Top Ten Tuesday: Books Which Make Great Gifts

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week we're talking about holiday reads. I am not generally concerned with books set at particular times of year, nor do I remember many holiday scenes beyond the ones in Harry Potter, so my take on this week is going to be a little different. I'm talking about ten books that make great holiday gifts! These tend to be my most-recommended books because they're widely appealing.

In Cold Blood: The true-crime classic is a masterwork of storytelling, truly representing the best of what narrative non-fiction can be.

The Handmaid's Tale: Margaret Atwood is an incredible writer, and this book has had growing visibility in the current political climate and with the Hulu series. Surprisingly many people haven't read it, though, and it's very much worth reading.

Station Eleven: I actually just recommended this to my book club! It's a post-apocalyptic story for people who don't like post-apocalyptic stories, telling a tale of a world both before and 20 years after a pandemic flu, that both builds great characters and asks interesting questions about what we as people need to survive.

The Secret History: This has something for everyone! A twisty, engaging plot, vivid and interesting characters, fantastic prose. And Donna Tartt was only 28 when it was published which is mind-boggling.

Remains of the Day: Truly one of the most well-crafted novels I have ever read, this story of an English butler who is convinced that he's rendered service to a great man reflecting on his life is just astonishingly good (and will break your heart).

Less: The rare light-hearted novel to win a Pulitzer, this book about an aging minor writer who takes a trip around the world to deal with the fact that his sort-of boyfriend is marrying someone else is so charming and warm that it tricks you into not noticing how flawlessly it's put together.

Stardust: For someone at all open to fantasy, this tale about a young man who swears to catch a fallen star for his love interest, only to find out that the star is not at all interested in being taken anywhere, is much more accessible (and honestly, enjoyable) than Neil Gaiman's more well-known American Gods.

The Namesake: The son of Indian immigrants to the US is named Gogol, after the Russian writer, and his name is just one the sources of tension as he grows up and struggles to figure himself out. The character work is top-notch, and Lahiri's writing is just so strong.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: It's a coming-of-age story, but that doesn't mean it can't be appreciated by adults too! Francie Nolan's childhood in Brooklyn, growing up as the bookish daughter of a charming but unreliable alcoholic father and relentlessly pragmatic mother, is heart-warming at any age.

The Age of Innocence: I think the classics freak a lot of people out, but they're often much better and less intimidating than people think. Case in point: this is set among rich people in New York City's Gilded Age, but at its heart, it's a dramatic (but repressed) love triangle. Edith Wharton was writing about her own social set, and it shows in her sharp wit and insight.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books Which Make Great Gifts

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is All About Visuals. I had a hard time with this initially, since I'm not a graphic novel person, but I decided for this week I'd highlight some of my favorite book covers! A great cover can really make a book stand out...even when I'm browsing through NetGalley and Edelweiss, I find myself drawn to covers when I'm thinking about what I might want to read next, sometimes even more than the authors! And I'm just going through trade editions for this purpose...the fancy special edition hardcovers are just not fair to compete with.

The Great Gatsby: This cover is just iconic. The woman's face superimposed over the city sky, the single tear, the naked ladies inside the eyes...instantly recognizable.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: That statute, which actually existed in the Savannah cemetery, was apparently removed because people were tromping through so much to see it (at least, that's what my husband told me based on a childhood visit to Savannah).

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: So bright, so bold, so eye-catching.

To Kill A Mockingbird: That tree, so symbolic in the story, is a perfect cover. Striking in its simplicity.

Twilight: Two pale hands, offering an apple. The apple and its connotation of falling innocence, gives you a subconscious clue to what you'll find inside. I know there is a lot of disdain for the content of the book, but the cover design is amazing.

Life of Pi: It's so straightforward- a dark skinned boy, curled in the fetal position, in a small boat with a tiger, surrounded by fish. But doesn't it promise one heck of a story within the pages?

The Hunger Games: Considering how deeply the role and power of symbols is explored over the course of this series, that the first cover is essentially just the mockingjay pin, arrow in its beak is perfect.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: A dorky looking boy on a broomstick, with a visible scar on his forehead, trying to catch...something. A unicorn racing by. Three dog faces in the corner. All of this sets you up for a magic story unlike any you've ever read before.

The Handmaid's Tale: Those two figures on the cover are so ambiguous. You can't tell who they're supposed to be, not even if they're boys or girls. It's the kind of thing that makes you look again.

A Million Little Pieces: This was actually the inspiration for the direction I chose this week. Even though it turned out the book was a bunch of crap, that image of teeny sprinkles clinging to fingers is so evocative and intriguing.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Covers

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Every Young Woman Should Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is Ten Books That Every X Should Read. Nothing came to mind immediately, so I started paging through my Read books on Goodreads, and when I saw the first entry on this list, my topic came to me and it was hard to narrow it down to ten from there. I don't know where exactly I'd draw the lines around "young woman", maybe from about fourteen to your mid/late twenties (I don't know that I feel like I qualify as a young woman anymore at 30), but really, these books are resonant and meaningful at any age and for either gender. They just seem especially relevant for young women:

The Handmaid's Tale: This should absolutely be mandatory reading in high school for everyone. Women's reproductive freedom has been a hot topic for decades, but this book takes the consequences of those freedoms being abridged to a horrifying extension. I don't think it's possible to read this, especially as a woman, and not be aware of how important it is to ensure that we have control over our own bodies.

The Stepford Wives: This is a quick and haunting read. When Walter and Joanna move to Stepford, it seems like it's full of perfect happy families. But there's something...off...about the wives. It's a scathing statement/satire about what men really want. 

The Interestings: This novel explores long-lasting friendships, and the kind of competition that works its way into them. A group of young boys and girls at an artsy summer camp bond together and pledge to remain friends forever. It's not as easy as that, obviously, and the book explores how friendships, especially female friendships, grow and change over time and the damage that the self-induced pressure to be "special" can inflict on lives that turn out to be more or less ordinary.   

Persuasion: Love and relationships are a huge part of life in general, but especially when you're young and just figuring out how to handle other people's hearts and how you'd like them to handle your own. Anne Elliot spurns the marriage proposal of Frederick Wentworth, even though she loves him, because her friends and family convince her he's not good enough. She's in her late twenties when they meet again and their fortunes have shifted...he's now a hot prospect and she's staring down spinsterhood (boy am I am so glad we don't live in Ye Olden Days anymore). She still loves him, but fully expects that she has lost him, and the heartache this causes her until (spoiler, but not really because this is Jane Austen) they get back together makes you really think about how you treat other people. 

Anna Karenina: I know, this is a monster novel, clocking in at well over a thousand pages. And Russian literature, with its naming conventions alone, can be hard to get into. But this story, about a young mother who is married to a bureaucrat with whom she has a satisfactory relationship but does not love, and falls into a passionate affair with a young nobleman is AMAZING. Is Anna brave? Is she selfish? What's a better situation: a settled and content existence or a passionate and completely unstable love affair? There's the whole side plot about Kitty Shcherbatskaya that progresses independently and is also good in its own right, but it's more of a slow burn than Anna's story, which raises all kinds of interesting questions to think about.

The Awakening: This too is a book about a woman living a conventional family life with a husband she doesn't really love, who falls for another man and finds the prospect of a relationship with him infinitely more compelling than continuing her staid existence and a wife and mother. This explores similar themes to Anna Karenina, obviously, but it's not quite as good. It's also not nearly as long, though, so it might be a good starter before you tackle the beast.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (series): As important about decisions about what love is and who to love are a central part of young womanhood, there's much MUCH more to your life than boys (or girls, or both). Lisbeth Salander kicks ass, takes names, looks how she wants to look, and has the sex life she wants to have. She has her own goals and pursues them and romantic relationships aren't something that's especially important to her. Being single or not making your love life a big serious deal is totally okay.

A Game of Thrones (series): The main female character in this series, Danaerys Targaryen, begins the books by being sold by her brother to a tribal warlord with whom she has no common language. But Dany and Khal Drogo's love story ends up being one of (if not the most) happiest relationships depicted in the series. When he dies, Dany turns her focus to learning how to rule a city. She has relationships, but they take lower priority than her personal goals. There's an interesting, complex model of any kind of woman you'd want to be over the course of these novels: Catelyn, Sansa, and Arya Stark, Brienne of Tarth, Cersei Lannister, Maergery Tyrell. You don't have to be just one thing. You're allowed to have internal contradictions. 

White Oleander: I don't know any woman who has a perfectly pleasant and smooth relationship with her mother. I don't think those exist. We love them but they drive us crazy: I think both sides would agree with that statement. The fraught relationship between Ingrid and Astrid is an exaggerated one, as are Astrid's relationships with her foster mothers, but coming to terms with your mother for who she is and recognizing and reconciling the parts of you that are like her are important (albeit difficult) parts of growing up.

The Devil Wears Prada: It's a lightweight, kind of fluffy read, remarkable to most because of its thinly-veiled look at Vogue editrix Anna Wintour. But there's also an important lesson in here about work/life balance. It's tempting to, like Andy Sachs, let everything else in your life fall by the wayside when you first get into the workplace, and if you've got big goals and are willing to let your personal life go for a bit while you chase them, go for it! But we all learn eventually that we can't be both a perfect employee and a human with a functional social life, and learning where to draw those lines is an important lesson. Just because you've got the job a thousand girls would kill for doesn't mean it's the right one for you. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Every Young Woman Should Read