Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Want With Me While Stranded On a Deserted Island

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about the books we'd want with us if we were to find ourselves stranded on a deserted island. For me, a desert island book has two main requirements: being decently long so it's not just something you can get through in a few hours, and having high re-read value. Here are the ten I came up with!

War and Peace: This book is super duper long and very layered, so every read-through will reveal more.

Lolita: One of my all-time favorites that I have read at least a half-dozen times and I never fail to find it an interesting reading experience. It's so brilliant there's always something new to appreciate.

A Suitable Boy: Another one that brings the pages. It's on my list to re-read one of these days but the time investment required means that a deserted island would be perfect for it!

The Secret History: Another one I've gone back to several times since I first read it as a high-school senior. The characters and story get me every time!

Vanity Fair: This one would be particularly interesting to read right before (or after) War and Peace, as they're both set during the Napoleonic Wars but in very different contexts. Also it's very lengthy!

Sabriel: This is by FAR the shortest of the books on this list, but it makes it because the re-read value is so high. I've definitely re-read this one over and over and it still entertains me.

A Game of Thrones: If it wasn't cheating to put the whole Song of Ice and Fire series up here I would, I love these books so much even if the last season of the show was a huge letdown.

The Queen of the Night: This book was so much fun to read that it would be a great diversion if I was just stuck alone on an island with my thoughts.

Americanah: This book is decently long and has a lot of depth to it so there's a lot to get out of returning to it!

A Tale for the Time Being: This one is kind of a wild guess but this book has definitely stuck with me since I read it a few years ago and it's different enough from everything else on this list to keep me from getting too bored!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Want With Me While Stranded On a Deserted Island

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Which Should be Adapted Into Shows

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about adaptations! Books have of course always been popular as a source material for movies, but more and more books are getting made into shows, which really allows for longer books to shine. I did a similar list a couple years back so am going to try not to repeat anything here!

The Luminaries: This book is a doorstopper, and its story of a small mining community in New Zealand would be fascinating to play out on the big screen!

Americanah: This one actually is being made into a miniseries (by HBO!), which I think will be better than a movie...it'll give this sprawling, gorgeous story some space to relax and really explore its themes!

A Visit From The Goon Squad: The book, marketed as a novel, is more a set of interconnected short stories so it's already in convenient episodic format.

White Teeth: Multiple settings, multiple generations of characters, complex subject matter about the legacy of colonialism...it should definitely be a series and I would love to watch it.

Daughter of Fortune: There's a lot of story in this book...a young woman growing up and falling in love in the the British community in Chile, a poor rural Chinese boy who grows up to become a doctor and then finds himself sailing the seas, and California Gold Rush. It could be a really fascinating series!

The Line of Beauty: I love a "fancy British people" series, and this book is about a young British gay man coming of age among the fancy set near the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. They actually already did a miniseries of this in the UK, but it was almost 15 years ago and only three episodes and I'd like to see a proper series.

The Age of Miracles: I don't know what the appetite would be right now for a post-apocalyptic show, but I'd never seen this kind of "end of the world" scenario (a slowing of the Earth's rotation) before and I think there would be enough to explore to make a series out of it. 

There There: Again, this is written as a series of interconnected point-of-view chapters that are almost more like stories than a single narrative, so it would be straightforward to adapt into episodes and we should have more media representation of modern Native American experiences.

Daisy Jones and the Six: This one is also sort-of cheating because it was announced it was becoming a series not long after it was published, but I am super looking forward to this one!

A Tale for the Time Being: The way this book plays with metanarrative might make it difficult to adapt well, and some of the themes are heavy, but it was such an interesting book and I'd like to see it be tried, anyways.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books Which Should be Adapted Into Shows

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Characters I’d Invite To A Party

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about the bookish parties we'd throw, and I decided to focus my list on the characters that would be fun at a party. Here are ten characters I think would make excellent party guests!

Lizzy Bennet (Pride and Prejudice): If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me!

Jordan Baker (The Great Gatsby): Anyone who shows up to Gatsby's parties is welcome at mine.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary): Every party needs a bit of a hot mess.

Margaery Tyrell (A Storm of Swords): She's both politically astute and genuinely good-hearted and talented at putting the people around her at ease, all of which make for a good party guest.

Sookie Stackhouse (Dead Until Dark): Sookie is savvy and kind and loyal and while parties probably aren't her favorite because of the whole mind-reading deal, she would be fun to hang out with!

Georgia Nicolson (Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging): She's a delightfully daft teenager and would absolutely do something unintentionally hilarious.

Lady Brett Ashley (The Sun Also Rises): She's kind of a tragic partier, but she parties nonetheless.

Vianne Rocher (Chocolat): Vianne would bring the good chocolate to share.

Ifemelu (Americanah): Ifemelu would be absolutely fascinating to get into a corner and have a serious conversation with.

Kolya Vlosov (City of Thieves): This party is otherwise all women, so let's throw a charming flirty young guy into the mix.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Book Characters I’d Invite To A Party

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books With Single-Word Titles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl!This week, we're talking about books with one-word titles. I thought about doing my least favorite single-word titled reads, but decided to be positive about it so here are some of my favorites!

Less: I was reluctant to read this when it was a book club pick, but I wound up just adoring this story about a middle-aged man on a trip around the world to escape having to attend his younger ex's wedding.

Wicked: I picked up this book, which tells the "real story" of the Wicked Witch of the West, for the first time in high school and have loved it ever since, through many re-reads. I also love the musical!

Twilight: Shut up, I know this book (and the whole series) are objectively not great. But I found them very enjoyable to read despite my own better instincts, and I've re-read them all more than once.

Musicophilia: I talk pretty often about my love for Oliver Sacks' most famous book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but I also really enjoy this one, about the ways that music effects the brain.

Blindness: Bleak and kind of depressing and no quotation marks to indicate speech so a little confusing to read at first, but so incredibly good.

Stardust: I love fairy-tale-esque stories and Neil Gaiman's trademark wit makes this one a real treat!

Prep: This book plunged me so powerfully back into adolescence it was almost physically uncomfortable to read but so well-executed.

Gilead: I am not religious, and had previously not cared for a book by Marilynne Robinson, so my expectations going into this book were low. It seemed like I was going to be right through the early going but it eventually cast its spell on me and I found it intensely moving.

Battleborn: I'm not generally into short stories, but this Nevada-centric collection really blew me away!

Americanah: Such an incredible, rich book with amazing characters and powerful themes and beautiful prose.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books With Single-Word Titles

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Follow On Social Media

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's topic is characters that we would follow on social media. But of course, social media comes in different flavors, so I've divided my list into those I'd follow on Instagram and ones I'd follow on Twitter instead.

Instagram

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): I am sort-of cheating here, because the Emma retelling I read (and liked!) last year, Polite Society, wrote its central character as a social media influencer...which is perfect because it's exactly what she'd be doing!

Francis Abernathy (The Secret History): Francis would be the type to post mostly (amazing) outfit-of-the-day photos, with occasional picture of the exclusive things and places his wealth allows him access to.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary): Bridget seems like the kind of messy friend that it can be fun to keep up with through social media. She would post lots of pictures of drinks with captions that probably overshared in an entertaining way.

Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby): A socialite who married rich, Daisy would be all about showing off the glittering exteriors to hide the hollowness of it all.

Lily Bart (The House of Mirth): She's basically trying to sell herself in marriage, and what better way to do that than to be the classiest kind of insta-model she could be?

Twitter

Lizzy Bennett (Pride and Prejudice): I'll be honest, I am not a super Lizzy fangirl. But she is definitely witty and could be very entertaining in 280 character bursts.

Ifemelu (Americanah): She would be the queen of those long strings of tweets that manage to somehow blow up the things you think you know and give you an entirely new perspective.

Catherine/Birdy (Catherine, Called Birdy): Quality teen snark.

Yunior (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao): The high-energy, pop culture reference-heavy way that Yunior tells the story would make for very entertaining tweeting.

Amy Dunne (Gone Girl): Anyone who could produce the Cool Girl speech could kill it on Twitter. I feel like she would mostly scroll and judge to herself, but every once in a while would give a truly inspired rant.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Follow On Social Media

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books Released In the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're taking a look back at the past ten years and choosing our favorite books for each one! Some of these ended up being pretty hard choices!

2018: Once Upon A River- I loved this book, which was consciously meta about the power of storytelling but without losing the magic.

2017: The Bear and the Nightingale- By far, my favorite series of the past decade. Each one of the books is fantastic, and the first one especially so...I got completely immersed in the world of Russian folklore it creates!

2016: The Queen of the Night- This book is completely bonkers. Sweeping, epic, entertaining, and with the most delightfully crazy plot twists.

2015: Dead Wake- I knew like nothing about the Lusitania (besides that it had sunk) and precious little about World War 1 and got SO into this.

2014: Station Eleven- This book isn't just about a world-decimating flu and its immediate aftermath, but how humanity continues to survive even more than a decade later and even if you don't think you like post-apocalyptic fiction, you should read this.

2013: Americanah- If someone hasn't recommended that you read this book about an African couple whose immigration journeys take very different paths by now, let me be that person. If you just haven't read it yet, let me encourage you to get to it. It's amazing.

2012: Devil in the Grove- It's one thing to read about Jim Crow and police brutality during that era in the abstract, but this account of young black men in Florida falsely accused of rape in the 1950s is searing and fascinating and eye-opening.

2011: The Song of Achilles- This retelling of the story of mighty Greek warrior Achilles, in which his loyal servant Patroclus is actually his partner, has a power that lingers long after reading.

2010: The Man Without A Face- Masha Gessen's nonfiction look at Russia and its leader is relevant and completely enthralling.

2009: Wolf Hall- There are so many Tudor stories out there, it's hard to think of a fresh angle on the drama of Henry VIII's reign. But Hilary Mantel's look at it from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell manages to do just that masterfully.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books Released In the Last Ten Years

Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Favorite Couples In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! With Valentine's Day coming up around the corner, this week we're looking at favorite couples! I feel like I did something similar-ish not tooooo long ago, so I'm highlighting my favorites from books I've read fairly recently.

Arthur and Freddy (Less): Arthur Less feels silly for being so sad when he finds out his ex Freddy is marrying someone else...after all, they weren't even ever really "official". But as he remembers their time together, it's more and more obvious how much he did actually love his lost flame.

Jessica and Marcus (Sloppy Firsts): We all have that one crush on the "bad" guy that we shouldn't have feelings for at some point, don't we? It's satisfying watching that relationship actually come together and kind of work!

Bathsheba and Gabriel (Far from the Madding Crowd): Watching Bathsheba make bad decisions about dudes is so rough because the right one is right there and you're just waaaaaiting for them to finally get together.

Maud and Roland (Possession): Like most nerds, the idea of falling in love while engaged in an intellectual pursuit is just impossibly romantic to me.

Nadia and Saeed (Exit West): These two young lovers and the journey they take is so deeply moving, even as their experiences change them in ways that put their future in jeopardy.

William and Katherine (Stoner): William's life is so sad that even knowing his affair with his beautiful, smart colleague can't last, I still found myself caring so much and wanting it to go on as long as possible so he has the chance for more happiness.

Lux and Joseph (Valley of the Moon): I liked the way Gideon built up the relationship between these two slowly and organically so that by the time they actually got together it felt so right!

Joe and Rosa (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay): I don't entirely love how Chabon wrote Rosa overall, but I really did care about the relationship between her and Joe and wanted things to work out somehow.

Vasya and Morozko (The Girl in the Tower): One of the things I love about how Arden writes these books is that Vasya is deeply aware of how ridiculous the idea of an actual relationship between a teenage girl and an ancient death god is...but they're so easy to get invested in!

Ifemelu and Obinze (Americanah): Rooting for these two to make it means rooting for someone who cheats on their spouse to end up with the person they're cheating with...but I found their love story so compelling I couldn't help it!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Favorite Couples In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Popular Books that Lived Up to the Hype

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! If you've ever read a book everyone told you was really good, and thought "really?" when you finally finished it, you've been bitten by the hype bug. I think a lot of us have gotten a little gun-shy over the years about the next hyped release! So here are ten books that (at least for me, everyone has different tastes) actually lived up to high expectations!

Jane Eyre: Classics, especially "beloved" classics, have literally hundreds of years of hype. I thought this book was going to be a straightforward romance and was delighted to find a story about a young woman coming into her own that happened to end with marriage. It's really good, y'all!

War and Peace: I tell everyone I've read War and Peace both because it's a gigantic classic and half the point of reading it is to brag about it but ALSO because it's honestly an incredible book that people think is intimidating and likely serious and boring and it is long but it is wonderful.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: I resisted this one for a long time because mystery/thriller is not a genre I've had particular luck with and I figured that its bestseller status confirmed that it was dumb. Joke's on me for being snobby, once I read it I raced to get the sequels because I looooved it.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: I remember a list I read several years back that said this was the best book since the turn of the century, which made me raise my eyebrows because it's a book about dudes writing comic books. How good could it be? The answer is: phenomenal.

The Hunger Games: I don't read a ton of YA. I'm not trying to sound like I'm hating on it, but I usually find that I'm looking for books with more complex characters/plots and more elegant prose styling for my personally most enjoyable reading experiences. So when this series got a ton of buzz, I kind of wrote it off as not for me and then I raced through all three of them because they're so good.

Gone Girl: A missing wife. A husband with a secret. Sounds like something you pick up at the airport to read on the plane and immediately forget. But I found myself staying up late and reading while I ate because I didn't want to put it down and that Cool Girl breakdown is a masterpiece.

Americanah: I read this just recently and there have been years of continually low-level hype about it that made me almost sure it would inevitably disappoint. Nope, turns out it really is that good.

A Game of Thrones: I actually watched the first season of the show before I picked up the books. Though I love The Lord of the Rings, I'd tried reading some other fantasy epics before and they'd just never clicked, but these books are so damn good and I re-read one over the holidays every year and I just want the sixth one nowwwwwwww.

Me Talk Pretty One Day: People love David Sedaris, which had always made me a little wary. Humor can be tricky on the page, and I've often found myself reading things that are supposed to be funny and being completely flummoxed. But happily, this book kept me laughing and I've picked up several of his other works to read.

Big Little Lies: I literally just posted my review of this last week, so I won't belabor the point. I read it as the miniseries (which I STILL haven't watched) was airing and getting raves so I read it at Peak Hype and still really liked it.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Popular Books that Lived Up to the Hype

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Red, White, And Blue Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're highlighting books with red, white, and blue covers because tomorrow is Independence Day! Or as my very British brother-in-law calls it, Unruly Colonists Day. Since this is a cover-focused list, I'm not going to write about my choices, but I will note for the record that all of these books take place in the USA!

The Great Gatsby

Into The Wild

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

From Dead to Worse

Americanah

Fahrenheit 451

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Beloved

All The King's Men

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Red, White, And Blue Covers

Book 117: Americanah

"Ifemulu showed her the cover of the novel. She did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was."

Dates read: January 10-14, 2017

Rating: 10/10

Every so often, a thread pops up on Reddit asking people who've come to the United States from elsewhere what surprised them most about this country when they got here. The answers are usually fairly similar: our obsession with germs and our "personal space", our loudness, how big the country really actually is, tipping. I always enjoy reading these kinds of things because I'm always curious about how what seems very natural to us can seem bizarre to people who grew up elsewhere and I try to keep it in mind when I myself travel elsewhere: what seems odd to me probably seems perfectly normal to them. Just because I think of something as "the way things are" doesn't mean it's the way things are everywhere.

Ifemelu, the Nigerian-born-and-raised protagonist of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, experiences this kind of cultural whiplash twice: once, when she transfers from her university in Nigeria to a small college in Pennsylvania and then the second time, fifteen years later when she decides to return to Lagos. That Ifemelu is black and only really experiences what it's like to be black in a predominantly white world once she gets to the United States, as well as the gap between African-Americans and Africans in America inspires her to start a blog about race, which becomes a major source of income for her and helps earn her a fellowship at Princeton. Once the fellowship is over, she shuts down her blog, leaves her longtime boyfriend, and prepares to go back to Nigeria.

She's nervous about going back, not so much because she doesn't have anything lined up there but because it means she'll be back in the same place as Obinze, the man she loved in high school and college but is no longer in touch with. Adichie uses one of my favorite framing devices to structure her novel: she begins with Ifemelu just before she leaves the US, shows us how she got there through flashbacks, and then proceeds forward. I love getting some information but not all of it right up front: it makes me intensely curious to find out how the situation we first encountered came to be. I hate mystery-style books where all the "answers" are backloaded...it makes the rest of the book feel like it's treading water before the payoff at the end. Those just leave me annoyed by the time I get to the end, but unwrapping the narrative layers one by one keeps me hooked. And Americanah had me like a fish on a hook.

Not only is her story structure one that I personally respond well to, but Adichie's writing is absolutely magnificent. I marked what feels like half of the book because she has a such a knack for taking feelings that you have or you recognize and phrasing it in a way that hits you right in the gut because it's so dead on and perfect and you never thought about it like that before. And I loved the way she wrote Ifemelu and Obinze's relationship, from their charmed young love to the reason for their separation and that Adichie isn't afraid to give them new partners, partners they experience happiness with even. There's context and nuance, not just to their relationship, but to their lives. The whole book explores shades of gray, no one is either a saint or a villain. They're people, trying hard and messing up and trying again. I think one of the most important things about reading is its potential to increase empathy, to see people outside of the ones like you as having the same kinds of hopes and dreams and fears as you even if their experiences don't look exactly the same. This book is a beautifully written examplar of that exact principle. It's completely fantastic and I totally loved every second of reading it and I recommend it highly.

One year ago, I was reading: The Bear and the Nightingale

Two years ago, I was reading: The Twentieth Wife

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Book 117: Americanah

Top Ten Tuesday: New-To-Me Authors I Read In 2017

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Despite liking to think of myself as well-read (and objectively, I know I am), there are SO many wonderful authors that I have yet to experience. Last year, though, I did manage to check these ones off the list.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah was so wonderful that I got copies of all her previous books to read too!

Colson Whitehead: I didn't think The Underground Railroad quite lived up to my admittedly very high expectations, but I really liked the quality of his writing so I'm definitely planning to read more.

Michael Chabon: I actually read Moonglow for my book club earlier in the year, which I really liked, but then I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay a few months later and it totally blew me away.

Liane Moriarty: While I did enjoy Big Little Lies and won't rule out reading more of Moriatry's books, I'm not really chomping at the bit to either. They seem to all be really similar.

Virginia Woolf: I got a lot out of Mrs. Dalloway, but I found Woolf's writing tricky and dense, requiring a lot of attention. It made me a little hesitant to try more of her work unless I'm really feeling like I want intellectual exercise.

Mary Roach: I've got her more-famous Stiff coming up in the next couple months, but my first of hers was actually Spook, which I thought handled a tricky subject with humor and grace.

David Sedaris: I've got most of his other books already because they're super easy to find second-hand and have come so widely recommended, so I'm glad I found Me Talk Pretty One Day very funny indeed.

Tana French: I finally read In The Woods, the first of her Dublin Murder Squad series, and although mystery is outside of my usual wheelhouse I loved it and can't wait to tackle the rest of them!

Joan Didion: I very much liked her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking (which also inspired a good discussion at book club when it was our read last month), and her beautifully sparse prose inspired me to acquire several of her other works.

George Saunders: I've got one of his short story collections banging around here somewhere, but I read (and loved) Lincoln in the Bardo for book club this year first.

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Top Ten Tuesday: New-To-Me Authors I Read In 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Recommendations For Feminists

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! I am so excited that Top Ten Tuesday is back, y'all! Putting these lists together is honestly so fun, both to do for my own blog and reading what other people have come up with. Anyways, today's topic is recommendations for a particular group of people, and I thought I'd put together some recommendations for feminists. I've tried to mix it up with both fiction and nonfiction so no matter what you read, you can find something here.

Bossypants: Tina Fey's book is one of the few comedian-writes-collection-of-amusing-essays that I thought actually lived up to the hype. It's not 100% on, but it's funny and insightful and a must-read for being an ambitious female in the world.

Too Fat Too Slutty Too Loud: This recently-published collection of essays from Buzzfeed's peerless Anne Helen Petersen profiles the ways in which famous women exemplify culture prohibitions against being too much, and how they've escaped (or in some cases, haven't) from the consequences for violation. Anyone interested in both pop culture and feminism should get their paws on this.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: She was Queen of England for only about 1000 days hundreds of years ago but she's been a subject of fascination ever since. Susan Bordo chronicles the ways that the perception of this long-ago royal have changed over time, reflecting overall shifts in how women are treated.

Under The Banner of Heaven: I considered adding Reading Lolita in Tehran instead of this book here, in the "religious fundamentalism leading to oppression of women" slot. But I think it's easy for white people in the Western world to look at a Muslim country in the Middle East and point the finger at them for oppressing women. It happens right here in the US, too. This is the best Krakauer, for my money.

My Horizontal Life: Sure, it's easy to respect "good" women, like Tina Fey, who for all her genuine feminist bona fides is still quite traditional in many ways. It's more challenging to look at a woman like Chelsea Handler, who is perceived as having slept her way into her E! show that she did before her current Netflix gig. But feminism includes women who don't necessarily do things the way other women approve of, and Handler's stories about being drunk and on drugs and sleeping with who she wanted when she wanted are pretty funny in her first memoir.

The Handmaid's Tale: This feminist classic has been recently revitalized by the Hulu production of it, and none too soon because it's just as relevant as when it was first published. Most chilling is the way that not only men control women, but the ways in which other women's cooperation is necessary and so easily given.

Americanah: Being a woman in the world is one thing, but we can't forget the necessity of considering how other identities intersect with femaleness. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel focuses on an African female experience, both in Africa and America, and her protagonist Ifemelu is as rich and complicated and ambiguous a character as any ever written, regardless of gender.

So Big: A recent book club exploration of a Willa Cather novel reminded me of how much I liked this book, which won Edna Ferber a Pulitzer Prize. She crafts a story of a woman who faces long odds and disappointments and changes in fate with good humor and cheer, without being saccharine about it, and it's a testament to women's perseverance.

The Group: For better or worse, many women I know are as much defined by their friendships as they are by their romantic relationships. It's not really a progressive view of femaleness in that the women involved are often catty, but it's worth reminding ourselves that the struggles we face (work or family life, breast or bottle) are ones that have been around for generations.

Wild Magic: For a younger reader wanting to explore female-driven adventures, any Tamora Pierce series will do. But for me, the series kicked off by this book was my favorite...I've always loved animals, so Daine's brand of nature-based power was right up my alley.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Recommendations For Feminists

Top Ten Tuesday: Best Books I've Read In 2017 So Far

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Now that we're about halfway through 2017, this week we're looking back at the reading year so far and picking out the highlights. I've read some really great books this year...here are my ten faves for now and looking forward to even more in the next six months!

Americanah: This is a book I've had on my shelf for a long time and expected to love and once I read it, I did love it. It's so nice when a book meets expectations that have been set very high from years of praise. 

Between The World and Me: This was a book club pick (it was on my own TBR but got scooted up the list) and it's a searing indictment of race relations in the US. I found it occasionally difficult to read but all the more important for it. Extremely powerful. 

The Bear and the Nightingale: This debut novel, set in a fantasy version of medieval Russia where the creatures of Slavic folklore are real, was something I read early in the year that I just loved. Fantastic world, awesome heroine, solid writing. And the sequel comes out in December!

City of Thieves: Another Russian-set book, this one takes place during the siege of Leningrad. A Jewish teenager and a young Cossack army officer, both in trouble for reasons of their own, are sent on a seemingly impossible quest for food in the starving city. Adventure ensues. Man-quests don't tend to be my happy place but this is very charming. 

Chemistry: Another debut, this book's nameless narrator is a Ph.D. student at a top tier university when she has a mental breakdown that forces her to really think about her life and what she wants from it for the first time instead of just following the path set out for her. It's easy to read, but packs a punch.

Moonglow: My first-ever Michael Chabon novel and I loved it and want to read more of his work. I've heard that Kavalier and Clay is his best and that just so happens to be coming up reallllly soon on my TBR!

Big Little Lies: I still haven't watched the show, but it seemed interesting enough that I snagged a copy of the book. This genre tends to be not my deal, but I did enjoy the mommy wars with surprisingly dark themes. 

If We Were Villains: This was clearly inspired by The Secret History and while it didn't live up to that book's greatness, this was an enjoyable read nonetheless. 

Mrs. Dalloway: You know those books that you read and enjoy and can already anticipate reading again and getting more out of every time you do? This is one of those.

The Man Without A Face: More Russia, but this time non-fiction, about the rise of Vladimir Putin. Topical and timely and fascinating. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Best Books I've Read In 2017 So Far

A Month In The Life: January 2017

And the first month of 2017 is already ending! It feels like it went really fast...maybe because it did, maybe because my busy season at work starts in just about a week and I'm not feeling quite ready for the long days it'll bring (expect diminished reading around these parts for the next four months). Let's look back at the last 31 days, shall we?

In Books...

• Where'd You Go, Bernadette: This book was a big sleeper hit a few years ago, but it did nothing for me. When I found out Maria Semple had been a writer for Arrested Development, it made more sense: this kind of absurdist humor would be a lot more palatable on-screen, but on the page it made me hate nearly everyone involved. 
• The King Must Die: Mary Renault's novel takes the mythological story of Theseus and tries to create a real-world story (read: no Olympian gods, for the most part) that might have given rise to the myth. It's good, but it's not especially compelling.
• American Heiress (ARC): I'm a big fan of Toobin, but I didn't find this to be his best work. I definitely learned a lot about the Patty Hearst/SLA situation that I didn't know before, but the bulk of the book was about her life with the SLA and not about the trial, which is what I was more interested in. 
• Americanah: This book has gotten a lot of buzz, and I was worried it was going to be one of those situations where my expectations were so high I'd inevitably be disappointed. But I completely loved this, the prose and the story, and it's something I'd already consider a favorite.
• The Wars of the Roses: Since I've been reading Philippa Gregory's The Cousins' War series, I wanted a primer on the actual history of the dispute and the players. As always with Alison Weir, this was well-researched and very readable. 
• Snow: My book club book for the month, I admired Orhan Pamuk's novel more than I actually enjoyed it. Its central plot points circle around some of the underlying tensions that make up the conflicts between the East and the West, and reading about them from the perspective of a writer from Turkey (a nation that straddles both worlds) provided interesting insights.
• Helter Skelter: This true-crime classic about the Manson murders was written by the lead prosecutor, so it would be hard to imagine a more informed source. And while his writing is engaging and it's an interesting story, it gets a little eye-rolling at points when he makes sure you know how much work he did and how great he was. Not that he didn't both work really hard and do really well, but still. If you're at all interested in the Family, it's a great read.

In Life...

•  Rang in the New Year: This year it was just me, my husband, and our pug at home. I've never been super into the whole going-out-for-New-Years bit, so hanging out with my two favorite guys and and being able to walk just outside the door to see the downtown fireworks (we live just a handful of blocks away) was perfect
• Made it through #nvflood17: Northern Nevada is fortunately not burdened with much in the way of severe weather (we don't even have a tornado siren), but one thing we do get are floods. A heavy storm front moved through the weekend after the New Year and there was significant flooding all over the area, and even avalanches (more than one!) up in the mountains. We were in a safe area, though, so we just chilled out and watched the rain come down. 
• State of the State: The first real event of the political season that's about to kick off, this sets the tone for the upcoming legislative session and a lot of the lobbyists come up for it, so we all get to see our other-side-of-the-state friends for the first time in a while!
• Work holiday trip: My work does a holiday long weekend trip every year, and this year we went to Phoenix! I'd never been before and Drew and I had a fantastic time. Since we've got offices there, Las Vegas, and Reno, it's often the only time of year the entire company gets together and it's good to catch up with what's going on work-wise everywhere else and reinforce our social bonds.

One Thing

•  Being in my 30s, especially living in a dry climate, I've gotten much more aware of skincare lately. And no one does skincare like Koreans, who have a whole ten-step process to take care of your largest organ. A good place to start with K-beauty, if you're interested, are sheet masks, which are serum/essence soaked cotton masks you lay on your clean skin for about 15-30 minutes. The Soko Glam 7-Day Sheet Mask Challenge Set gives you a variety pack to experiment with and find favorites! This isn't an affiliate link or an advertisement of any sort, I just bought it and liked it and thought I'd share.

Gratuitous Pug Picture

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A Month In The Life: January 2017