Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’ve Decided I’m No Longer Interested In Reading

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This topic, about books we meant to read at one point, but are no longer interested in, is a hard one for me. I rarely change my mind on reading something once it's made my list. But these are ten that I've decided to let go on.

My Absolute Darling: Bad reviews, particularly from Queen Roxane Gay, turned me off.

Heather the Totality: A trusted reviewer (Jessica Woodbury) said that it wasn't only bad, it was offensively bad and very reductive about its central female character. The book turned out to be a massive flop so this was apparently the right call.

I Am Charlotte Simmons: My rule is that I give authors two tries. If I don't like one book, it just might have been that particular book, or the time that I read it. Twice, though, almost certainly means that author isn't for me. Tom Wolfe has two strikes.

Nutshell: I'm usually here for Ian McEwan, but I heard this novel is very weird and not in a good way...in a "fetus judges the crap out of his mother" way. Which doesn't sound like anything I'd particularly enjoy.

Portnoy's Complaint: There are several other Roths on my TBR, but given that I've heard this book is basically about one guy obsessing over sex for a couple hundred pages...unless I start to read him and turn into a completionist, I think I'm good.

My Sister's Grave: This was a book I got from the Kindle First program, but realized I don't actually want to read and I don't have to.

The Killing Kind: Pretty much exactly the same as above. I don't really like mystery-thrillers, so no reason to force myself to read mediocre ones just because I got them for free.

Younger: Same.

(R)evolution: Same.

King of Taksim Square: I thought I should keep this on my list just to get some more exposure to Turkish literature, but honestly, the not-great Goodreads reviews turned me off. I'm sure there is much better Turkish work out there (I've read some of it!).

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’ve Decided I’m No Longer Interested In Reading

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books For The Second Half of 2017

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we're looking at books coming out in the back half of 2017 that we're looking forward to. I know I've mentioned this before, but I'm not a big "looking forward" reader and don't pay an especially amount of attention to new releases. So these ones tend to be a little hard for me. But here are ten books coming out later this year that I really want to read.

The King Who Had To Go: I love the British royal family and all of their drama and the abdication crisis is really the height of that kind of upper class drama so I am HERE for a book about it. 

Our Little Racket: I always wonder how much the families (especially the spouses) of white-collar criminals actually know. This novel explores the impact of a Bernie Madoff-type's downfall on his family and it seems like something I'd just love.

Heather The Totality: This was on my most-anticipated-of-the-year list, because it's the guy who made Mad Men a thing and I loved Mad Men and I will read whatever he writes. 

See What I Have Done: Lizzie Borden was tried (and acquitted, although practically no one remembers that) of the brutal axe murders of her parents, and this book looks to tell her story.

Sing, Unburied, Sing: My three years in the South left me with an enduring fascination for a part of the country to which I have not returned since I graduated from law school. This tells the story of a black family in Mississippi and I really want to read Jesmyn Ward, I've heard such great things.

Shadow of the Lions: Twisty boarding school novels are like catnip for me (probably because I went to a deeply boring public school).

Worth Dying For: I'm always interested in the symbols humans adopt and cling to, and this nonfiction looks at a symbol loaded with meaning: flags.

The Goddesses: Intense female friendships are another insta-read category, and this seems Single White Female-y in a delightfully dark way. 

The River of Consciousness: Oliver Sacks is one of my favorite authors, and this is a book he was working on when he passed and I want to read some of the last words he left behind.

Hunger: I've got Bad Feminist on my shelf but haven't read it yet. Nevertheless, I've heard great things about Roxane Gay's writing (and she's an A+ Twitter follow, if you haven't already). This memoir about her relationship with her body has gotten amazing reviews so far. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books For The Second Half of 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: 2017 Debuts I'm Excited For

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is debut novels that I'm especially looking forward to. This was a hard one for me, since I do a lot of backlist reading and don't tend to be very immersed in discussions about what's coming up, much less the subset of those that are debuts. But there's only one crossover with my first-half-out-2016 list from a few weeks ago, and the rest are definitely books I want to get my paws on!

The Futures: Anna Pitoniak's debut is about a young couple who move to New York to start their lives...only to be caught up in the middle of the recession. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of books coming out about being young during the recession and I am going to eat them up because that's my life.

The Leavers: This is kind of cheating because was on my list of 2017 novels I'm looking forward to a few weeks ago, too, but hey, it's a debut I'm looking forward to. 

The Beast Is an Animal: Peternelle van Arsdale's YA novel is a kind of fairy tale take (not yet another re-telling of Beauty and the Beast, though) and seems like the kind of thing I'd enjoy on a genre I'm not especially inclined towards.

Heather, The Totality: Like a lot of people, I totally loved Matthew Weiner's series, Mad Men. He's making his literary debut and the way he told stories on the show has me totally excited to read him in print.

The Hate U Give: There's been a ton of hype around Angie Thomas's book focused on the Black Lives Matter movement...it isn't even out yet and the movie right have already been sold! I'm pumped to read it.

The Bear and the Nightingale: I remember reading the occasional Baba Yaga story as a kid and really loving them, so Katherine Arden's novel based on Russian folklore definitely has me intrigued.

All Our Wrong Todays: Elan Mastai's book posits a modern day world that's everything that a mid-century American would have hoped for, flying cars and all. So when someone from that world finds themselves in ours, it seems like some kind of nightmare. This sounds fascinating!

American War: In a country that feels ever-more sharply divided, a civil war doesn't seem completely beyond the realm of possibility, and it is just this possibility that Omar El Akkad explores. This focuses on a little girl being used as an instrument of war, which will get me right in the feels.

Chemistry: Stories about post-college discontentment tend to resonate with me, especially grad school oriented ones, so Weike Wang's novel about a woman who suddenly realizes that her schoalrly pursuits might not be what she really wants is right up my alley.

Everything Belongs To Us: Modern day literature set in Asia and written by Asians is a big hole in my reading patterns, and this novel by Yoojin Grace Wuertz, about students in South Korea in the late 1970s, a time of social upheaval, seems like it will be fascinating.

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Top Ten Tuesday: 2017 Debuts I'm Excited For