Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge discussion

A Book with 24 Letters in the Title

Unless I just happen upon a book with EXACTLY 24 letters in the title, I am assuming this means there are to be at least 24 letters in the title. (I'll discuss with Nadine tomorrow.)

Shock! No listopias! LOL 😁

Listopia is HERE

Oh this is going to be easy. If we're generalizing and it does not have to be exactly 24, then even better.

I scrolled through my TBR on here and in my phone and To Make Monsters Out of Girls is exactly 24 letters long! I never read the book obviously but I remember that when I leafed through it at a bookstore, the poems were quite short so there should also be 24 or more in there.

All Your Children, Scattered was already on my TBR and has 24 letters so that worked out well :)

The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food by Judith Jones

Exactly twenty-four letters.

The Stranger in the Lifeboat by Mitch Albom
We Are All the Same in the Dark by Julia Heaberlin
Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? By Crystal Paul Smith

The Overdue Life of Amy Byler

The Candid Life of Meena Dave

I have to admit I found this letter counter tool very helpful for counting more quickly while combing through my TBR: https://charactercounter.com/letter-c....

Some from my TBR:

Daughters Who Walk This Path
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (not counting the subtitle)
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (ditto)

Gina wrote: "I have to admit I found this letter counter tool very helpful for counting more quickly while combing through my TBR: https://charactercounter.com/letter-c....

Some from my TBR:

[book:Daughter..."

Thanks for the letter counter!

Boy, I thought I would be able to find one I already own to fulfill this prompt, but so far, no luck! (Trying to find one exactly 24 characters long.)

Ooh! Just found one. The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher

just looked through my paper TBR and found a few exactly-24-letter ones

A General Theory of Oblivion
How to Raise and Keep a Dragon
Conversations with Friends
Things Bright and Beautiful
Tilly and the Bookwanderers
The Rosewater Insurrection (sequel to Rosewater)
The Library of the Unwritten
The Thief on the Winged Horse
I Have Some Questions for You

and if you want to count *characters* rather than strictly only letters, This Is My Body, Given For You (23 letters and 1 comma)

I'll be going through my Kindle tomorrow but for right now I've just about driven myself cross-eyed...

I used the letter counter to check these:

Agatha H and the Airship City
Amari and the Night Brothers
The Baron of Magister Valley
Battle of the Linguist Mages
The Bear and the Nightingale
The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
The Chosen and the Beautiful
Comics Will Break Your Heart
Dying with Her Cheer Pants On
Finlay Donovan Is Killing It
The House of Shattered Wings
How To Succeed in Witchcraft
Kat and Meg Conquer the World
The Last Hour Between Worlds
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
A Million Quiet Revolutions
A Natural History of Dragons
The Princess and the Fangirl
The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly
Serafina and the Black Cloak
The Siren, the Song, and the Spy
So You Want to Talk About Race
Ten Thousand Skies Above You
This Song Will Save Your Life

I keep finding titles that are 23 or 25 letters! Aargh!

A few more:

Little House in the Big Woods

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Waning of the Middle Ages

Long Day's Journey into Night

Scattered All Over the Earth

A Child's Book of Prayer in Art

L Y N N wrote: "Unless I just happen upon a book with EXACTLY 24 letters in the title, I am assuming this means there are to be at least 24 letters in the title. (I'll discuss with Nadine tomorrow.) ..."



Oh yeah, full agree! I'm not making myself crazy searching for exactly 24 letters. If the title has 25 or 30 letters, it's got 24 letters plus a few extra.

Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

Daughter of the Moon Goddess was the only one I found on my TBR before I got googly eyed.

An ARC dropped through my letterbox on Saturday with exactly 24 letters in the title, hurrah! A Letter to the Luminous Deep

Finally went through the Kindle... mostly leaving this here for my own future reference but hopefully it can help others out too

The Girl on the Dancing Horse: Charlotte Dujardin and Valegro (excluding subtitle)
Murder on the Orient Express
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
The Death of the Necromancer (one of Martha Wells' backlist, for the Murderbot enthusiasts)
When We Believed in Mermaids
Confession with Blue Horses
The Dictionary of Lost Words
The Fall of the House of Byron: Scandal and Seduction in Georgian England (again excluding subtitle)
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
The Bookseller of Inverness
The Secrets of Hartwood Hall

Thank you for the letter counter!

I was surprised at how many I do actually have that are *exactly* 24 letters. I thought they were nutty to include this, but it turns out this is a pretty fun scavenger hunt.

Thanks, all, I was driving myself to distraction going through my TBR but not coming up with any. But, from the lists above, I actually have Finlay Donovan Is Killing It out from my library, but intended to wait for next year to read it. So that will be the one!

From the lists people have posted, I give my best recs to The Final Revival of Opal & Nev, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, A Natural History of Dragons and The Library of the Unwritten.

The Brotherhood of the Wheel

I’ve had this on my shelf for awhile

Yay! Just counted the letters in this one that I haven’t read yet for 2023

Midnight Is the Darkest Hour

26 letters: One More Croissant for the Road

My electronic dice roll picked this prompt to be first for 2024. Once I finish a few more Miss Marple short stories, I will start reading this one.

24 letters: The Priory of the Orange Tree

I'm going to read God Was Here But He Left Early by Irwin Shaw.

If you have titles in an excel sheet you can use the formula "=len(SUBSTITUTE(cellRef," ",""))" to count the characters without spaces!

Hannah wrote: "If you have titles in an excel sheet you can use the formula "=len(SUBSTITUTE(cellRef," ",""))" to count the characters without spaces!"


excellent tip!!!!

Remarkably Bright Creatures = 24 letters :)

Deciding between So You Want to Talk About Race and The Girl in the Eagle's Talons. The latter also works for a book with a neurodivergent MC, and I'll be very surprised if there isn't at least one death in the first chapter.

The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype--and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More 109 characters

I've been counting the letters in just about every title I add to my TBR, and as I was looking up a book that takes place in a day, I found that Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, is exactly 24 letters long!

Of course, the Listopia list includes it, but I just wanted to remind anyone who is double-dipping on the prompts, that this one would fit the 24 letters prompt, and the 24 hour prompt.

I went a little crazy manually counting the letters of each book's title on my TBR and finally found one: The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Also if anyone wants a poetry book for this, there's the excellent Adrienne Rich collection Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Another easy way to count the number of letters in a title is to paste the title into a word document. You just need to highlight it and then click on "# of # words" in the lower left corner next to "Page # of #". If you can't find it, you can manually click on "Word Count" under "Tools".

Note: You should be looking for "Characters (no spaces)" rather than "Characters (with spaces)" since you don't want to count the spaces between words.

I read The Lost Journals of Sacajewea.

Sherri wrote: "I read The Lost Journals of Sacajewea."

That's cool. I have that one on my TBR.

Cendaquenta wrote: "Finally went through the Kindle... mostly leaving this here for my own future reference but hopefully it can help others out too

[book:The Girl on the Dancing Horse: Charlotte Dujardin and Valegro..."

Awesome thanks so much for the list! I already had Zami on my list for the visually impaired author prompt.

The Kingdom of Flesh and Fire (Blood and Ash #2) is exactly 24 letters if anyone wants to go that route.

Well, humble pie well and truly eaten here, because I was definitely, definitely not going to do this challenge this year. Then I picked up Jeeves and the Wedding Bells which I'd generously bought second-hand as part of my husband's post-Christmas birthday, and it had 24 letters in the title. So I thought book fate was telling me something and had another look at the challenge. I'm doing it.

And after all that waffle, the book was a very good reproduction of the original stories, with a bit of modern thought put in by Sebastian Faulks. Like drinking a glass of bubbly, so a good light New Year book.

Sweet, if you ignore the subtitle, the full title has exactly 24 letters!

The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other Worlds, and Parallel Universes

I'm reading so much already this month so it will be a February read.

Welcome Home, Caroline Kline

Jen wrote: "I used the letter counter to check these:

Agatha H and the Airship City
Amari and the Night Brothers
The Baron of Magister Valley
"

I was going to read the Agatha H book, but then I just happened to read Miss Eliza's English Kitchen for a book club.

I read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. I didn't count the letters, but there are more than 24 in the first six words!

I read The Mystery on the Blue Train by Agatha Christie for this

The House by the Cerulean Sea
Bonus lol

I had read The Connellys of County Down for this one.

is exactly 24 letters.

I Read:
Last Call at the Nightingale by Katharine Schellman

1920's cozy mystery.

Randomly started to read “Philosophy Before Socrates” by Richard D. McKirahan, then I realized the title has 24 letters

Finished Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman

My Short Review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I didn’t even notice when I read it but I'm Thinking of Ending Things fits the bill! Could also fit prompt 33 unreliable narrator.