Top Ten Tuesday: Books I'd Love To Take A Class On

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a autumny freebie. Since autumn always makes me think about school, I figured this week I'd feature titles I'd love to seriously study. I took a whole class on Dante's Divine Comedy in college, and it was not only an amazing course, but it made me wonder how you could ever really understand the work without getting all that context, because there is SO MUCH Italian history crammed in there. And sometimes I feel that way with books, like I need to really dive into it to understand everything. So here are ten books I'd love to study!

War and Peace: I'd love to know more about Russian life, both among regular people and the aristocracy to which the Rostov family belongs. And then the Napoleonic wars on top of that!

Vanity Fair: Another perspective on the Napoleonic wars! Plus more information about social status/life/etc during the Victorian era would be great.

Midnight's Children: I enjoyed reading this, but felt like if I knew more than what I'd picked up from other novels about the Partition, I would get about 1000% more out of it.

Snow: Turkey has had an interesting history, being neither really Middle Eastern or European, but a little bit of both. I just don't know much about that history, which would have given a lot more richness to the way this wrestles with cultural tensions in Turkey.

Sense and Sensibility (and all of Austen, really): I still have one Austen novel outstanding (Northanger Abbey), but I would love to deconstruct both the class system of Britain and how it has changed/evolved and just really dig into what makes her work so brilliant.

The Age of Innocence: While we certainly know all about the Roaring Twenties, the Gilded Age in America (and particularly New York) isn't as high profile. I'd love to learn more about that world, and compare it with our own, in exploring this wonderful novel.

Great Expectations: I'd really enjoy going into depth on form and structure here, as this was of course originally published as a serial. It's been the most successful, for me, of the Dickens I've read, and how he managed to make each installment interesting while keeping the overall story on track would be fascinating to explore.

The Lord of the Rings: There is a LOT going on in this trilogy, and I'd love to explore how J.R.R. Tolkien's own life experiences/social world impacted the writing of these books, as well as really dive deep into questions I've always had, like what the holy heck is the whole Tom Bombadil thing about?

Harry Potter: I'm sure there actually are classes about this at college these days, but every time I go back and revisit these books I catch another layer in them, and would love the chance to really dig into this world.

Wolf Hall: I've read quite a bit of Tudor-era historical fiction, and most of it is wrapped up in the interpersonal drama of the relationships between the main players. But this one is uniquely rooted in both church and political power structures, which made it hard to get into at first and definitely required outside research to grasp.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I'd Love To Take A Class On

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

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Thought-Provoking Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday: Platonic Relationships In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! While romances may get the swoons, some of my favorite relationships between characters in books are families and friends. So without further ado, here are ten of my favorite platonic relationships I've read on the page!

Vasya and Dunya (The Bear and the Nightingale): The bond between the old nurse and her wild young charge is so warm and loving that it makes the horror of what happens near the end even worse.

Lyra and Iorek (The Golden Compass): The strange, sober bear king and the clever, high-spirited girl make a great team and develop a geniune closeness.

Elinor and Marianne (Sense and Sensibility): As the older sister myself, I identify with the steady Elinor, and I love her connection with her open-hearted little sister.

Mariam and Laila (A Thousand Splendid Suns): These "sister wives" suffer through an awful husband together and become each other's rock.

Siskel and Ebert (Life Itself): The real love Ebert felt for the co-anchor who was in many ways his opposite and with whom he sparred regularly just shines through the pages of his memoir.

Madeline, Celeste, and Jane (Big Little Lies): The way the friendships between the main women are built, the realism underlying even the more over-the-top aspects of the plot, really make this book work.

Sabriel and Mogget (Sabriel): The tension between these uneasy allies, the way they vacillate between mistrust and fondness, is an enjoyable aspect of this book and its sequels.

Meg and Charles Wallace (A Wrinkle in Time): The fierce, protective love Meg has for her otherworldly little brother, and his love for her, are the emotional core of this whole series.

Matilda and Miss Honey (Matilda): Obviously this book is wonderful, and this relationship is what makes it so great. Two kind-hearted, cruelly treated people who find in each other someone to care for!

Wilbur and Homer (The Cider House Rules): If this surrogate father and son relationship doesn't get you in the feels, you don't have any.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Platonic Relationships In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Couples I Did NOT Root For

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we've got a "love freebie" in honor of Valentine's Day coming up tomorrow. I'm going to twist this a bit to talk about the couples that a book tried to make happen but I never really bought.

Anna Steele and Christian Grey (50 Shades of Grey): Yes, I read these books. Yes, all three of them. And I never quite figured out what was supposed to be especially romantically compelling about them. I think most of us have had enough good sex with bad partners to know that just banging alone doesn't make a relationship.

Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare (Tess of the d'Urbervilles): It's supposed to be tragic when he learns about her past, and instead of understanding because his own past isn't spotless, ditches her. But he basically never saw her as an actual person in the first place. She was always an object. Not romantic.

Romeo and Juliet (Romeo and Juliet): Two teenagers who've known each other for like a second and a half but then of course they get married and then kill themselves over each other. That's not love it's hormones.

Madeline and Leonard (The Marriage Plot): The love triangle in this book has a weak third leg, but honestly even the central relationship didn't really work for me. They never seem suited to each other at all...I know that early-20s-mistaking-drama-for-passion but I couldn't understand what either of them thought they were getting out of their relationship.

Sookie Stackhouse and Quinn (All Together Dead): Sookie has plenty of boyfriends over the course of the Southern Vampire Mysteries, but Quinn was my least favorite. Maybe because their relationship never really gets off the ground? I'm not sure, it just never really worked for me.

Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon (Sense and Sensibility): I love this book for the relationship between the sisters, but it felt kind of crappy for the lively, intense Marianne to end up with this much-older, buttoned-up dude. It felt like he was a better match for Elinor, actually.

Rachel Chu and Nick Young (Crazy Rich Asians): For two people super-in-love, they barely seemed to talk about anything important. How can you be dating someone seriously enough to be living together and just never really talked about your family?

Elise Perez and Jamey Hyde (White Fur): Despite some good quality prose, this book fell flat for me because I never really bought into the desperate, crazy, take-no-prisoners love affair that's supposed to hold everything together.

Anne Welles and Lyon Burke (The Valley of the Dolls): These two just want such different things out of life. Also they're both pretty boring.

Natasha Rostova and Pierre Bezukhov (War and Peace): Pierre is such a nerd and Natasha is such a delight and she can do so much better than him I hate that they end up together.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Couples I Did NOT Root For

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Feature Sisters

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, our topic was to chose ten books that highlighted a particular type of character. I figured I'd focus on sisterhood, since that's a subject that has a lot of meaning for me (my little sister is 2000 miles away and I miss her).

My Sister's Keeper: This Jodi Picoult tearjerker is about a girl who's been serving as a source of replacement body tissue for her sister, who's been struggling against cancer, for most of her life. When her sister needs her yet again, she takes her fight to be able to make her own decisions about her body to court. It's compulsively readable and really gets you by the heartstrings.

Game of Thrones: There are sisters all over this series, but the ones I find most interesting are Sansa and Arya Stark. The former wants nothing more than to be a great noble lady, while the latter strains against the boundaries she feels trapped into because of her gender. The ways that sisters struggle to define themselves against each other feels very true to me.

Atonement: This is a book I keep meaning to revisit, because I didn't care for it when I read it as a high schooler but I really enjoyed the movie when I saw it years later. It tells the story of Briony Tallis, whose jealousy of her older sister and overactive young teenage imagination lead her to make a careless accusation which destroys lives. Sisterhood is wonderful, but there's darkness there too and this is a powerful exploration of that.

The Descendants: This novel, about a father and his two daughters reacting to the accident that left the mother in a terminal coma, is more about the relationship of the family as a whole than the sisters specifically. But the sisters, both damaged by their childhoods in their own way, provide an interesting example of how two children can come out of the same household and wind up being very different people.

The Red Tent: This book, on the other hand, is deeply about sisterhood. This novel, which I've loved since I first read it in high school, tells the story of the only daughter of the biblical Jacob, starting with the story of her mothers. Yes, mothers, since it's not only her biological mother Leah who raises her, but also her aunt Rachel and their half-sisters (as Diamant tells it), Zilpah and Bilhah, all married to her father. To be four sisters is one thing, but four sisters sharing one man complicates the situation, and the ways the bonds between them change over time is beautifully drawn.

Sense and Sensibility: Pride and Prejudice has more sisters, but her siblings seemed like mostly window dressing to Lizzie Bennett's story. Sense and Sensibility is much more strongly rooted in the bond between Elinor and Marianne Dashwood...and any older sister who's used to fretting over a much more impulsive younger sister will recognize herself here.

Seating Arrangements: This book I had mixed feelings about as a whole, but thought it had an interesting perspective on sisterhood. While older sister Daphne seems, to younger sister Lydia, to glide through life without too much trouble, Lydia feels like a puzzle piece that doesn't fit. It's easy to feel, sometimes, like the life your sister leads is a reference point for the way you should or shouldn't live your own. Comparison and jealousy is a very real part of sisterhood.

The Other Boleyn Girl: I will concede that this book is kind of soapy and ridiculous, but I love this whole series and just embrace the fromage. Before Anne Boleyn ensnared King Henry VIII, he was enamored of her sister, Mary, who became his mistress for a time. They don't always like each other, which is very true of sisterhood, but the bonds of family prove very hard to actually break.

Housekeeping: I actually did not love this book, to be perfectly honest, but I did like the way that Marilynne Robinson played with the idea of sister relationships through generations. Ruth and Lucille are still quite little when their mother abandons them and drives her car off a cliff, and when several other arrangements fall apart, they wind up with their aunt Sylvie, who's...odd. She's basically a hobo, and Ruth finds herself drawn closer and closer to her while Lucille chases conventionality.

Spoiled: This fun, silly YA novel from the bloggers behind Go Fug Yourself tells the story of a teenage girl from flyover country who finds out, when her mother dies, that her father is a major Hollywood star. She moves out to LA to get to know him and the sister she never knew she had. It's predictable, in large measure, and maybe a bit too broad, but I liked the way the relationship between the sisters develops.

Share:facebook - twitter - pinterest

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Feature Sisters