Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved but Never Reviewed

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's subject is books we love but have never reviewed. I've only really reviewed the books I've read in the last couple years, so this is basically a list of my all-time favorites.

Lolita: The most incredible writing, the fact that it was written in Nabokov's third language makes me want to weep for my insufficiency with just the one. I have so many thoughts about this book and why it is brilliant.

The Secret History: I genuinely believe that this is a book that everyone could enjoy. It has rich characters and an intriguing plot. It begins with a crime and then winds back in time to show you how it happened, and then what happened after, which keeps the suspense up. I have re-read it so many times since I was introduced to it in AP English!

Catherine, Called Birdy: A childhood favorite, mostly for the decidedly un-ladylike heroine at its center.

The Virgin Suicides: I love this book so much, it's so beautiful and such a well-realized portrait of a time and place. As a native metro Detroiter, I am especially invested in the story.

The Golden Compass: Another one that deeply appealed to childhood me in part because of the female hero who refused to be docile and compliant and what a girl "should" be. The sequels are also great, but the original volume is where my heart really lies.

1984: I first read this in 7th or 8th grade, I think, and I believe it influenced my early interest in politics...and my sometimes-cynical perspective on it.

In Cold Blood: This is not just my favorite work of nonfiction by a country mile, it's one of my all-time favorite books. I know there are concerns with Capote's reporting, but anyone expecting 100% accuracy out of any nonfiction book outside of an academic history is naive (and even then, decisions about information to include v. what to leave out can influence the perspective of the reader).

The God of Small Things: Another book where the luminous writing is what drew me in, and then the heartbreaking story and richly drawn rendering of a family and their relationships elevated it to my top tier.

Anna Karenina: This is half here because I thought War & Peace would be too pretentious, half because it's an incredible book in its own right. Such incredible depth of characters, and the story is actually pretty straightforward but really beautifully told.

The Remains of the Day: This book is just...exquisite. It's elegant and reveals itself with such heartbreaking steadiness. I was a wreck by the end in the best possible way.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved but Never Reviewed

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Opening Lines

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about the very first words with which an author tries to snag you. That's right, it's time for favorite opening lines. You only get one chance at a first sentence, and here are ten of my favorites!

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." (The Hobbit)

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." (1984)

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina)

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (Pride and Prejudice)

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." (Lolita)

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." (Mrs. Dalloway)

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." (The Bell Jar)

"The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation." (The Secret History)

"On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope." (The Virgin Suicides)

"In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini." (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Opening Lines

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Could Use Better Titles Than Just A Name

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! While last week we highlighted books with awesome titles, this week we're considering the opposite: books with titles that could use a little more oomph. For me, I've always thought that just naming your book after a person in that book is a little bit of a cop-out (unless, of course, you've written a biography). So here are ten books with names as titles that I think could use an upgrade.

Emma: Austen's most famous works use Ye Olde Ampersand, so how about calling this one Love & Matrimony after the central theme?

Rebecca: It's symbolic that the book is named after a character who, though never alive during the narrative, dominates its events. But I would sort-of cheat and name it after its main character: The Second Mrs. deWinter, which I think creates intrigue about the first.

Lolita: Despite being the title character, young Delores isn't actually the main focus of the book (rather, it's narrator Humbert Humbert). I think No Choice would be a good replacement for this one...Humbert's desperate obsession makes him feel as though he doesn't have one, while she actually doesn't.

Anna Karenina: Anna herself is a fascinating character, but I might call this one instead The Train, paying homage to both the driving passion of the central affair as well as the importance of trains in several scenes.

Jane Eyre: This is a great book about coming of age, with strong gothic overtones and a person locked in an attic. The title coveys none of that. I'd crib an episode title from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and title this Becoming.

Macbeth: Let's just go with the theater tradition and official re-dub this The Scottish Play.

Tess of the D'urbervilles: The subtitle of this book is "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented". That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, so how about Purity?

Nefertiti: This novel was a little underwhelming for me, but a title like that isn't going to help it stand out. For all the emphasis the book places on the physical loveliness of the Egyptian queen, For Beauty would make a more intriguing title.

Olive Kitteridge: I've actually always liked it when books that are short story collections (which is very much what this is, "novel" or no) are named after one of the stories within. It's not the strongest entry, but A Little Burst is a story that's both representative of the whole and that makes a good name.

Mildred Pierce: This is a noir, but the name Mildred has always made me think of mildew, which just makes it sound damp. It would be better served leaning into its potboiler style, so I'd call it From Bad to Worse.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Could Use Better Titles Than Just A Name

Top Ten Tuesday: Thought-Provoking Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're focusing on quotes from books. Specifically, quotes that are either inspirational or thought-provoking. I'm too cynical to get deep into inspiration, but I love a book that makes me think, so here are ten quotes from books that get my brain going.

"Does the walker chose the path, or the path the walker?"- Sabriel

"Life is fleeting. Don't waste a single moment of your precious life. Wake up now! And now! And now!"- A Tale For The Time Being

"Things can change in a day"- The God of Small Things

"Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously."- Jitterbug Perfume

"Is it really possible to tell someone else what one feels?"- Anna Karenina

“To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect”- Sense and Sensibility

“After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?”- Remains of the Day

“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”- In Cold Blood

“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”- The Handmaid's Tale

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”- Seeing Voices

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Top Ten Tuesday: Thought-Provoking Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday: Classics You Shouldn't Be Intimidated By

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! Since I shuffled a bunch of December topics, here's the freebie I was supposed to do like two weeks ago! Since today is Christmas and some of you may have gotten gift cards, and next week is New Years and some of you may be resolving to "read more classics" (a resolution I made for years before I actually started reading them), here are ten that aren't nearly as intimidating as you might think!

Emma: If you've seen Clueless, you know the basic gist of Emma. A wealthy, pretty, smart young woman decides to play matchmaker for a less fortunate friend, and experiences her own romantic complications. It's a great way to get introduced to Austen's sharp satire and wit.

Anna Karenina: Yes, it's super duper long. And yes, there are some boring parts about farming in rural Russia. But this book has a love rhombus that rivals any in a modern-day YA book and tells an absolutely fantastic story.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A modern feminist audience will recognize the slut-shaming, madonna/whore complex, and double standards that Thomas Hardy presents as the nonsense they are.

Great Expectations: Dickens was paid by the word, and it shows in all his work. But this, for me, is his best, and once you read it you'll recognize it as the source for a lot of other literature. It is funny and smart and full of incredible characters.

The Picture of Dorian Grey: This story about the rot that can fester beneath a perfectly curated facade and how people often mistake visual appeal for moral goodness is definitely relevant to our time.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Anyone who was a bookish child will likely recognize themselves in Francie Nolan, and her journey towards maturity is a deeply affecting one.

Jane Eyre: I'm not big into Gothic lit, so I avoided this one for a long time, but it turns out it's an amazing story about a young woman determined to make her way in the world despite many obstacles...and there is a truly WTF plot point that's fun to talk about!

1984: There's a reason this one gets referenced all the time lately...in a world where "alternate facts" are trumpeted, this has very real lessons for us all.

Vanity Fair: This book is lengthy and there are some boring-ish bits, but Becky Sharp's scheming her way up the social ladder is entertaining. The OG scammer.

The Age of Innocence: This is truly A+ drama about super rich people in Old New York having romantical problems.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Classics You Shouldn't Be Intimidated By

Top Ten Tuesday: Best Character Names

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're looking at the characters with the best names. It would be so easy to go with just girl's names, since it seems like authors often get more creative with them, or stick to the realm of fantasy where there's even more flexibility, but I decided to try to limit myself to one name from any given series and included my favorite five for girls and five for boys!

Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games): Many fantasy-style novels use names that are similar to ones we know and use, but with a twist. This one falls right in line with that, but it's particularly well-done because the rhythm and balance of it is pleasing.

Anna Karenina (Anna Karenina): Maybe it's the repetition of the "n" sound and the "a" vowels that tie it together so well, but this one just flows beautifully.

Georgiana Darcy (Pride and Prejudice): She's only really a bit character, but I've just always loved the elegance of Georgiana as a name. It feels more sophisticated and unexpected than Georgina.

Vianne Rocher (Chocolat): I like the link to the famous Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and Vianne is lovely, and they work really well together.

Daenarys Targaryen (A Game of Thrones): A Song of Ice and Fire had to get in here somewhere, and the distinctive majesty of this name is instantly identifiable with the series.

Philip Pirrip (Great Expectations): Both names come close to being palindromes, and echo each other in a way that should sound cheesy but instead has a bright ring.

Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter): There are so many names from the Harry Potter universe that could have made it on here, but the soft consonants of the headmaster's name, its very old-fashioned first name and to my American ear, very British-sounding surname, make it my favorite.

Tristran Thorn (Stardust): Again with the "fantasy using slightly-changed normal names", but I like the stutter-step of "Tristran" instead of the familiar "Tristan", and both names sound enough alike but are still different that they hang together well.

Bilbo Baggins (The Hobbit): This is just such a delightfully hobbit-y name.

Newland Archer (The Age of Innocence): This has the kind of moneyed, old-fashioned aura that fits this Old New York character perfectly.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Best Character Names

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Surprised Me

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're going through books that surprised us. I'm going to split mine up, and highlight first five books that surprised me by how good they were, and then five that I was surprised to find I did not enjoy.

Happy Surprised

Anna Karenina: Never having really read Russian lit, I thought I didn't like it because it was too long and boring. And then I read this book and discovered that I really did love Tolstoy. Both this and War & Peace are a million pages long and amazing.

Moby-Dick: Again, a book with a reputation of over-long snoozer, this time about some dude obsessed with a whale that ends up killing him, the end. But this book is actually delightful and has a ton of information about whales and whaling, religion, seafaring life, and so much more, as well as creating some truly unforgettable characters.

Jane Eyre: I thought this was just a gothic romance, which has never held that much appeal for me, because all you ever hear about is Mr. Rochester and his crazy wife in the attic and the looooove story. I was happy to find out that this is much more a book about a young woman discovering herself and making her own place in the world and very much liked it.

The Rosie Project: I usually shy away from romances (no offense to those of you who love them, they're just generally not for me), but I'd read such good things about this one and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I really did enjoy reading it! It's just incredibly charming and a breezy, pleasant book.

So Big: I never would have picked this up but for its Pulitzer Prize (I'd never even heard of it before), because a story about a young woman being widowed with a baby son and scraping out an existence in midwestern farm country doesn't sound like something I'd really like. But Selina DeJong is an incredible character and I got totally sucked in and this book is really really good, y'all.

Not Happy Surprised

Don Quixote: I've gone on a classics kick over the past several years, and found that I actually liked a lot more of them than I thought I would. And then I got to Don Quixote and words cannot adequately describe how much I hated it and it was so long and reading it was like torture.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette: Everyone I knew who'd read this book described it as super funny and really good. And then I read it, and found its cavalier treatment of mental instability horrifying. I know they're making a movie of it and I think it might work onscreen, but it fell so very flat on the page for me.

Crazy Rich Asians: This is kind of along the same lines...rave reviews for a frothy fun romp and I mostly wondered if Kevin Kwan had ever been in a relationship before, because the one at the center of the book was deeply unrealistic and not in a good way.

Fahrenheit 451: I loved many of the dystopian classics I read in high school, and I wanted to love this one (it's about book burning! how could I not love it?) and I found it so boring I honestly can barely remember it.

Yes Please: This pains me, because I love Amy Poehler so much and wanted to just love every second of her book but it did absolutely nothing for me at all. It was neither interesting nor funny nor insightful. It was just kind of there.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Surprised Me

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're highlighting our favorite quotes from books. I love highlighting/dog-earing my books to remind me of pieces of writing I found particularly meaningful, so I enjoyed going back through some of my favorites and pulling out words I especially loved to share with y'all!

"Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." (Lolita)

This book is FULL of gorgeous writing. Hands-down the most beautifully written book I've ever read. But this part of the intro has always stuck with me.

"Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn't even had. Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-sicle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn't delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil's night." (The Virgin Suicides)

I re-read this book, one of my all-time favorites, recently for my book club, and this passage has always struck me as both representative of the quality of writing in this book as a whole as well as capturing something real about the downswing Detroit experienced.

"Midway through the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the true way was lost." (Inferno)

This line has been translated many different ways, but I've always loved the way the copy I studied in college did it.

"All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina)

Obviously this one is a classic. It's not exactly true, but has the ring and spirit of truth, which counts for as much anyways.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." (1984)

This book was so prescient in so many ways and this is one of the truest things in it.

"'I wish it need not have happened in my time,' said Frodo. 'So do I,' said Gandalf, 'and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'" (The Fellowship of the Ring)

Basically my personal motto when I start feeling like life's unfair. In many ways, our circumstances are beyond our control and all you can do about it is figure out how to make the best of it.

"Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring." (Breakfast at Tiffany's)

I'm one of those people who's never quite been able to let go of that sense of the new school year starting as the real beginning of the year, though my last school year started in 2009.

"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (The Great Gatsby)

This is my literal favorite line in all of literature. The only thing that rivals its perfection as an ending is the end of Six Feet Under (don't @ me).

"Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win." (The Shining)

If you've only ever seen the movie (which I love), I'd recommend reading the book as well. The latter tells a story not about a haunted hotel, but a haunted man and how his internal demons are played upon until he loses the battle to keep them at bay and it's really really good.

"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously." (Jitterbug Perfume)

This is one of my favorite books, and while Tom Robbins isn't always an author that it's easy to pull a quote from (it's more about the writing as a whole), I love this one and it's something I think about when I start feeling down.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books I'm Thankful For

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic, with Thanksgiving in two days, is books that we're thankful for. This isn't usually how I think about books (I tend to think about good to bad, not more to less thankful), but I pondered for a bit, and here are ten books that make me grateful.

A Wrinkle In Time: For teaching me it was okay to be a prickly adolescent girl, and that I could still be the hero even if I was.

Anna Karenina: For teaching me that I didn't hate Russian literature (just Dostoyevsky).

Memoirs of a Geisha: For being a wonderful book, and then inspiring me to think more critically about own voices.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: For inspiring in me a lifelong fascination with psychology and the brain.

Lolita: For teaching me that the English language can be playful and unexpected.

To Kill A Mockingbird: For showing and not telling its lessons about injustice and being all the more powerful for it.

Gone With The Wind: For teaching me that sometimes the movie is better.

Harry Potter: For being magical.

The Hunger Games: For reminding me that reading outside of my usual genre lines can be very rewarding indeed.

The Handmaid's Tale: For making the misogyny behind male control of female reproduction blindingly obvious.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books I'm Thankful For

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Love That Are At Least Ten Years Old

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This is a topic that was MADE for me, since I am a devoted backlist reader. I tried to mix in both books I've read several times over the years, and books that I've read more recently but that I'm looking forward to revisiting. There's definitely something exciting about reading the new buzzy book that's on everyone's mind, but there are so many amazing books that are older but just as worthy of your time. Here are ten of my favorites!

The Virgin Suicides: Middlesex might have been the award-winner, but I've always enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides' debut more. It's tightly constructed and beautifully told and I've been on a months-long mission to make it a book club read because I'd love to have a reason to revisit it yet again.

The Secret History: Every campus novel I read gets compared to this incredible story about a group of students who commit a murder...and none has quite measured up to the engrossing story and well-drawn characters of Donna Tartt's book.

Anna Karenina: I'd made a stab at this one in high school and only gotten through about 50 pages, but when I picked it back up a few years ago I ate it up. The portions about farming get a little dry but the bulk of the novel is incredibly good.

Emma: Austen, like Tolstoy, is an author I only was able to get a handle on later in life. I'm going to confess my unpopular opinion that Pride & Prejudice is overrated, and instead recommend Emma. If you've ever seen Clueless, you'll recognize the broad strokes of this story of a wannabe matchmaker.

The Namesake: I'd heard great things about this novel for years before I finally picked it up, but I'm glad I did. If you like books that are all about delving deeply into a character, you'll love this one about the son of Indian immigrants who hates his name.

All The King's Men: If you pay attention to politics for long enough, you'll probably realize that there are very few people in it who are either all bad or all good. This story is told through the eyes of a cynical reporter who becomes a right-hand-man for a governor and watches the once-idealistic candidate become a ruthless operator.

1984: I first read this book when I was about 12 and even though I didn't really get all of it, I got enough to understand its timeless message about government manipulation and control of information. It's a book I get something new out of every time I revisit it.

The Great Gatsby: I loathed this classic when I first read it as a junior in high school. I thought everyone involved was selfish and whiny. But when I picked it up again in college, I fell in love with its powerful language and indelible characters.

In Cold Blood: The first true crime novel, this book tells the story of a heinous murder in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, and the men who committed it, and what happened to them. It's almost impossible to put down.

The Stranger Beside Me: Another true crime classic, this brought Ann Rule to immediate prominence in the genre as she recounted working at a suicide crisis call center along a handsome young man named Ted Bundy as a series of murders swept Washington.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Love That Are At Least Ten Years Old

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Kept Me Up Late To Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's theme is "one sitting books". Now I read a lot (obviously), but I almost never read a book in one sitting. That's just not the way I do things. So rather, in the spirit of the theme, I've made my list out of books that kept me up late to read. I'm usually pretty good about putting my book down at bedtime, because I'm one of those people who doesn't function well after a bad night of sleep. But sometimes, I'm just too into it and I can't make myself do the smart thing and get back to it tomorrow. So here are ten books that kept me up late at night to read them!

The Queen of the Night: Even though I'm usually a character-over-plot reader, I could not get enough of this plot-heavy historical fiction mystery. I kept promising myself just one more chapter until I went to sleep, and then one more, and one more...

The Last One: This book's story, about a woman on a reality TV survival show when a deadly pandemic strikes, deconstructs the way we respond to these kinds of shows and the action is hard to tear yourself away from. I loved this book.

Green Girl: This was a very recent read, and even though I didn't actually like it that much, I found it very difficult to turn away from the tale of a lost young American woman in London trying to figure out the world.

Dead Until Dark: All of the books in the Southern Vampire Mysteries did this for me, honestly. They're breezy and light and so easy to get sucked into and hard to put down.

Gone Girl: Didn't we all get totally drawn into this book when we read it? The mystery of the first half, and the twist, and then wondering how it'll all end up...how could you sleep before you find out how it resolves?

Anna Karenina: I found this gigantic Russian tome to be incredibly compelling. I finished it in about 5 days, which meant a few days of less-than-ideal resting but I couldn't tear myself away from Anna's tragic story.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Before I finally picked the first of these Swedish mystery/thrillers, I thought they couldn't possibly live up to the hype. But then I opened the first one, and found it really hard to close it again until it was over.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Ok, fellow nerds who were growing up in the Harry Potter midnight-release-party era, you gonna pretend like you didn't get the book and then immediately stay up all night until you knew how the saga ended? Didn't think so.

Child 44: I grab a lot of books that look mildly interesting off of Kindle sale pages, because for 2 or 3 dollars, why not? This was a bit hard to get into at the beginning, but once it took off, it really took off and I had a really hard time turning off the light to take a break and rest

We Need To Talk About Kevin: Even though you know from the beginning how it ends, the way it unfolds is what keeps your attention. I kept turning the pages to dive deeper long past I should have been getting some shut-eye

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Kept Me Up Late To Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved Less/More Than I Thought I Would

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: book that we loved more or less than we thought we would. I decided to divvy it up: five books I liked less than I would have thought, and five I liked more! Expectations are a tricky thing...a beloved author, or favorite topic, can get you thinking that you'll really appreciate something going in, while genre preferences can give you an idea that you might not like it at all. Which is part of why I try to read broadly, because I've been both disappointed and unexpectedly delighted!

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Yes Please: I should have known better, because I've tended to find "comedian memoir in essays" to be very hit-and-miss. But I had high hopes for Amy Poehler's book, because I really enjoy her on screen. Sadly, though, this one was MUCH more miss than hit for me.

The Marriage Plot: Jeffrey Eugenides is my favorite author, both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are incredible. But his most recent book, The Marriage Plot, was more interesting than enjoyable for me. There are some thought-provoking themes here, but it was wildly uneven.

Pride and Prejudice: I love most of Jane Austen's work, but this, which seems to be most everyone's favorite Austen, didn't do it for me the way I was hoping. I found both Lizzie and Darcy pretty irritating, and while there are things to enjoy here, it didn't do as much for me as her other books have.

The Circle: Dave Eggers' novel is really interesting conceptually, with a Facebook-esque company drastically eroding the idea of privacy feeling very resonant in the modern world. But the writing is clunky and the characters are awful and I hated reading it.

The Catcher In The Rye: This is a book that I think you have to find at the right point in your life to connect with. For a budding adult, feeling lost and alienated from the world, this probably hits home hard. But for an actual adult (which is what I was when I read it), J.D. Salinger's novel about a teenager's existential crisis can be just deeply annoying.

More

Jane Eyre: I wouldn't consider "gothic romance" a genre that I tend to super enjoy, and Mr. Rochester is kind of the worst, but Jane herself is an incredible heroine and I really loved the way she grew throughout the narrative.

The Rosie Project: I actually wouldn't consider any time of romance my preferred genre, now that I think about it. But this story of an autistic professor looking for love and the so-wrong-she's-right woman that turns up in his life and was funny and charming and sweet and I really liked reading it.

Blindness: I'd seen the relentlessly depressing movie version, so I can't imagine what spurred me to take the source novel off the shelves at the local secondhand store, but I'm glad that I did. It's a difficult book to read, both in subject matter and presentation, but it was really powerful and I had a hard time putting it down.

Lords of Discipline: As a woman raised in a three-person family that consisted of me, my mother, and my sister, I often struggle to connect with material that's strongly rooted in masculinity. And what's more masculine than an all-boys military academy? But this coming-of-age story is written beautifully by Pat Conroy and is rooted in a very human sympathy that will appeal to any reader.

Anna Karenina: Russian literature has a reputation for being boring and a dreadful slog. And while perhaps Dostoevsky might deserve that reputation, Leo Tolstoy does not. Anna Karenina is a the story of a woman trapped inside the strictures of a society that can't and won't allow her to live as she wants and even though it's a million pages long I finished it in less than a week because I couldn't put it down.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved Less/More Than I Thought I Would

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Set Outside The US

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: books set outside the US! I think a lot of us (or maybe just me?) tend to read fiction set within our own country...it's just instantly familiar, there's no learning curve. Thankfully I do sort my books on Goodreads by country setting, so I'm going to try to do no more than one from each country!



The Kite Runner (Afghanistan): I think most of us have read this one by now, yes? If you've somehow managed to not, I definitely suggest that you do because this story about friendship and guilt and what we owe the people we love is universal and heartbreaking and a must-read.

Number the Stars (Denmark): I'll admit that it's been a hot second (read: well over a decade) since I read this book about a young Danish girl whose family helps a Jewish family escape into Sweden to avoid concentration camps. But it's a testament to how powerful this book is that I still remember and think fondly of it all these years later.

The Remains of the Day (England): I loved this book so much. I'm going to keep talking about it forever. It's beautiful and sad and wonderful and everyone should read it.

Les Miserables (France): I'm inclined towards theater geekery, but I've actually never seen the musical based off of this book. I did see the terrible movie, though. With all due respect to the musical, I have to believe the book is better, just because a book clocking in at well over 1000 pages is inevitably richer than a 2-2.5 hour musical. There are long passages about economic fairness that are still deeply relevant to the world we live in, and the sprawling story is very well-told.

A Suitable Boy (India): I read this either the summer before college or the summer after my freshman year, I can't remember which. My mom had a copy, and I looked at its 1400 pages and figured it should keep me occupied for a while. It did more than keep me occupied, I found it consuming and read it constantly until it was done. It's about family and love and marriage and the Partition of India and it's incredible. Yes, it takes forever to read. Worth it.

Memoirs of a Geisha (Japan): I read this book so many times in high school and college that my original copy has a cover with corners missing. I know he had an issue with his primary source, geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who sued him for naming her in his acknowledgements when he'd promised not to and later wrote her own book. But I still wish he'd ever written anything else, because I loved this book.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Netherlands): Another high school favorite! I'd actually already liked the painting, and this fictionalized history behind it of a young woman who gets drawn into the world of painter Johannes Vermeer was really enjoyable. I re-read it several times and it's still on my shelf, so it's probably time for another re-read!

Anna Karenina (Russia): I used to think I hated Russian lit after some failed attempts at this book and some Dostoevsky in high school. Turns out I was just too young for Anna Karenina (still hate Dostoevsky though), because when I read it a few years ago I blew through it's 1200 pages in like two weeks. Tolstoy is amazing.

Cry the Beloved Country (South Africa): My high school AP English teacher was a native Louisianan and had the accent to prove it, but she always encouraged us to read diverse books. And in some cases, MADE us read them: we had to choose between two books to read about the Black female experience and the Black male experience (we had to read at least one in each category), and Cry, The Beloved Country was mandatory reading for everyone. This novel's themes of individuals bridging the deep racial divisions of their country through love and forgiveness resonates with me still today.

Let Me In (Sweden): I like vampire media. Buffy. Twilight. I never got much into Anne Rice, but not everything is for everyone. I actually saw the movie first, which is really great and creepy as hell, and then when the book went on Kindle sale I picked it up. It's just as unsettling and delicately told, a haunting twist on the vampire lore you think you know.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Set Outside The US

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This is another hard topic for me! I generally don't shift much in opinion once I've made my mind up about something (it takes me a while to get to the mind-made-up part though). Although I've historically done a lot of re-reading, it's not been so much a thing for me recently, so it's hard for my opinions to shift too much. But here's my best shot at it:



The Great Gatsby: This was the first thing that came to my mind, because when I read it as a high schooler I hated it, but when I read it again after I'd been in college a few years I loved it (still do). While it may be appropriate for high school on a prose level, I think it's hard to appreciate this novel without some rough life experiences behind you.

Anna Karenina: This feels like cheating a little, because the first time I tried to read this (in high school), I dropped it about 100 pages in because it felt soooo boring. So I didn't actually read it the first time, but when I picked it up a few years ago, I loved it and flew through it in like, a week. Another one where life experience really helps connect you to the novel and characters.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: I legitimately loved every single entry of the Harry Potter series as I read them when I was a teenager. And when I re-read the whole series a couple years ago, I loved them again. Except for this one, which I've started thinking of as Harry Potter and the Teenage Angst. So. Much. Stupid. Drama. Which is honestly probably fairly realistic for that age group, but was so tiresome to read about.

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: I haven't actually re-read this one since high school, when I loved it. But when I think back to it, I wonder what all the fuss was: as hard as it tries to convince you it's about a bunch of devil-may-care sassy dames, it's actually about a bunch of self-centered overgrown adolescents who are bound together by their love of making excuses for themselves. I have no desire to ever read this again.

The Prince: I tried to read this in high school and thought it was incredibly boring. A more recent re-read shows it to be a really astute look into governance, which I wasn't as interested in then but I am interested in now, so I think it's more about my preferences shifting than anything else.

Uglies: I got pretty into this series early in college (my younger sister had the books and I borrowed them), but looking back on them, it's hard to believe I took books with something called "The Pretty Committee" seriously. I don't think they're awful or anything, but I'd no longer be inclined to read or recommend them.

Tuesdays With Morrie: I found this really touching when I first read it when I was 18 or 19, but reading it a few years later, I was dismayed to find it mawkishly sentimental and trite. I grew up reading Mitch Albom's columns in The Detroit News and he's a talented sportswriter, but I don't want to read any of his books again.

Go Ask Alice: Not that I would have been the type of kid to get into drugs, but I found this really horrifying and realistic when I read it when I was around 13 or so. It was based on a true story...or so I thought, until an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Liar City, when they exposed it as complete baloney.

Flowers In The Attic: I actually read this whole series as a teenager and loved their over the top drama. When the first novel went on sale on the Kindle for $2 recently, I thought I'd revisit it. They do not hold up and I couldn't get more than a few chapters in.

Evening: This is a fairly recent one...I read it right after law school, after seeing and enjoying the movie, and really liked it, finding the story heartbreaking and poignant. When I was cleaning out my bookshelves right before my last move, I remembered it was about a woman who never really gets over a one night stand at a wedding and though it's written well, I couldn't fathom ever wanting to read it again.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed

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