Top Ten Tuesday: Covers That Made Want to Read/Buy the Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a pretty covers week...we're talking about books we decided to read because we liked the cover! I don't know that the cover has ever actually been the deciding factor for me, but I won't lie that the good ones catch my eye and make me curious about what they might be about...which sometimes results in a purchase/read! 

 

A Tale For The Time Being 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Interestings

Sabriel

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging

The Fountainhead

Stardust

The Luminaries

Shantaram

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Top Ten Tuesday: Covers That Made Want to Read/Buy the Book

Top Ten Tuesday: Titles That Would Make Good Band Names

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about book titles that would make good band names. I do enjoy picking out phrases that I hear and thinking they would make good names for musical acts, so this one seemed like fun!

Daisy Jones and the Six: I'm cheating, this is the name of a fictional band already, but there's no denying that it works really well!

There There: Can't you just picture a chart-topping single by a band called There There? I see them as an indie rock style group.

Anthem: This would be a band that did like stadium rock music for sure.

The Black Dahlia: The Black Dahlia would definitely be fronted by a Lana Del Rey-type nostalgic pretty girl with a similar interest in Old Hollywood iconography and throwback-style tunes.

Twilight: A female singer-songwriter type who wants to be mysterious about her real identity.

The Interestings: This would be very self-conciously quirky indie music that would have like one big hit, one minor hit, and then tour small venues forever.

Abhorsen: I could definitely see a European DJ touring under this name.

Speak: A teen pop girl group, right?

Native Son: Native Son would be a rap duo who consciously chose to reference this book because of its message about race relations and makes very socially aware music.

The Lowland: It's been too long since we had a Boyz-II-Men style R&B group and I think this would be a great name for one!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Titles That Would Make Good Band Names

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters That Remind Me of Myself

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're highlighting book characters that remind us of ourselves. So there are a decent contingent of smart, book-nerdy girls on here, but also some that are probably less flattering comparisons.

Hermione Granger (Harry Potter): I know I just used her a couple months back in a similar topic. But is there an overachieving girl who doesn't identify with Hermione?

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): I am not much of a matchmaker, but I do enjoy gossip and drama like our girl here. And Emma does have a brain in her head: we're told she's clever right there in the opening line.

Meg Murray (A Wrinkle in Time): For reasons not worth getting into right now, I was an often-angry little girl. It's rare to find stories that center on a girl who gets mad and makes that part of her heroism.

Francie Nolan (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn): Francie's determination to get an education and love for learning and reading make her a role model for plenty of nerdy girls.

Esther Greenwood (The Bell Jar): I struggled with mental health and depression growing up and still do, honestly. Esther's struggle feels so familiar.

Daine Sarassri (Wild Magic): I tried getting into the Alanna series, but the central character's bravery was never something I could identify with. Daine's love of animals, however, really spoke to me!

Lee Fiora (Prep): I spent quite a bit of time reading this book infuriated at its teenage protagonist...because she made so many of the same mistakes rooted in hyper self-conciousness that I have made and to be honest, continue to make.

Jules Jacobson (The Interestings): Jules's struggle to recognize that her talents and worth may not be in the same place as her friends and deal with the jealousy she feels is all too recognizable.

Briony Tallis (Atonement): Briony's failure to understand what she's seen and desire to be important and listened to lead to tragedy...my own childhood busybody-ness didn't have disastrous consequences, but that was more luck than anything.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary): Who can't relate to the refusal to really adult?

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Top Ten Tuesday: Characters That Remind Me of Myself

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I'd Like To See As Miniseries

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I've done a little twist on the topic this week...we're supposed to be talking about TV shows we're excited to see start new seasons now that it's fall. Not to be one of those people, but I don't actually watch a ton of TV lately. So instead, I'm talking about books that could be turned into prestige miniseries that I would watch the crap out of!

The Secret History: This would work well as a movie, too, but a miniseries would give it room to breathe and really get the atmospherics right. It starts off in medias res with a murder (like Big Little Lies!), so there's your hook, and then into the dark and twisty story.

The Interestings: This lifetime-spanning story of a group of friends who meet at a summer camp for creative kids and continue to interact as they grow up and find themselves and settle down could really explore the shifts in their dynamics over time if it was given several hours in which to tell its tale.

Vanity Fair: This book ends up feeling rushed as a movie because there's a lot of plot there (it's long, y'all), but Becky Sharp is a rare compelling female antihero and her scheming and machinations deserve multiple episodes.

The Queen of the Night: The framing device of this book is that an opera singer is offered the opportunity to be the first to sing a new role...only to find out that the opera is based on her truly insane life story (there's too much there for just a movie). Only a handful of people could have done so, and cutting between her attempts to find the source and the actual events would work perfectly onscreen!

Helter Skelter: I know there's allegedly a Tarantino movie on the Manson murders coming, but I'd like to see Ryan Murphy's American Crime Story series take on this case using this book, written by the prosecutor who put Manson away, as the source material.

The Corrections: This has been bandied about for a series adaptation before, if I recall correctly, and I'm not sure why it never went anywhere, but I think the high drama of this family dysfunction story would work well given the room to sprawl out over several episodes.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: This book about cousins who create a best-selling comic-book hero series in World War II era New York has a lot of flashbacks and a lot of intricate storytelling and cutting any of it would be a travesty so a miniseries is the way to go.

Possession: They did make a movie out of this (which I haven't seen), but it's so textually rich that I can't imagine it did justice to it in less than 2 hours. The dual storylines of a modern-day set of academics studying fairly obscure Victorian-era poets who discover a hidden bond between them really needs several hours to do justice to both of them.

Middlesex: A truly epic family saga stretching from the conflicts between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s to modern-day Detroit and an intersex person's journey of self-discovery has a lot of story to tell, and would be an engrossing show.

The Lords of Discipline: Pat Conroy's military school drama could probably be squished down into a movie, but why do that when you can go full Southern Gothic and let the story sink in slowly?

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I'd Like To See As Miniseries

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: Things I Want To See More Of In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we're highlighting things we'd like to see more of in books. This one was a little hard for me to distiguish from things that I really like to read about, because obviously I want to see more of those things too, but here are ten things I'd like to see more of at bookstores!

Female anti-heroes: Part of the reason, I think, that Gone Girl was such a runaway success was that it presented us with a creature rare in pop culture...the female sociopath protagonist. While it's not uncommon to be shown a ruthless man who we're supposed to root for, it happens far less often that we see the same situation around a woman. More like Amazing Amy please!

Own voices: While all fiction is based on imagination on some level, I'm starting to find myself very skeptical of books about a particular subgroup (women, minorities, people who aren't heterosexual, etc) written by people outside of these groups. It's not that it can't ever be done well, but how about having black female stories written by, well, black women?

Environmental non-fiction: I think we're all growing more aware of the effect that our actions have on the environment, and there hasn't been a major work of environmental nonfiction that I can remember since An Inconvenient Truth. I'd like to see more information about the ways our world is changing.

Politically aware characters: I know that political references can date a work, and I'm definitely an outlier since I work in politics, but most of the people I know, even outside of work, are at least somewhat aware of what's going on at least in D.C. I'd like to see more books where characters are actually paying attention to politics.

Two sides to the story: There are two (or more) sides to every story, and I always really like books where we get to see the same interactions and events from multiple viewpoints to emphasize the need for perspective.

Stories that follow groups of friends over time: I know that my friendships have been my most enduring relationships over time, and have changed and grown as we ourselves have. I really like books like The Group or The Interestings that follow friends as they grow up.

Realistic marriages: As a recently-married person myself, I'm really interested in reading stories about marriages that are based in reality...not high-octane domestic dramas, but stories that deal with the actual day-to-day of what makes up a marriage.

Adult fiction about professional dancers: I've always loved stories about rarefied sports worlds, like figure skating or gymnastics or ballet. And while there's YA fiction about that kind of thing, it's hard to find stories about professional dancers all grown up. I'd love to read some if I can find it!

Characters with chronic diseases: It seems like popular fiction never deals with people in wheelchairs, or with diabetes, or even something as basic as migraines. Plenty of people go through life with these kinds of conditions, though, and I think it would be eye-opening to read about it more often.

Anthropological looks at modern society: I bought (but haven't yet read) a book called Watching the English that looks at modern British society through the perspective of an anthropologist, looking at the rituals that define life. I think it would be really interesting to see more of these for other countries (including the good old US of A and all our subcultures!)

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Top Ten Tuesday: Things I Want To See More Of In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish Didn't Have Love Triangles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic are books we wish had more or less of...something. Love triangles can be well-executed (Anna Karenina and The Age of Innocence both come to mind), but often don't add anything interesting or special to the story, rather padding it with extra drama that doesn't serve the underlying narrative very well. Here are ten books I wish I could read again without the love triangle element.

The Hunger Games: This is the start of an amazing trilogy about a young woman who conquers tremendous odds to become to be both a freedom fighter and a symbol of the resistance. Her relationship with Peeta is built slowly and organically, but the silly love triangle with Gale? Not even remotely necessary.

New Moon: Bella and Edward have plenty of obstacles in their romance without the artificial hurdle of stupid Jacob. This is the book where he's the most real as a third leg of the triangle, but mostly he's just sulking in the corner. Laaaaaame.

Water for Elephants: I loved this book about a young man who finds himself traveling along with a circus and working with an elephant, but the love triangle with Marlena and Jacob and August? Doesn't add that much to the story, really.

The Interestings: While Jules and Ethan have a connection (and Ethan has a crush) when they're teenagers, I never understood why it persists past the point when Ethan marries Ash and they have children. Jules is happily coupled, Ethan is happily coupled...why the need to add the *~drama~* of a long-burning love triangle?

Gone With The Wind: Has anyone who's ever read this book or seen the movie ever understood why Scarlett gets so hung up on Ashley?

The Circle: Every single person involved in the Mae-Francis-Kalden triangle sucks. Mae is a selfish asshole, Francis is the worst kind of "she friendzoned me" bro, and Kalden only ever wants to bang in weird places. There's no tension here.

From Dead To Worse: Most of the love triangles that make up Sookie Stackhouse's romantic life are well-rendered and entertaining, but Quinn is my least favorite of her partners and when it comes to either him or Eric Northman, it's hardly even imaginable why she might consider the other side.

Return Of The King: This is less of a love triangle than an ill-advised crush, but the half-heartedness of Eowyn-Aragorn-Arwen is just

The Marriage Plot: Being in a relationship with someone with a serious mental health issue is a topic that doesn't get explored very often, and Eugenides handles that issue really thoughtfully. But inserting Mitchell's crush on Madeleine like it's a viable spoiler to that romance? Falls totally flat.

Sophie's Choice: While Sophie's love affair with Nathan is a beautifully tragic, Stingo's desperate crush on her leads to one of the single most cringeworthy scenes I've ever read and it just feels so pointless.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish Didn't Have Love Triangles

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Things Books Have Made Me Want To Do or Learn About After Reading Them

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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Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Things Books Have Made Me Want To Do or Learn About After Reading Them

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Every Young Woman Should Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is Ten Books That Every X Should Read. Nothing came to mind immediately, so I started paging through my Read books on Goodreads, and when I saw the first entry on this list, my topic came to me and it was hard to narrow it down to ten from there. I don't know where exactly I'd draw the lines around "young woman", maybe from about fourteen to your mid/late twenties (I don't know that I feel like I qualify as a young woman anymore at 30), but really, these books are resonant and meaningful at any age and for either gender. They just seem especially relevant for young women:

The Handmaid's Tale: This should absolutely be mandatory reading in high school for everyone. Women's reproductive freedom has been a hot topic for decades, but this book takes the consequences of those freedoms being abridged to a horrifying extension. I don't think it's possible to read this, especially as a woman, and not be aware of how important it is to ensure that we have control over our own bodies.

The Stepford Wives: This is a quick and haunting read. When Walter and Joanna move to Stepford, it seems like it's full of perfect happy families. But there's something...off...about the wives. It's a scathing statement/satire about what men really want. 

The Interestings: This novel explores long-lasting friendships, and the kind of competition that works its way into them. A group of young boys and girls at an artsy summer camp bond together and pledge to remain friends forever. It's not as easy as that, obviously, and the book explores how friendships, especially female friendships, grow and change over time and the damage that the self-induced pressure to be "special" can inflict on lives that turn out to be more or less ordinary.   

Persuasion: Love and relationships are a huge part of life in general, but especially when you're young and just figuring out how to handle other people's hearts and how you'd like them to handle your own. Anne Elliot spurns the marriage proposal of Frederick Wentworth, even though she loves him, because her friends and family convince her he's not good enough. She's in her late twenties when they meet again and their fortunes have shifted...he's now a hot prospect and she's staring down spinsterhood (boy am I am so glad we don't live in Ye Olden Days anymore). She still loves him, but fully expects that she has lost him, and the heartache this causes her until (spoiler, but not really because this is Jane Austen) they get back together makes you really think about how you treat other people. 

Anna Karenina: I know, this is a monster novel, clocking in at well over a thousand pages. And Russian literature, with its naming conventions alone, can be hard to get into. But this story, about a young mother who is married to a bureaucrat with whom she has a satisfactory relationship but does not love, and falls into a passionate affair with a young nobleman is AMAZING. Is Anna brave? Is she selfish? What's a better situation: a settled and content existence or a passionate and completely unstable love affair? There's the whole side plot about Kitty Shcherbatskaya that progresses independently and is also good in its own right, but it's more of a slow burn than Anna's story, which raises all kinds of interesting questions to think about.

The Awakening: This too is a book about a woman living a conventional family life with a husband she doesn't really love, who falls for another man and finds the prospect of a relationship with him infinitely more compelling than continuing her staid existence and a wife and mother. This explores similar themes to Anna Karenina, obviously, but it's not quite as good. It's also not nearly as long, though, so it might be a good starter before you tackle the beast.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (series): As important about decisions about what love is and who to love are a central part of young womanhood, there's much MUCH more to your life than boys (or girls, or both). Lisbeth Salander kicks ass, takes names, looks how she wants to look, and has the sex life she wants to have. She has her own goals and pursues them and romantic relationships aren't something that's especially important to her. Being single or not making your love life a big serious deal is totally okay.

A Game of Thrones (series): The main female character in this series, Danaerys Targaryen, begins the books by being sold by her brother to a tribal warlord with whom she has no common language. But Dany and Khal Drogo's love story ends up being one of (if not the most) happiest relationships depicted in the series. When he dies, Dany turns her focus to learning how to rule a city. She has relationships, but they take lower priority than her personal goals. There's an interesting, complex model of any kind of woman you'd want to be over the course of these novels: Catelyn, Sansa, and Arya Stark, Brienne of Tarth, Cersei Lannister, Maergery Tyrell. You don't have to be just one thing. You're allowed to have internal contradictions. 

White Oleander: I don't know any woman who has a perfectly pleasant and smooth relationship with her mother. I don't think those exist. We love them but they drive us crazy: I think both sides would agree with that statement. The fraught relationship between Ingrid and Astrid is an exaggerated one, as are Astrid's relationships with her foster mothers, but coming to terms with your mother for who she is and recognizing and reconciling the parts of you that are like her are important (albeit difficult) parts of growing up.

The Devil Wears Prada: It's a lightweight, kind of fluffy read, remarkable to most because of its thinly-veiled look at Vogue editrix Anna Wintour. But there's also an important lesson in here about work/life balance. It's tempting to, like Andy Sachs, let everything else in your life fall by the wayside when you first get into the workplace, and if you've got big goals and are willing to let your personal life go for a bit while you chase them, go for it! But we all learn eventually that we can't be both a perfect employee and a human with a functional social life, and learning where to draw those lines is an important lesson. Just because you've got the job a thousand girls would kill for doesn't mean it's the right one for you. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Every Young Woman Should Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Of My Most Recent 5 Star Reads

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: Ten Of My Mose Recent 5 Star Reads. Since the bulk of my content are actual review posts with ratings, I don’t want to sit here and type more about things I’ve already typed about at length (unless, of course, you want to go back and comment on the posts, in which case I’d LOVE to have a conversation about anything I’ve reviewed). So I’m going to look at books I read in the year or so BEFORE my 30^th birthday/the start of this blog and highlight ten of the best books I read.

Bring Up The Bodies: I'd read the first volume of this series, Wolf Hall, and actually not really cared for it despite being a sucker for Tudor historical fiction. I think part of it might have been reading it on my Kindle...some books really benefit from being read physically. But I was willing to try the second novel in a hard copy and I LOVED it. The slow build of the first book pays off in this one, the intrigue and drama fly fast and furious, and reading it from a different perspective than we usually see in these kind of books was fascinating. It was great.

Remains of the Day: I'd read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I liked a lot, so when I saw this at a secondhand book sale, I figured it was worth the $1. I was right. This one grabbed me right from the start, ripping my heart out as I read about Stevens' life and the happiness and meaning it could have had if he'd have only opened himself up to it. It's gorgeous and sad and wonderful.  

A Thousand Splendid Suns: Like everyone else in the world, I read and loved The Kite Runner. I was a little wary of this one because I had such high expectations from Khaled Hosseini's debut, but I knew this was a story about women and I'm always a little suspicious of men writing women's stories. I didn't want to be disappointed, and I wasn't. It was a lovely portrait of female friendship and the power women have when they work together.  

Blindness: I'd seen the movie first, because I love Julianne Moore, and found it well-done but difficult to watch. But I heard the book was a struggle to adapt and better than the movie, and it's true. It tells the story of a world where blindness has become a contagious disease. The first round of victims are quarantined, and an eye doctor's wife refuses to leave her husband despite not being affected and so pretends that she too is blind. It's about humanity and inhumanity, and even though it's written with nameless characters and lack of dialogue markings, it's so good that you just adapt to it and the pages fly by.

High Fidelity: Another one where I'd seen the movie first. The movie is a really solid adaptation, Nick Hornby's novels seem to move well to screen. He really nails that "adult who hasn't quite grown up yet and finally takes significant steps towards maturity over the course of the story" place, which, even though his characters are mostly white dudes, I think is a place that's relatable for a lot of people (myself included). It's a coming-of-age novel, just with the actual age being older than the traditional version of that reliable story. 

The Age of Innocence: I actually still haven't seen the movie for this one! But I want to, because I loved this story of smoldering passion and the ritualistic social manners that keep the players stuck in their roles. It's a love triangle, but one where all the players are sympathetic, the ties that bind them are real, and no one is an interloper just created to be an obstacle in the Twu Wuv of the "real" couple. It explores a lot of the same themes as Anna Karenina, and while it's not quite as masterful, it's beautifully written and a lot shorter. If you enjoyed this, and you should because it's great, the Tolstoy should be on your TBR too.  

The Pianist: And yet another entry in the "I watched the movie first" file. And while the book is excellent and heartbreaking (as Holocaust survivor stories are), this might be one of those cases where the movie measures up to a really good book. Both are incredible stories of survival and the power of music to play on the humanity of both performer and listener. 

So Big: This was something I never would have picked up on my own, but it went on sale for the Kindle and when I saw it had won the Pulitzer Prize, I figured it was worth a read. And yes, yes it is. So Big is the story of Selina, a high-spirited young woman who leaves her native Chicago to teach in farm country for a year. She plans to return home, but instead falls in love with a strong, handsome farmer. They marry and have a child, but her husband dies not long thereafter. Her young son is nicknamed So Big, and her struggle to raise him as a single mother is affecting and inspiring. She's an amazing character and this book is unforgettable. 

The Interestings: I'd heard a lot of buzz around this one when it first came out and finally got around to reading it when I scored a secondhand copy for cheap. It's the story of a group of kids that come together at a summer camp for the artistically gifted and whose friendships wax and wane over the course of their lives as they unfold in many directions. I find these kinds of friendships-changing-over-time novels to be incredibly compelling, and the current running through it about what it means to think of yourself as special and how it impacts your perception of happy-but-ordinary circumstances is just icing on the cake.

Stardust: Last one where I saw the movie first (which is cheating, because this is the last book on the list)! The movie was fun and forgettable, but the kind of epitome of "the book is better"...there's nothing wrong with the film, it's just not as good. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Of My Most Recent 5 Star Reads