October
I've had some of these hanging around for a startlingly long period of time. I'm in a bit of a grump, which makes this the perfect time to look at a book list. I don't have a lot of energy to deal with interfaces, and I'm less likely to be interested in All! The! Books!
75 Notable Translations 2023 from World Literature Today (limited free pages) - the introductory section was interesting reading, but the list was text, with title, author, translator, publisher, and no info, and I didn't care to click through. I scanned through to see if anything caught my attention namewise, but wasn't really expecting much. I spotted Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera and Dragon Palace by Hiromi Kawakami to click through, and both sound sufficiently interesting I've added them to the list.
Tor.com Reviewers’ Choice: The Best Books of 2023 hypothetically this should be a list I'll find a lot on. But! I was at least somewhat on top of my reading last year, so before looking at the list, I'm taking a guess that some of the interesting ones I'll already have read. I do like the format, where each reviewer talks about their picks, and writes some number of paragraphs with the books discussed collectively. I was right that there are some books I very much enjoyed on that list. There were some that I don't remember ever hearing of (although at least one that looked interesting was already on the wishlist; I didn't check them all). And a surprising number that I started and bounced out of to 'finish after Hugo reading season' because I knew they weren't going to be my number one Hugo vote. Most of which I still haven't gone back to.
November
Locus Magazine 2023 Recommended Reading List - this page managed to annoy me before I'd read anything by popping an ad up over the 'reject tracking' button, so that I ended up clicking on the ad instead of the reject. This provides a long list of who provides the recommendations, and many of those I recognised are people whose suggestions I have previously bounced off, so I wasn't actually all that optimistic. And then I started skimming, and realised that I just don't care enough to click through, and title plus author doesn't give me enough to latch on to. I was interested to note that the most recent Greg Egan is self-published, and I'd be interested in knowing what the story is there -- although not interested enough that I allowed myself to be distracted from task Close! All! Tabs! I spotted an Octavia Cade collection that I didn't know about, so that went on the list. I was very bemused to see a collection by Tom Reamy, but again, did not go down the rabbit hole of finding out what was going on there (assumption: reprint?).
I could have gone looking at the short stories, and decided against it. Similarly the next tab I had open was a long list of short story links that I decided to just close. I do like short stories, I just don't need these lists sitting there being Tasks.
Nebula reading list - I'm assuming that this is a generic link, and what is on the page changes each year. Which means I was probably meant to be looking at 2024's list, but I'm looking at works published in 2025. After a bit of a look at the novels (which was a much shorter list than I was expecting) I decided to skip. At this point in time my focus is kids books, and there aren't any.
Esquire: The 30 Best Sci-Fi Books of 2024 - this one gives lovely potted summaries of why they are recommended, and it was so nice to engage with. I did end up adding books to the wishlist that i would otherwise have missed. Long, but interesting.
From the New York Public Library Best Books for Teens 2024 - this has an itty bitty drop down that would allow for selection of other years. As I'm in 'close all the tabs' mode I have chosen to not go down the rabbit hole. This shows me covers, with title and author as text; there are an assortment of filters available. Oh! and a potted summary for each. I didn't find anything very inspiring, but I did realise that I can use this as a list for my uni book search, because there is a kids books section.
December
Unusually, a video: The Top 10 Science Fiction Books Published in 2023 - I hadn't heard of most of these; there were two that I have on the wishlist, but I didn't have the motivation to add any of the rest to said wishlist, not least because several were subsequent books in a series. I skipped through much of this because I wasn't that interested in the commentary, at least on the series ones.
Reactor: Readers Pick Their Favorite SFF of 2025 - this is the first one of these I'm reading today, but I'm tired and grumpy, so I suspect I won't be putting things on the wishlist. ... and this is image plus link; I don't have the oomph to go clicking through, so looking at the pretty and then closing the tab.