Setting Author Backlist Goals for the Unabridged Podcast Reading Challenge

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Last month, I focused on an Unabridged Podcast Reading Challenge category, "Book published in the year of your birth." I thought that this month, I'd focus on "Book from a favorite author's backlist," which was also the subject of an episode last week, episode 306, "Book from a Favorite Author’s Backlist." I keep a list of authors whose work I want to explore fully, and each of these will be inspiring some of my reading this year. Here are just a few of those authors:

Katherine Center

Since I first read Katherine Center's How to Walk Away (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm), in 2018, I've gravitated towards her work. I've read each new book as it came out, and I've gradually been dipping into her backlist to make sure I've enjoyed every bit of her lovely outlook on life.

I've been fortunate to get advanced copies of a few of her novels, so I'm sharing those reviews here. In the course of the reviews, I mention the opportunity we had to interview Center on Unabridged (I link to the episode!) and the way that has informed my reading of her books ever since.

Left to read: The Lost Husband, Get Lucky, The Shippers (publication 2026)

Katherine Center’s What You Wish For (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Katherine Center’s What You Wish For is devoted to the pursuit of joy. That doesn’t mean it’s always a joyful novel—in fact, it opens with a tragedy that broke my heart. What it does mean is that Center is exploring, on every page, what we can do when it’s tough to be joyful, when our lives seem to be out of our control, when the world seems to be against us. How do we find joy then?

Elementary librarian Samantha Casey has not led an easy life, but she’s finally found her happy place. She loves Kempner School, which is a tight-knit, welcoming school. She has a best friend, Alice, who is both incredibly nerdy (math t-shirts!) and insanely cool. By moving to Galveston, she’s escaped the horror of an embarrassing and unrequited crush on Duncan Carpenter, a brilliant teacher and free spirit from her last school. And she has Max and Babette Kempner, the founders of the school, her mentors, and her (unofficially) adopted parental figures.

All of this changes in a moment, in the first scene of the book, when Max, the beloved principal of Kempner School, dies. Suddenly, that firm foundation Sam had found shifts, and she’s left to try to scramble her way back to security, especially after the unexpected reappearance of a very changed Duncan in her life.

Katherine Center does here what she does so well in each of her novels: she creates a world for her main character and then shakes it up. Readers get to watch what happens as the character tries to find firm ground again while realizing that false comfort won’t work.

What You Wish For, with its school setting, really resonated with me: I loved the discussions of the place of joy and color in a school (and in a life) and the focus on reading what makes you happy (former English teacher here!). I was so happy to see Duncan, a secondary character from a prior Center favorite, Happiness for Beginners, reappear. I reveled in Sam’s struggle to love and connect with others, particularly her consideration of when that connection is worth the risk inherent in reaching out.

I absolutely loved Max, who is wise and kind and the principal and dad we all wish we had (I think I marked every single thing he said in the book!). Most of all, I was hungry to see a character who realizes that finding joy can be difficult but that the search is definitely worth it. That’s a message we all need always, but particularly right now.

Katherine Center's Hello Stranger (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Every time I pick up a new book by Katherine Center, I’ve come to expect joy. In 2020, when we interviewed her for the Unabridged Podcast upon the release of What You Wish For (you can listen here), Center talked explicitly about working toward joy, both in her life and her writing. She said, “[O]ne of the things that I really wanted to write about in this book in particular, like the kind of the place where I started with the story, was I wanted to write about joy. . . . [W]hen you find the right story for you, whatever that story is that you need at that particular moment in your life, it's so satisfying that it feels like joy.”

With Center’s new book Hello Stranger, that feeling of joy was in full effect for me. At times, I was giddy as I read about Sadie Montgomery’s fierce attempts to wrestle back control over her life, her relationships, and her career—to find joy in the face of adversity.

Sadie is a portrait artist on the cusp of finding the success she’s dreamed of ever since the tragic death of her mother—also a portrait artist—when she was a child. Her relationship with her father has never been what she wanted, and her relationships with her stepmother and stepsister are downright confrontational. But she has a good friend, Sue, and a sweet, aging dog she loves and a place to live and work (thanks to some gracious rule breaking from Sue’s parents, her unofficial landlords).

And then she falls one day, merely walking across the street, and everything changes.

Sadie finds out that she needs immediate brain surgery, and while the surgery is successful, it results in prosopagnosia. Face blindness. She can’t recognize anyone’s face, even her own, and she certainly can’t paint portraits, which means that the art competition on which she was counting is going to be a real challenge.

The situation unfurls from there, of course, complicated by a potential romance with her dog’s veterinarian and a burgeoning friendship with the superficially-jerky-but-maybe-not neighbor who turns out to be pretty helpful when she needs it.

In retrospect, there were a few elements of the plot that stretched my credulity just a bit, but they didn’t impact my reading experience at all. The story here is gorgeous and sometimes heart wrenching but ultimately joyful. Center considers the impact of Sadie’s face blindness on her life and her career and her relationships with great sensitivity, making excellent use of the need for Sadie to see things differently both literally and figuratively.

Katherine Center's The Rom-Commers (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Reading Katherine Center’s newest book has become a favorite summer tradition for me. Her books center on such believably real characters in such lovely, dreamy, and sincerely funny circumstances. The Rom-Commers checked all of those boxes for me.

Emma Wheeler’s life is dominated by two things: (1) caring for her family, particularly her father, after a tragic accident that changed their lives forever, and (2) screenwriting. Well, screenwriting rom-coms.

Emma has made choices that have affected her career and her freedom to make sure that her younger sister has every option she could dream of as she emerges from college and to keep her father safe, which means 24-7 care.

So, when she’s unexpectedly given a chance to ghost write (and overhaul) a rom-com screenplay by her idol, Charlie Yates, she’s both exhilarated and reluctant: her sister has an internship opportunity that Emma doesn’t want her to pass up, and she can’t leave her dad.

This situation, right from the beginning, is communicated with such vividness that I felt every facet of Emma’s agonizing choice: follow the dream that she’s pushed down for so long or keep to the narrow path that she’s carved out for herself.

It takes a push from her family—and her high school ex-boyfriend, Logan, now a successful Hollywood agent—to get Emma on the plane to meet and work with Charlie Yates.

And then she finds out that (despite what Logan told her!) Charlie doesn’t want a ghost writer and doesn’t even know that she’s coming.

This premise spins out in satisfying ways. Of course, Emma ends up co-writing with Charlie, schooling him on the merits of the rom-coms that he so scorns and giving him a very honest take on the problems she sees with his draft. Their working relationship has ups and downs, misunderstandings and miscommunications both deliberate and not, and the ways that their romantic relationships develop in parallel to their screenplay are delightful.

But it’s the characters that are the standout here, the ways that Emma and Charlie (and Emma’s dad and sister) force themselves to work toward happiness again and again, work toward believing in and living with love.

I always appreciate reading Center’s acknowledgments, where she shares the inspirations for each story and the books and research that informed her novels. Her dedication to and advocacy for romance is a beautiful thing, and it’s borne out, again and again, in her books.

The Rom-Commers is a beautiful tribute to rom-coms and to writing and to movies, and it’s a wonderful novel about the ways we have to believe in and put effort into pursuing love. It’s a book that will satisfy Center’s readers, old and new.

Elizabeth Strout

Strout is one of those authors I've returned to, again and again. Somehow, I never quite remember just how beautiful I find her books until I'm dipping into them again. They're perfectly crafted, with a gorgeous, spare style, and each novel offers such an unflinching, yet generous portrait of its characters. I've revisited a few of these (I share one review of a re-read, Olive Kitteridge, which I probably need to re-read again before diving into its sequel, Olive, Again), and she's an author I can imagine re-reading throughout my life.

Left to read: Abide with Me; Olive, Again; The Things We Never Say (publication in 2026)

Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

"Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did. But . . . it was never enough, was it?" (211).

I first read Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge in 2009. Going into re-reading the book for my book club in 2019, here's what I remembered: I liked the book. It reminded me of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio in the portrayal of a small town through linked short stories. Olive Kitteridge was grumpy.

Oh, there's so much more! There's something so poignant about the way Strout delves into each character's life. Yes, Olive is at the center of the book, but the first several stories are about other people who live in the town. Strout—whose other work, like My Name Is Lucy Barton (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm), I've also loved—has such a talent for using details to unveil truth, for highlighting the everyday to illuminate the universal. She gets at the heart of each person. These characters are not always likable, but they're always empathetic because we come to understand what has shaped them.

This book is just phenomenally beautiful. And Olive! Oh, I love her so much. Yes, she's grumpy and mean and rigid, but she also believes in the potential of her students, of those around her, of her family to do more and to be better, and she's not afraid to share truths with people who may not be able to receive them. No, she's not always truthful with herself . . . but who IS always truthful with herself? (I wish I were brave enough always to be!) And the ending of this book. Oh, it's so lovely and beautiful and . . . realistically hopeful. Maybe that's not the most romantic type of hopeful to be, but it's still beautiful.

Elizabeth Strout's The Burgess Boys (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

I was in the midst of a run of books that were . . . fine? And then I decided to work on one of my goals for 2026: becoming an Elizabeth Strout completist. Amy and Isabelle (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm), which I read right at the end of 2025, was her debut, and I could tell, but even a lesser book by Strout was more successful than some of the books I'd been reading.

And then I picked up The Burgess Boys. Oh, wow. I just loved this so much. The Burgess boys are Jim and Bob, and Bob is one of my favorite characters from a more recent Strout book, Tell Me Everything. The way she weaves through the lives of the Burgesses—Jim and Bob, who are Maine transplants living in New York, and their sister Susan, whose lonely son has committed a horrible crime in their small hometown. The boys (now attorneys) are pulled into their nephew's defense and into their own pasts.

Strout's books deal with characters' mistakes, their cruelties large and small, in a gentle way. She doesn't excuse ugliness but does offer a complex and complete understanding of their lives and of the small beauties that rest alongside those misjudgments.

Colson Whitehead

My first Whitehead book was Zone One (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm), a literary fiction novel about zombies that reinvented the latter genre for me. My second novel by Whitehead was The Underground Railroad, a blend of speculative fiction and historical fiction and literary fiction that convinced me I needed to read everything he's written. Whitehead's mastery, regardless of genre, and his willingness to embrace tropes while also bringing something new to everything he writes has made him a favorite. (Please note that I previously posted these reviews, so you'll see that I didn't meet my 2023 goal of reading everything by the author!)\

Still to read: The Intuitionist, Sag Harbor, The Colossus of New York, The Noble Hustle, Cool Machine (publication in 2026)

Colson Whitehead's Apex Hides the Hurt (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

One of my loose goals this year is to finish reading Colson Whitehead's backlist, so I put his third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt, on my #23backlistin2023 list. While this one didn't reach the heights of some of his more recent work, this satire about a "nomenclature consultant" held all the humor and incisive societal criticism I could have wanted from a Whitehead novel.

The unnamed protagonist has become successful by, simply, naming things, but he's come up against some challenges (we don't find out what those are until later) that mean he's taken a leave of absence from his company. They do send him one job: a town named Winthrop that's considering a new identity.

The town was founded by Black families who were formerly enslaved who want to name their new home Freedom. But a white family (the Winthrops) came along and christened the town after themselves, instead. The current Black mayor, a descendant of those Black families, is advocating for the name originally intended; the descendant of the Winthrops likes things the way they are; and a third leader, a businessman named Lucky, wants to emphasize the town's promise of wealth and success with the name New Prospera.

It's the protagonist's call.

As he tours through Winthrop, doing research and interviewing its citizens, he reflects back on just how he got where he is and on how his own identity might connect to the identity of the town.

This is a clever, satisfying read that poses so many great questions, challenging the reader to find the right answers . . . or to answer them at all.

Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

I'm not sure why I didn't pick up Colson Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle the moment it arrived at my house. It's fantastic.

It's 1960s Harlem. Ray Carney is the son of a crook who's trying to escape the criminal life. He married up and is trying to build on the success of his furniture store in an industry that still only grudgingly accepts Black business owners.

In his quest to support his family to a level that will appease his in-laws, Ray starts edging into criminal enterprise. Then, his cousin forces him into a fatal final last step.

Harlem Shuffle is told in three long sections, each several years apart. While it took me a bit to be completely enraptured, once the story grabbed hold, I couldn't put it down. This is a fun novel that just revels in historical detail—the descriptions of furniture are absolutely delicious—and in Ray's constant struggle as he's pulled in two directions.

I've heard this one is going to have a sequel, and I'm all-in for more Ray Carney!

Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

I first read Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad in 2016 and absolutely loved it. I'm continually struck by Whitehead's ability to jump into a new genre, a new time, and to bring it vividly to life.

The novel focuses on Cora, an enslaved young woman on a plantation in Georgia who makes the decision to run with Caesar, who recently arrived on the plantation. Cora's mother made the same decision, leaving Cora behind . . . and leaving her with a desire to do the same.

The book proceeds almost episodically, driven by unusual connective tissue: an actual railroad running underground from state to state, stop to stop.

Cora and Caesar stop at various stations along the railroad, each time hoping that they've found both safety and freedom. They're pursued relentlessly by Ridgeway, a slave catcher, who vows to catch Cora since he was unable to bring back her mother.

I listened via audio this time, and I can recommend both formats: Whitehead's writing is beautiful, so I missed the chance to mark quotation after quotation, but the plot is also propulsive, which worked will in the audio.

Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys (Bookshop.org | Libro.fm)

Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys is spare and heartwrenching and perfect. I'm a fan of Whitehead's gorgeous prose and ability to deftly move from genre to genre, but The Nickel Boys may be my favorite work of his yet. And yes, that includes his amazing The Underground Railroad.

The book, at just over 200 pages, is tight and brilliantly structured, unfolding the story of Elwood Curtis, a good, kind, responsible black teenager in the Jim Crow South who is wrongly sentenced to Nickel Academy. Whitehead resists an overly dramatic accounting of the horrors Curtis faces there in favor of an unsentimental detailing of the events both large and small that make it such a life altering place. The novel moves occasionally between Elwood's time at Nickel Academy in the 1960s and his current life in New York, as we see what has become of his youthful promise.

It's not fair to give away anything about this novel. Instead, I'll just advise you to read it immediately.

Who are some of the other authors on my list?

Octavia Butler

N. K. Jemisin

Lily King

Rebecca Makkai

Mindy McGinnis

Maggie O'Farrell

Ann Patchett

Kevin Wilson

#bookishfaves #unabridgedpodreadingchallenge #autoreadauthors

(A note to our readers: click on the hashtags above to see our other blog posts with the same hashtag.)

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