Well, look at this! A Christmas Eve top ten Tuesday. Merry Christmas, one and all! Today’s TTT concerns books we hope Santa brings, but I’m just going to go with books I added to my wanna read list on goodreads. And then, I’ll look at the same list I did last year to see how many I actually read. But first, the Tuesday tease!

You can’t influence fate, or change what’s out of your control. But you can choose what you yourself do with the cards you’re dealt. (The Death of Mrs. Westaway, Ruth Ware)

Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov. Rod Dreher declared this collection of gulag short stories the best Russian short fiction since Chekov.

Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, Greg Epstein. See his piece in the Boston Globe, “My Name is Greg, and I’m a Tech Addict“.

The Last Days of Budapest: The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital, Adam LeBor

Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes, Randolph E. Richards

No Scrap Left Behind: My Year Without Food Waste, Teralyn Pilgrim

The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis, George Stephanopolous

Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs, Johann Hari

Camino Ghosts, John Grisham.

The Future of Buildings, Transportation and Power, Roger Duncan and Michael Webber

Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that Will Change the World, Parmy Olson

And now, let’s take a look at last year’s post! Of the ten in that list, I read three: Distracted by Alabama and The Anxious Generation. I’m still working on a review for Anxious Generation. Remaining, then are:

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, Norman Davies. Guessing this will feature times when Sweden and Poland were continental powers to be reckoned with.

Networks of New York: A Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure

The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life

Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West

The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness

The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity

Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance