each person can nominate 1 book.

~ Book must be available both as a physical copy and as an ebook.

~ Authors: Please do not nominate your own book.

~ Please do not nominate books that are part of a series, unless it is the first book.

~ You can second someone else's nomination, but that will count as your nomination.


This thread will be closed by November 25th, and we will choose ten books for the poll. If there are more than ten books nominated, we will choose "seconded" books first. If there is still a tie to get into the top ten, we'll go back to the Goodreads average rating to see which is highest.

There are lots of ways in which the word self can be used. Such as DIY (Yourself), Myself, Self publish. Personally I think memoirs would be the best fit.

So I am going to nominate this Autobiography by Randy Rainbow. A well known Youtube Content creator who makes song parodies about various members of the USA congress and particularly Donald Trump.

His Biography is called Playing with Myself.

And if you are thinking that he might be gay - Yes he is gay.

This is my review if anyone wants to read it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...

Unsettled: A Journey Through Time and Place I want to nominate Unsettled. It is a book that tells the story of her families journey as indigenous Australians. She does this by travelling to all the places that are in her families stories, talking to elders of the Koorie community as she travels. Kate says the following about the book.
I decided to do a road trip – a kind of pilgrimage – to all the places mentioned in the family stories. I’d re-run the stories in my mind one more time, but this time I’d be standing where they happened – right on the land that was taken – and I’d widen the frame to include the people who were there when my forebears took it. I’d try to see the whole picture and understand what it meant. Not to condemn, not to accuse. And not to wallow in guilt. Just to let myself really look, and see where that might lead.

I nominate Joyful Recollections of Trauma: A Hilariously Cathartic Memoir-in-Essays of Childhood Turmoil, Self Healing, and Finding Happiness by Paul Scheer.

"Sel-Healing" in the titles is the connection to self.

I nominate Self-Portrait with Boy by Rachel Lyon. The connection is in the title.

"Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, responsible for her aging father, and worrying that the crumbling warehouse she lives in is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. One day, in the background of a self-portrait, Lu accidentally captures on film a boy falling past her window to his death. The photograph turns out to be startlingly gorgeous, the best work of art she’s ever made. It’s an image that could change her life…if she lets it.

"But the decision to show the photograph is not easy. The boy is her neighbors’ son, and the tragedy brings all the building’s residents together. It especially unites Lu with the boy's grieving mother, Kate. As the two forge an intense bond based on sympathy, loneliness, and budding attraction, Lu feels increasingly unsettled and guilty, torn between equally fierce desires: to use the photograph to advance her career and to protect a woman she has come to love."

I took inspiration from the "Family & Self"- Novels-List from The Guardian (https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...) and would like to nominate The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.

From the description of the book:
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies.

The connection is in the story about Esther's "self".