Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: things that books have made me want to do or learn about after reading them! This one was a little bit of a struggle...while I've never watched a dance movie without immediately wanting to take a dance class the next day, books don't usually inspire the same kind of "I need to go do that now!" mentality for me. But I went through my reading list and found some books that sparked a new interest for me!
To Do:
Black Beauty: Horseback riding- It was this and many other horsey books, to be honest. Like pretty much every little girl ever, I took horseback riding lessons. It never went anywhere because I'm terribly allergic to cats and most barns have cats so I'd get allergy attacks when I went, but every time I read a book about horses I feel like I should maybe start it up again. It's never too late to learn, right?
Black Star, Bright Dawn: Dogsledding- Reading about a young Native American woman who races the Iditirod made me really want to get a team of huskies of my own and hitch up a sled! I'm glad my mom never indulged this particular whim of mine, I'm sure I'd have managed to get badly hurt.
The Big Rewind: Make a mixtape- Sure, I make iTunes playlists all the time. But actually putting one together for someone else and giving it to them? Never happened. But since reading this book, I've found myself wanting to put my feelings for someone else into music and let them experience it.
The Interestings: Look up my old summer camp friends- The book revolves around a group of kids who meet at a summer camp and stay close for the rest of their lives. I went to a day camp as a kid in the summers and I made some sweeps through facebook after I read it to see whatever happened to the kids I was friends with. I'm no longer close to any of them and we're all scattered to the winds now.
The Egypt Game: Visit Egypt- The book doesn't take place there, but it fed my Egyptophilia as a kid and, along with all the other reading I did about Ancient Egypt (which was a lot), made me want to go to there. This one is still on the to-do list...I want to see the pyramids and the sphinx!
To Learn About:
The Other Boleyn Girl: Tudor England- I remember reading a book or two about Elizabeth I that I liked as a young teen, but it was when I first read Phillipa Gregory's bestseller that I really got hardcore into the Tudors, which is now one of my favorite time periods to read about in fiction and nonfiction alike.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: Psychology- When I first started college, I was a political science major. While in light of future developments (since I'm a lobbyist now and everything), I might should have stuck with that, reading Oliver Sacks' book got me passionately into psychology and made me change my major and I regret nothing.
Blonde: Marilyn Monroe- Yep, another white chick who's all into Norma Jean. How original, I know. But there's a reason there are a bazillion biographies of her out there...she's undeniably compelling. Before I read this, I'd loved many of her movies, but I'd never given much thought to the human being behind the dumb blonde routine. Turns out she was a really interesting person.
The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy- On the one hand, he was a smart, charming, and handsome young man who volunteered for the suicide call center and would seem to have a bright future ahead of him. On the other, he killed several young women in horrible ways. That kind of internal contradiction was fascinating, and I read a few other books on Bundy, but none that got at his simultaneous humanity and inhumanity the way this one did.
The Hot Zone: Deadly viruses- The plot of this book could have easily been a fictional thriller, it was so tightly constructed and urgent. I was fascinated by the people who spend their whole lives running towards the terrible sicknesses instead of away, but nothing I read in this area afterwards had the same kind of propulsive intensity.
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