c# mongo 2.0 reduce traffic of FindAsync

You can reduce the size of the returned documents via projection which you can set in the FindOptions parameter of FindAsync to only include the fields you need:

var filter = Builders<Book>.Filter.Eq(n => n.Author, AuthorId);
// Just project the Title and Author properties of each Book document
var projection = Builders<Book>.Projection
    .Include(b => b.Title)
    .Include(b => b.Author)
    .Exclude("_id"); // _id is special and needs to be explicitly excluded if not needed
var options = new FindOptions<Book, BsonDocument> { Projection = projection };

List<string> books = new List<string>();

using (var cursor = await BooksCollection.FindAsync(filter, options))
{
    while (await cursor.MoveNextAsync())
    {
        var batch = cursor.Current;
        foreach (BsonDocument b in batch)
            // Get the string value of the Title field of the BsonDocument
            books.Add(b["Title"].AsString);
    }
}

Note that the returned documents are BsonDocument objects instead of Book objects as they only contain the projected fields.