Top Ten Tuesday: Book Titles with Numbers In Them

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're looking at books, and numbers. Specifically, at books with numbers in their titles. Here are ten of my favorite numerically-titled books.

Hyperbole and a Half: About half the content of this book was already freely available on Allie Brosh's blog of the same name, but it's hysterically funny and I highly recommend it. I think of her often and hope she is well.

The Last One: I absolutely loved this book from a couple years ago that tells the story of a woman trying to survive an apocalypse that she thinks is just a part of an elaborately staged reality survival show she's filming when a virus devastates the world.

The Two Towers: This does suffer a bit from "middle book" syndrome, but honestly all three of the books in The Lord of the Rings are great.

Three and Out: The issues that have plagued the Michigan football program over the past decade or so have been agonizing as a longtime fan, but John U Bacon's book about the Rich Rodriguez years is fascinating.

Daisy Jones and the Six: This "Behind the Music" style book about a Fleetwood Mac-esque band's rise and fall just completely captivated me.

The Nine: This look at the Supreme Court in the last years of the Rehnquist Court is a fascinating peek behind the scenes.

Station Eleven: This has become a go-to recommendation, the end of the world book for people who don't like end of the world books. Haunting and elegant, this is a modern classic.

12 Years A Slave: An absolutely searing account of becoming a slave, written by a free black man who was kidnapped and sold. The movie is just as good.

Child 44: I'm not always super into fast-paced thrillers, but this one scooped me up and took me for a wild ride through Soviet Russia.

1984: An all-time favorite, I've been re-reading this one since I was 12 and it still holds up.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Book Titles with Numbers In Them

Top Ten Tuesday: Wintry Reads

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! Now that it's December, it's basically wintertime (I know it's not like "official" winter for another couple weeks but it's cold already). So as the weather outside starts to get frightful...here are some books where the weather is also frightful!

The Bear and the Nightingale: The first of the four books on this list that are set in Russia, where I basically assume it's always winter. I've picked books where the wintery-ness is an actual real part of the plot and not just assumed! A frost demon plays a central role here, so winter is very much present.

War and Peace: So much of this book happens during the winter, because...Russia.

City of Thieves: That this book, and its central search for eggs, takes place during the winter. The Siege of Leningrad winter, at that, so a bad one even by Russian standards.

Child 44: I read this several years ago now, so maybe it doesn't mostly take place during the winter? But I feel like I remember a lot of winter-ness and snow.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: All the Harry Potter books have Christmas scenes, but the Yule Ball in this one really makes the winter-ness of it memorable!

Lirael: Like to rest of the Clayr, Lirael lives in a glacier, in a world carved entirely from ice.

The Shining: The Torrances head to the Overlook to take care of the hotel during the long winter off-season, and anyone who's lived in an area where snow is real knows how isolating winter can be when you're snowed in.

In Cold Blood: The murder takes place on November 15th, which is technically fall rather than winter, but we all know mid-November is basically winter and there's something about this true crime classic that feels wintry to me.

Snow Falling On Cedars: The snow's right there in the title, and the image of the island community buried, even isolated under its weight, is resonant.

The Golden Compass: The portions of the book that take place at Svalbard, northern and wintry, are the ones that stick out the most in my memory.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Wintry Reads

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Really Liked But Can't Really Remember

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books we really liked at the time that have kind of faded in the memory banks. As someone who reads quite a bit, I find this happens fairly often...I have a good opinion of the book when I've finished it, and then within a couple months, I'll remember only a vague outline. Here are some books that I'd need a refresher on if I ever had to describe despite liking them when I read them.

A Brave New World: I read this in high school and thought it was incredible and I could not do more than describe the gist of it if I had to. It's going on my "to revisit on audio" list.

Under the Banner of Heaven: I hated Krakauer's Into The Wild, but loved this when I grabbed it at the airport on the way back to Alabama for my second year of law school. I remember how compelling it was, but remember few of the actual details besides the most egregious ones.

The Kite Runner: My clearest memory of this book, which I know I thought was really interesting because I'd not read fiction from that area of the world much yet (I was in college), is that an ex-boyfriend lent it to me and I prepared what I'm sure was a truly embarrassing letter about how I wanted to get back together to tuck inside when I returned it. Luckily he told me he didn't need it back when I tried to give it to him.

Memoirs of a Geisha: This is sort of cheating, because I listened to it on audio a few months back so I DO remember it now, but holy smokes I'd forgotten SO MUCH of the plot. And I'd read this multiple times, too!

Never Let Me Go: I think the themes resonated so strongly in this book that the plot kind of just fell away because it's not really about the plot, is it?

Skinny Legs and All: Like many of Tom Robbins' books, this book has multiple plot threads, so I'm not going to give myself too hard of a time about the fact that I remember little about it except how much I've liked reading it the several times I've done so.

The Lovely Bones: I read this in high school and think I re-read it once (maybe twice?) in college and other than the central conceit I could tell you almost nothing about it except that I liked it so much that it still lives on my shelf.

The Interestings: I read this only a few years ago and while this is probably the one I remember the best on this list, how little I do actually remember is extra annoying because I loved reading it so much!

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: I think my memories of this book get conflated with the movie (Blade Runner), even though I'm very clear on remembering that when I saw the movie (in college) after reading the book (in high school), the book was better.

Child 44: Another one I read fairly recently and is all fuzzy anyways! In my defense, this is a thriller and the plot is all twisty-turny so the odds were stacked against me.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Really Liked But Can't Really Remember

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