Charon07 sees what’s in the cards for 2025

Greetings! I’m Charon07, a retired CPA from central Illinois. This is my second year of the Category Challenge, and I think I’ve gone overboard a little. I’ve been thinking about potential categories too long and come up with too many, so that even after culling, I’ll probably aim for reading just 2 or 3 from most categories. Plus I’m going to try the ColorCAT, the ScaredyKIT, the NatureKIT, the BingoDOG, and maybe even the CoverCAT if I can squeeze it in.

These are my categories for the year:

For the TBR group:
📚 TBR print & ebooks (6)
🔊 TBR audio (6)

Series & authors:
🥁 Louise Erdrich (focus on the Love Medicine books, 9)
🐦‍⬛ Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (3)
🐺 Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy (3)
🐎 Suzy McKee Charnas’ Holdfast Chronicles (4)

Other categories:
📎 On-hold books (ones I’ve started but not finished, 2-3)
👵🏽 Growing old (2-3)
🇧🇷 Lusophone literature (2-3)
🪆 Baba Yaga (2-3)
📆 2024 Category Challenge potential books I didn’t get around to (2-3)
🪽 Poetry (2-3)
🌍 African authors (2-3)
🐓 Tournament of Books (2-3)
🏔️ Daunting (difficult, dense, depressing, dangerously thick, 2)

CATs, KITs, & DOG:
🌈 ColorCAT (12)
💀 ScaredyKit (12)
🌿 NatureKIT (12)
🐶 BingoDog (25)
🖼️ CoverCAT (?)

📚 TBR print & ebooks

• Pothos by Rosa Campbell

🔊 TBR audiobooks

• The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

🥁 Louise Erdrich

Series

🐦‍⬛ MaddAdam

• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

🐺 Wolf Hall

🐎 Motherlines

Other categories

📎 On-hold books

👵🏽 Growing old

🇧🇷 Lusophone literature

• The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

🪆 Baba Yaga

📆 2024 Cat Callenge potential books I didn’t get around to

• The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel
  
• The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

🪽 Poetry

🌍 African authors

• White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

🐓 Tournament of Books

• The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa

🏔️ Daunting (difficult, dense, depressing, dangerously thick)

🌈 ColorCAT

January: Green
Pothos by Rosa Campbell

💀 ScaredyKIT

January: Diverse Perspectives
White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

🌿 NatureKIT

January: Sheep & Shepherding
Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet by Catherine Friend

🐶 BingoDog



2. The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
3. Down a Dark River by Karen Odden
4. The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
5. Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
13. White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi (January ScaredyKIT)
14. Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet by Catherine Friend
15. Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas
24. The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa

🖼️ CoverCAT

January: Let's Have A Tea Party
Cackle by Rachel Harrison

All in all, the cards predict a very busy year of reading!

Great to see you set up and ready! I, too, fear that I have gone overboard with my planning this year - but as we all know plans are made to be broken!

Good luck and happy reading!

I am loving the tarot cards

>6 Charon07: Daunting (difficult, dense, depressing, dangerously thick) is a great category! Happy reading in 2025.

Beautiful set up! And a clever use of cards!

>13 DeltaQueen50: >14 majkia: >15 lowelibrary: >16 pamelad: >17 VivienneR: Thanks for stopping by!

>13 DeltaQueen50: I guess I’ll see if I can keep up with all these categories, but I really couldn’t find any more that I could part with! Maybe the daunting ones, but I figure if I can’t read at least one or two over the course of a year, I should just take them off my TBR altogether, and I don’t want to do that either.

Great set-up, and I’m curious to see what will go into the daunting category! I’ve got books of that kind myself.

Happy reading! Hope your plans work out, but you can always adjust as you go. I like the card graphics, very unique.

>19 MissWatson: >20 LadyoftheLodge: Thanks for dropping in!

Sadly, a couple of my daunting books are also ones that are “on hold,” started but not finished, which makes them even more daunting since I know I couldn’t finish them at least once before.

Good luck with your 2025 reading!

Nice set-up. I'll never read everything I've planned either, but it's fun planning

Love your setup. I see you have the Wolf Hall trilogy on your list. Definitely one for the daunting category! I have owned the trilogy for ages and it just keeps getting put aside as looking at the three of them together is quite intimidating - so long!

>24 JayneCM: Well, I can try the ebooks—that way their bulk isn’t as intimidating!

>25 Charon07: Good way to trick yourself! :)

Happy reading in 2025!
Boy, can I relate to a "daunting" category.

I love your cards and categories. Happy reading!

Gorgeous illustrations! Looking forward to following your reading in 2025 and maybe hitting up a book sale or two.

These are some great categories! I have a doorstopper category for really long books, which is a bit similar to your "daunting" one. I read three of those in 2024 and hope to read a few more in 2025.

>27 mstrust: >30 MissBrangwen: I’m hoping that making a category for them actually inspires me to read a couple of the daunting books this year!

>28 susanj67: Thank you!

>29 RidgewayGirl: Definitely want to hitone of the bog sales this year, and make the pilgrimage to Exile in Bookville!

Hi there, it looks like a very interesting reading year lies ahead of you. I love the Daunting category and am interested in your experience of Wolf Hall. I have not yet read it myself.

Hi Charon, thanks for visiting my new thread! I'm dropping my star to keep up with your thread too.

I second the ebook suggestion for the big fat books. I read War and Peace a few years ago, and would never have managed it if I'd had a paper book!

>33 Jackie_K: Audiobooks are another way to make the doorstoppers more palatable, but I just looked and War and Peace is 60 hours!

Happy New Year and good luck with your reading.

I'll be following along. My categories aren't anywhere near as ambitious but I am going to be trying to read more African authors.

>35 lowelibrary: Thank you! Happy new year to you too!

>36 charl08: I made a note of the link in your thread to the 100 Notable African Books by year! That will be a terrific resource! I don’t know how many I’ll be able to fit in this year, but my goal is to eventually read authors from as many countries as I can.

Happy new year to you--and happy reading!

Great set up. I am looking forward to following along this year.
Find me here
https://www.librarything.com/topic/367017#8712413

🌍💀🐶 White Is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
Just the sort of horror I love: eery, a creeping sense of wrongness, with very little that’s an overtly scary trope. My full review is here.

🖼️ Cackle by Rachel Harrison ★ ★ 1/2
Although the genre here on LT is horror, I’d call this rather a cozy witch story, nothing horrific about it unless you find the prospect of being single horrifying. My review is here.

Love the tarot cards! Looks like you are going to be very ambitious this year. Looking forward to following along.

>38 thornton37814: >39 beebeereads: >42 Crazymamie: Thanks for stopping by, and happy new year!

Very ambitious challenges, but they look fun! I look forward to following along!

🐓 🐶 The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa ★ ★ ★ ★ 1/2
A cautionary tale about book censorship and authoritarianism with a message that, if not entirely original, still apparently needs to be repeated. My review is here.

>45 Charon07: I liked your review - added my thumb to it. And don't you just love that cover?!

>47 Crazymamie: Thanks for the thumbs up! It is a great cover, isn’t it?

>45 Charon07: Glad you liked this one as I picked up a copy of this from the library just yesterday.

>49 RidgewayGirl: I’ll be interested to see what you think of it.

📚 🌈 Pothos by Rosa Campbell ★ ★ ★ 1/2
This was a memoir of the author’s grieving the death of her father—almost a prose poem, or a series of prose poems. My review is here.

🐶 Down a Dark River by Karen Odden ★ ★ ★ 1/2
An engaging mystery set in Victorian England. My review is here.

>40 Charon07: and >45 Charon07: These are already on my WL and your comments confirm that!

>52 Charon07: This one sounds really good and I just love a Victorian London book cover such as this!

>53 MissBrangwen: I hope you enjoy them! White Is for Witching had some qualities that reminded me of The Icarus Girl (its unsettling uncanniness, for instance), so if you’ve read one and liked it, I also recommend the other, though they are in other ways very different books.

🔊 🇧🇷 📆 The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel ★ ★ ★ ★
A deeply affecting story about an illiterate gay man looking back on his life and his first love. My full review is here.

🌿 🐶 Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep, and Enough Wool to Save the Planet by Catherine Friend ★ ★ ★

Interesting, amusing, and occasionally educational anecdotes about sheep farming, becoming a “fiber freak,” and trying to be writer while still being the “backup farmer.” I laughed out loud at several points, and annoyed my husband by reading the especially funny parts out loud to him. “We can all love sheep, of course in an entirely healthy and platonic and non-gross sort of way.”

🐶 Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle ★ ★ ★ ★

So much better than I expected—funny and scary and full of heart! My full review is here.

>56 Charon07: The title already sounds great.

>57 Charon07: Great review - I added my thumb. Sounds like one for The List, so I added it. Not a title or an author I am familiar with, so thanks for that.

>59 Crazymamie: If you end up perusing his other titles, please don’t judge this book by his past ouevre!

>60 Charon07: Duly noted.

🐶 The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa ★ ★ ★ 1/2

A sweet, heartwarming, and rather melancholy tale of a single mother who works for a housekeeping agency and her ten-year-old son who befriend a former mathematics professor with a brain injury.

🐶 The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor ★ 1/2

A disappointment. A sad and unsatisfying tale that lacks the creepy whimsy and charm of Welcome to Night Vale.

>63 Charon07: Bummer. Hoping your next read is much better.

>55 Charon07: This sounds ... I can't find the right adjective. I was going to say wonderful or lovely, but those don't seem right for something so sad. In any case, I am going to see if my library has it. Thanks for your review!

>64 Crazymamie: I’ve already read several great books this year, and it’s only January! A clunker every now and then is inevitable.

>65 purpleiris: It is lovely, even though it’s sad.

🐶 Cascade Failure by L. M. Sagas ★ ★

A disappointing, formulaic space opera. My full review is here.

>62 Charon07: I've read this a couple of years ago and remember to have liked it quite much, I gave it 4 Stars. It was a good read, heartwarming and full of empathy.

>69 Tallulah_Rose: Yes, indeed. The relationships between the main characters were so warm and gently depicted.

🐦‍⬛ Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This was a reread, and I’m pleased to say it was as good as I remembered. My original review is here. This is the postapocalypse book by which I judge all others. This is the first of the MaddAddam trilogy, and the only one I’ve read so far. I reread it because it’s been more than 20 years since I first read it, and I wanted it to be fresh in memory going into the next book. I have to say that I’m a little afraid that the subsequent books might alter my perception of this one, and I’d hate for that to happen.

>71 Charon07: I have not yet read it, but it sounds really great.

January Summary

Tree books: 3
Ebooks: 6
Audiobooks: 5

Fiction: 12
Nonfiction: 2

Author gender:
   Female: 11
   Male: 3
   Nonbinary/other: 0

Living author: 9, 5 presumed
Deceased author: 0

English: 10
Non-English: 4

Published:
   2020s: 10
   2010s: 2
   2000s: 2

Own books:
   Acquired < 2025: 7
   Acquired 2025: 0
Borrowed: 7

Best of the month:
Oryx and Crake, White Is for Witching, The Book Censor’s Library

Worst of the month:
The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home

I love that you do a monthly summary!

>74 purpleiris: I noticed that many people in this and other groups do a summary, and I thought it would be interesting to see what sorts of trends there might be.

📆 The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo ★ ★ ★ ★

A delightful fairy tale for adults set in Japan and China at the end of the Qing Dynasty, in the early 1900s. I listened to the audiobook, read by author Yangsze Choo, who did a wonderful job and whose British accent was very pleasant to listen to.

My full review is here.