Top Ten Tuesday: Shortest Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's subject is technically books we've read in one sitting, but I don't tend to read that way...I pick up books and put them down pretty frequently throughout the day. So I'm focusing instead on short books that really grabbed my attention, even if they took me more than one sitting to finish. 

Civilization and Its Discontents: Breaking the rules here almost immediately, as this isn't really a "one-sitting" kind of book despite being very short. If you've heard of Freud and have an opinion on his theories but have never actually read his work, this is a totally fascinating exploration of the tension between society and the individual.

Men Explain Things to Me: The concept behind the title essay in this collection has become widely recognizable as "mansplaining", but that doesn't mean the essay itself isn't worth reading, along with the others that touch on various aspects of the experience of being a woman in the world.

Number the Stars: A childhood favorite, I recently revisited this story about a Danish girl and the Jewish friend whose family her family helps to escape on audio and honestly I think it holds up.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: The "life-changing teacher" is a stock character in media, but this book explores a much darker side of a charismatic educator influencing young minds. 

Lord of the Flies: A lot of people have hated this since they read it in school and had to analyze the obvious symbolism, and while there is certainly room to disagree with its premise, I found it a really interesting examination of the evolution of power dynamics. 

The Sense of an Ending: The story in this novel is the kind that some authors would have indulged themselves padding out to 350 pages, but the sparseness really makes it work.

A Clockwork Orange: Deliberately meant to be hard to get into because of the use of words from its own invented language but once you do get into it, it's great!

Exit West: This one I did come very close to reading in one sitting. The story of immigrants Nadia and Saeed just flew by.

Breakfast at Tiffany's: I love the movie, it's wonderful. The original novella is different...darker, and sadder, and just an incredible piece of writing.

The Awakening: This is one that has hung with me since high school...short, but elegant and powerful.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Shortest Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Great Posters For Books Made Into Movies

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is technically supposed to be a cover freebie, but honestly I am not huge into book covers. So I'm doing a little twist on it: I'd originally thought of highlighting books that get new covers when a movie is released and the best or worst of those, but instead, I'm just going to do the posters for the movies themselves! I have either seen the movies or read the books (mostly both) for every one of these.

The Silence of the Lambs



Breakfast at Tiffany's



Gone With The Wind



The Godfather



Apocalypse Now (Heart of Darkness)



Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep)



Rosemary's Baby



Perfume



The Exorcist



A Clockwork Orange

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Top Ten Tuesday: Great Posters For Books Made Into Movies

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Food-Related Titles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, our theme is food. We're supposed to be talking about books that make us hungry, but I honestly almost never take notice of food in books. So instead, I'm bringing you ten books that use food or food-ish words in their titles!

Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers: I love this whole series (the last couple books aren't the best, but most of them are very fun)

Chocolat: One of the few books that has genuinely made me want to eat the food described within!

Eat Pray Love: I know, this book is cliche at this point, but there is so much weirdness about being a woman and one's relationship to food that I think the idea of practicing indulgence deliberately hasn't lost its power.

Kitchen Confidential: This is Anthony Bourdain's first memoir, and it is what you would expect it to be...bursting with appreciation for food and life, irreverent, and rough around the edges.

The Hunger Games: I love this series, and the first one in particular is my favorite.

In Defense of Food: This one literally says food in the title. It basically boils down to an admonition to eat mostly whole/unprocessed foods.

Breakfast at Tiffany's: The movie is lovely, but if you've never read the book I'd really encourage it! It's quite short, more of a novella, but just wonderfully put together.

Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: You can't go wrong with Chuck Klosterman on pop culture.

The Grapes of Wrath: Grapes are food! Though this book is much more concerned with citrus groves in California (also, I hated this book).

The Cider House Rules: Cider is drink rather than food, but close enough, eh? I loved the movie in high school, which inspired me to pick up the book and I have loved it ever since.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Food-Related Titles

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

Literary Adaptations...The Good

Any book snob will tell you that the book is always better than the movie. Always! I'm not a very good book snob, because I think that's baloney. A book is a different medium, but that doesn't mean that it's always the superior one. So get ready to hate, because here is my list of movies that I like more than the books they're based off of:

Practical Magic: Ok, qualifier here. This isn't a "good" movie. But it's really fun to watch. I remember being SO excited when I found out it was based off a book and eagerly tearing in...and hating it. The fun and lightness of the movie were nowhere to be found and while I've watched the movie over and over again, I've never been tempted to reopen the book.

Gone With the Wind: A lot of people love Margaret Mitchell's novel and it's widely considered a classic. But I'd seen the movie, with the absolutely perfect Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable so many times before I read it that it just couldn't measure up. The movie sheds some of the side plots that are more narratively deadweight, which helps it feel like it's moving along even through a run time long enough to require an intermission.

Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet: Reading the play is one thing, but seeing it come to vibrant life, original language and all, is awesome. Luhrmann finds the youth and impetuous energy of this play about young people and with the help of a well-cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes makes the Bard's words resonate way more than your randomly assigned classmates in 5th hour English.

The Godfather: The first two movies in this series (I pretend the third doesn't exist), tell what I will argue is the greatest American tragedy ever presented: the rise and fall of Michael Corleone. The story that Mario Puzo's The Godfather tells is a pretty boring gangster drama. Skip the book and watch the movies until you can recite them from memory instead.

Clueless: This is saying something, because I LOVE Emma. But Alicia Silverstone is so delightfully vapid but good-natured as Cher Horowitz that it's impossible to not just fall in love with her. It's not an especially faithful adaptation, but there are a lot more of the major themes and plot points in there than you might give it credit for unless you think about it. It updates and refreshes the story without being too revisionist.

The Shining: Stephen King's tale of claustrophobic horror is legitimately great, even though I honestly don't much care for horror as a genre. Either in books or movies, but Kubrick's version of the story (which shares only broad outlines with the original, much to King's dismay) is so weird and visually stunning that its domination of the source novel can't be denied. 

Breakfast At Tiffany's: Truman Capote was famously displeased with what the movie did to his novella, which is beautiful written. Instead of casting Capote's friend Marilyn Monroe as Holly Golightly as he'd wanted, they gave the role to Audrey Hepburn and completely changed the ending. But I feel like the movie works even better, somehow, as Capote didn't want it, with a staying power much more durable than the original slim volume. 

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Literary Adaptations...The Good