Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish I Had Read As a Teen

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's subject is technically books that I wish I'd read as a child, but I haven't read an actual children's book in quite some time. I have, however, read quite a lot of books I suspect teenage me would have absolutely adored, so here are some books I wish I'd come across as a teen!

Sloppy Firsts: This is an easy choice...it's very much a young adult book, about a sarcastic teenage girl whose best friend has just moved away. I very much liked this as an adult lady, so I think teenage me would have been even more into it!

Jane Eyre: I think I would have struggled with this a bit because Jane is kind of a drip in the early going, but once I pushed past that and she got to Thornfield, I bet I would have been extremely into brooding Mr. Rochester in a way that adult me would find embarrassing.

Pride and Prejudice: I didn't read my first Austen (Persuasion) until I was in my late 20s! I found P and P kind of teenager-y when I read it, and suspect that high school me would have adored Lizzy Bennet's sharp wit.

High Fidelity: Somehow I neither read the book nor watched the movie until my mid-to-late 20s! I would have loved the stuff with the "top 5" lists and music snobbery (though I had no business being music snobby with anyone, I listened to A LOT of Top 40).

The Namesake: Teenagers do, of course, enjoy reading about the experiences of other teenagers, and I know I for one liked stories about going away to college because I was very much looking forward to leaving my small town...which makes this narrative about growing up something I would have eaten up as a teen!

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: This is a very short read, and has a kind of implicit warning about the cult-of-personality teachers that you often find in high school that my cynical self would have found highly appealing.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Francie Nolan is kind of nerdy and bookish, but she's more well-rounded than that and with all the female-centered coming-of-age type stories I read at that age I can't believe I missed this one. It's fantastic!

Stardust: This is the kind of well-told story that works for any age, so this one is mostly about wishing I'd gotten into Neil Gaiman sooner.

The House of Mirth: I completely fell in love with The Age of Innocence reading it in my 20s. I did not love The House of Mirth as much, but while I was reading it I kept thinking that its message would have really resonated with me in high school and how I wished I had read it then!

Spoiled: This is another book that is actually really meant for young adults, and the only one published after I myself would have been a teen. I saw some tone issues with it when I read it a couple years ago, but it has the kind of humor that I would have absolutely loved earlier in life (to be clear, I also enjoyed the humor now).

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish I Had Read As a Teen

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Which Make Great Gifts

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week we're talking about holiday reads. I am not generally concerned with books set at particular times of year, nor do I remember many holiday scenes beyond the ones in Harry Potter, so my take on this week is going to be a little different. I'm talking about ten books that make great holiday gifts! These tend to be my most-recommended books because they're widely appealing.

In Cold Blood: The true-crime classic is a masterwork of storytelling, truly representing the best of what narrative non-fiction can be.

The Handmaid's Tale: Margaret Atwood is an incredible writer, and this book has had growing visibility in the current political climate and with the Hulu series. Surprisingly many people haven't read it, though, and it's very much worth reading.

Station Eleven: I actually just recommended this to my book club! It's a post-apocalyptic story for people who don't like post-apocalyptic stories, telling a tale of a world both before and 20 years after a pandemic flu, that both builds great characters and asks interesting questions about what we as people need to survive.

The Secret History: This has something for everyone! A twisty, engaging plot, vivid and interesting characters, fantastic prose. And Donna Tartt was only 28 when it was published which is mind-boggling.

Remains of the Day: Truly one of the most well-crafted novels I have ever read, this story of an English butler who is convinced that he's rendered service to a great man reflecting on his life is just astonishingly good (and will break your heart).

Less: The rare light-hearted novel to win a Pulitzer, this book about an aging minor writer who takes a trip around the world to deal with the fact that his sort-of boyfriend is marrying someone else is so charming and warm that it tricks you into not noticing how flawlessly it's put together.

Stardust: For someone at all open to fantasy, this tale about a young man who swears to catch a fallen star for his love interest, only to find out that the star is not at all interested in being taken anywhere, is much more accessible (and honestly, enjoyable) than Neil Gaiman's more well-known American Gods.

The Namesake: The son of Indian immigrants to the US is named Gogol, after the Russian writer, and his name is just one the sources of tension as he grows up and struggles to figure himself out. The character work is top-notch, and Lahiri's writing is just so strong.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: It's a coming-of-age story, but that doesn't mean it can't be appreciated by adults too! Francie Nolan's childhood in Brooklyn, growing up as the bookish daughter of a charming but unreliable alcoholic father and relentlessly pragmatic mother, is heart-warming at any age.

The Age of Innocence: I think the classics freak a lot of people out, but they're often much better and less intimidating than people think. Case in point: this is set among rich people in New York City's Gilded Age, but at its heart, it's a dramatic (but repressed) love triangle. Edith Wharton was writing about her own social set, and it shows in her sharp wit and insight.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books Which Make Great Gifts

Top Ten Tuesday: Standalone Books That Need a Sequel

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I personally am not big into series...I do read them, but they're more an exception than a rule. That being said, there are definitely books that I put down and wish I had the next entry waiting to pick up to see what becomes of these characters! Here are ten books I'd read a sequel to.

Pride and Prejudice: I know modern authors have done spins on this idea, what happens to Lizzy and Darcy, but I wonder what Austen herself would have done with them and how she would have kept their spark alive as a married couple.

Gone Girl: I want to hear from the child Amy's carrying at the end of the book...did his/her parents stay together long-term? What would it be like to grow up with those people raising you? I feel like there's a compelling story to be told there.

The Bell Jar: We know that Esther survives, goes on to (presumably) get married and have a child. How did that come to be? Like Sylvia Plath, does Esther continue to struggle?

Speak: I first read this book nearly two decades ago as a high school freshman and it's never left me. I'm still curious how Melinda grows up and how her high school experience continues to impact her.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Don't get me wrong, I love the coming-of-age aspect of this book, but I want to know what becomes of Francie Nolan, how she deals with moving away from Brooklyn, and what she makes of her life.

Matilda: I hope it all ends happily, but I do wonder how it plays out for Matilda and Miss Honey.

Catherine Called Birdy: The book ends on a hopeful note for high-spirited Catherine, but I don't think she'd easily adjust to life as a wife and mother, so I can only imagine there would be hilarity to ensue!

The Namesake: The tale of Gogol coming into his own is powerful, but I do find myself wondering what kind of husband and father (if he becomes a husband and father at all) he would be to his own children.

Let Me In: I mean, honestly, this book was super duper dark and I didn't want it to be any longer than it was, but I am interested in how Eli and Oskar survive together in the world.

The Lords of Discipline: I loved Will McLean and wish we would have gotten a glimpse at his adult life after college.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Standalone Books That Need a Sequel

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Love That Are At Least Ten Years Old

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This is a topic that was MADE for me, since I am a devoted backlist reader. I tried to mix in both books I've read several times over the years, and books that I've read more recently but that I'm looking forward to revisiting. There's definitely something exciting about reading the new buzzy book that's on everyone's mind, but there are so many amazing books that are older but just as worthy of your time. Here are ten of my favorites!

The Virgin Suicides: Middlesex might have been the award-winner, but I've always enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides' debut more. It's tightly constructed and beautifully told and I've been on a months-long mission to make it a book club read because I'd love to have a reason to revisit it yet again.

The Secret History: Every campus novel I read gets compared to this incredible story about a group of students who commit a murder...and none has quite measured up to the engrossing story and well-drawn characters of Donna Tartt's book.

Anna Karenina: I'd made a stab at this one in high school and only gotten through about 50 pages, but when I picked it back up a few years ago I ate it up. The portions about farming get a little dry but the bulk of the novel is incredibly good.

Emma: Austen, like Tolstoy, is an author I only was able to get a handle on later in life. I'm going to confess my unpopular opinion that Pride & Prejudice is overrated, and instead recommend Emma. If you've ever seen Clueless, you'll recognize the broad strokes of this story of a wannabe matchmaker.

The Namesake: I'd heard great things about this novel for years before I finally picked it up, but I'm glad I did. If you like books that are all about delving deeply into a character, you'll love this one about the son of Indian immigrants who hates his name.

All The King's Men: If you pay attention to politics for long enough, you'll probably realize that there are very few people in it who are either all bad or all good. This story is told through the eyes of a cynical reporter who becomes a right-hand-man for a governor and watches the once-idealistic candidate become a ruthless operator.

1984: I first read this book when I was about 12 and even though I didn't really get all of it, I got enough to understand its timeless message about government manipulation and control of information. It's a book I get something new out of every time I revisit it.

The Great Gatsby: I loathed this classic when I first read it as a junior in high school. I thought everyone involved was selfish and whiny. But when I picked it up again in college, I fell in love with its powerful language and indelible characters.

In Cold Blood: The first true crime novel, this book tells the story of a heinous murder in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, and the men who committed it, and what happened to them. It's almost impossible to put down.

The Stranger Beside Me: Another true crime classic, this brought Ann Rule to immediate prominence in the genre as she recounted working at a suicide crisis call center along a handsome young man named Ted Bundy as a series of murders swept Washington.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Love That Are At Least Ten Years Old

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Interesting Father-Child Relationships In Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Much like a month back when we looked at mother relationships for Mother's Day, now we're looking at father relationships for Father's Day. I broadened it out to general father-child relationships for this one because I immediately thought of books I wanted to include that had relationships with both genders as children. Some of these are good relationships, some bad, but all of them compelling (to me anyways). 

To Kill A Mockingbird: Can you make a list on this subject without highlighting Atticus and Scout? I haven't read Go Set a Watchman so I'm pretending it doesn't exist and that Atticus can go on being the A+ human I learned about in sophomore English.

The Descendants: I enjoyed the movie and decided to pick up the book, which I enjoyed even more. When his estranged wife ends up comatose after an accident, Matthew finds himself suddenly solely responsible for the two daughters he's been only partially involved with during their childhoods and the way the three begin to actually bond, with wariness and scars but also hope, is really lovely.

The Shining: The movie, while a favorite of mine, skimps on the complicated father-son dynamic between Jack and Danny. Raised by a brutal man, Jack struggles to bring up Danny with more tenderness without really knowing how to go about doing that, and his feelings about his alcoholism are much more explicitly tied to the injury he inflicted on his toddler in a drunken rage than they are in the movie.

The Cider House Rules: This is a surrogate rather than biological relationship, but the bond between Wilbur and Homer is beautifully drawn, and Homer's struggle to define himself against his paternal figure is one of the central narrative threads.

The Namesake: When an Indian immigrant to America names his son Gogol after his favorite author, it comes to symbolize all the conflicts and tension between a father and son who love each other but don't really understand each other.

The Other Boleyn Girl: A very different look at parenthood, Thomas Boleyn sees his daughters Mary and Anne as pawns in his power games rather than people with thoughts and feelings. Of the two, Anne takes most after his ruthlessness and we all know how things ended up for her.

Sabriel: The first book in this series focuses on the love between a father and his daughter, the titular heroine, whose search for him drives the action and leads her to her destiny.

A Feast For Crows: Tywin Lannister is a pretty awful parent to all of his children, really: marrying off Cersei to Drunken Lout Robert Baratheon despite her pleas to not, trying to manipulate son Jaime into giving up his chosen profession so he can come be the heir, and refusing to see that second son Tyrion is the smartest of all of his children. I picked this particular entry because the way Tywin goes out is AMAZING.

The Return of the King: Even though it's only a side story, Faramir's desire to prove himself to his father, and his father's idolization of the fallen Boromir and refusal to see the better man that Faramir is, is heartbreaking.

The Little House on the Prairie: Here's the thing about this whole series, really. Laura hero-worships the shit out of her dad, and so when you're reading them as a kid you just buy into that, but when you think about it as an adult, Pa was the WORST. Ma does like 1000% of the work and Pa gets all the glory and that is definitely a very real parental dynamic.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Most Interesting Father-Child Relationships In Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Holiday Gift Guide

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's prompt is to create a holiday gift guide. As my gift guide, I'm going to tell you about ten books that I've reviewed on this blog over the last year, and who they would make a good choice for this holiday season!

Beloved: Someone interested in the ways that slavery's pernicious evil continues to reverberate. Toni Morrison's classic makes the horrors of slavery, which can almost seem abstract in their scope, personal and real.

All The King's Men: Anyone who is interested in what can be hiding behind a populist veneer. President-Elect Trump is not the first politician to rise to power behind a populist message. There are some definite parallels to Robert Penn Warren's Willie Stark in our incoming administration.

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Budding feminists. Most of us have heard of and are at least somewhat familiar with Anne Boleyn. Susan Bordo's examination of the myths that have sprung up around her and how they've changed over time is a great primer on variable views of women over time.

The Serpent King: Anyone who has ever felt like they don't belong. Which is kind of everyone, right? Jeff Zenter's story about three high school misfits in their senior year brings that aching longing of adolescence rushing right back in the best possible way.

The Namesake: Someone with a complicated relationship with their parents. In Jhumpa Lahiri's justly lauded novel, Gogol's angst over his given name mirrors the tension he feels with his immigrant parents and their culture as he grows up in America. 

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Anyone who's loved someone unreliable. Little Francie Nolan worships her ne'er-do-well father in Betty Smith's coming-of-age classic. The pain that he causes both Francie and her mother, Katie, without really "meaning" to will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has tried to count on someone that they shouldn't.

The Big Rewind: Nostalgic older millennials. Remember mixtapes? If the actual creation of a putting songs on a cassette before your time, Libby Cudmore's witty, entertaining debut probably won't resonate with you very hard. But for the rest of us, it's a treat!

American Gods: Mythology buffs. Neil Gaiman is an incredible writer, and this is one of his most popular works for a reason. It posits a world in which the gods of classical mythology (along with more modern subjects of worship) are actual, corporeal beings...a great mind-stretcher for people who love myths!

The Group: Young women who've just graduated from college. When you graduate, you feel like the whole world is in front of you. And it is! But the struggles that exist out there in the real world: relationships, work, motherhood are the same ones that we've been dealing with for nearly a hundred years. It's comforting to realize we've all been through it before.

Enchanted Islands: Anyone who feels like the later stages of their life are fated to be boring. After a difficult but not particularly exciting life, the heroine of Allison Amend's novel experiences real adventure for the first time in her late 40s, in a way that continues to play out through the rest of her days. Life's adventures never really end.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Holiday Gift Guide

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books Set On Campus

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is books in X setting (X being whatever you want it to be). What floated into my mind immediately, with summer starting to wind down, was books set on campus. I'm going to cheat a little here: not all of these books are entirely set on a campus, but all of them have at least portions that take place there.



The Marriage Plot: This book tells the story of three students at Brown in the 70s, moving Jeffrey Eugenides's autobiographical focus from his Detroit childhood to his college education. This book follows the journey three characters as they navigate both campus and post-graduation life, and is honestly my least favorite of his three novels even though it's still pretty good (I really want him to come out with a new one).

The Secret History: This is probably my favorite campus novel and one of my favorite books overall. It's about a group of Classics majors at small liberal arts school Hampden College (usually assumed to be based on Bennington, Tartt's own alma mater) who you find out commit a murder right at the beginning. The mystery is the why, and the way the book unravels it is SO GOOD.

The Group: Most of the action in this novel takes place post-graduation, but flashbacks take us back to Vassar during the days that the girls who make up the titular group were in college.

Private Citizens: Again a book that takes place mostly after school but the events that transpired at school (in this case, Stanford, which was my dream school when I was applying and from which I was rejected) are recounted at length and are an important part of the narrative.

Lords of Discipline: I just finished this incredible book, about a cadet at a thinly-disguised version of The Citadel, and even though I didn't have high expectations going in I loved it.

The Namesake: While Yale is only a small part of the overall narrative here, it's an important part of Gogol's life. It's at college that he finally sheds his hated birth name and begins going by Nikhil, symbolizing his attempts to shed the identity his parents tried to create for him.

Lucky: I read this book, a memoir of sexual assault and its aftermath while Alice Sebold (who also wrote The Lovely Bones), during my own college years. While Sebold's experience is the less-common-on-campus "stranger rape", the struggle she went through to have her rapist prosecuted is still harrowing and really opened my eyes to how the justice system "works" in these kinds of cases.

The Golden Compass: And moving into the fantasy campuses, this novel is set at least in part in a parallel version of the University of Oxford. Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of the book and the rest of the series that follows it, is a headstrong preteen growing up among the scholars who populate the college.

Wicked: Another fictional school, this take-off on the Wizard of Oz features the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, as roommates at Shiz University. It's really a wonderful book and the musical is pretty awesome too!

Harry Potter: And it's not a college campus, but the campus of Hogwarts is still one I desperately want to visit (I've got a trip to the Harry Potter theme park in Orlando with my best friends coming up and I CAN'T WAIT)!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books Set On Campus

Book 22: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

"The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn't held it tighter when you had it every day."

Dates read: February 19-22, 2016

Rating: 9/10

Lists/Awards: NY Times Bestseller

Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In today's world, it's ground zero of the hipster renaissance. It's more expensive to live in Brooklyn lately than it is to live in Manhattan. But it wasn't always that way. A century ago, when A Tree Grows in Brooklyn takes place, Williamsburg was where the immigrants and/or poor people lived. People like Francie Nolan and her family.

If you're a fan of plot-driven novels, this probably isn't going to be the book for you. Nothing much really happens...two young people, the children of Irish and German immigrants, meet, fall in love, and marry. They have two children, a girl and a boy. The father, Johnny Nolan, is charming and sweet-natured but fundamentally weak, incapable of holding down a steady job because of his alcoholism. The mother, Katie Nolan, is strong-willed, hard-working and tries but fails to hide her preference for her son over her daughter. The family lives in poverty, barely scraping by, as the children grow up. Francie, the daughter, is the center of the story, and the plot is largely about her poor but otherwise mostly unremarkable childhood.

But for me personally, I didn't even really notice that there was less in the way of plot, because the characterization and quality of writing were so strong. The shy and bookish yet resilient Francie and her world were apparently an only thinly veiled version of author Betty Smith's own childhood experiences, and a feeling of lived emotional truth resonates throughout the novel. Smith's prose isn't showily beautiful like Vladimir Nabakov's, but she strikes home keen insights about childhood and growing up with elegance and sensitivity. The characters are all people that exist in the real world: the good-natured and lovable but ultimately feckless overgrown child, the harried parent who has to stay strong enough to keep it all together at the expense of their own emotional wants and needs, the standoffish person who holds themself apart and pre-rejects everyone else before they can be rejected, the younger sibling who manages to get away with more than the older sibling would have ever thought to try. It may be set 100 years ago, but the story it tells is still meaningful today.

It was pure coincidence that I read this book right after The Namesake, and a minor plot point got me thinking about immigration, second languages, and class. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, both Katie and Johnny, despite being the children of immigrants, speak only English. Their parents are determined that their children will be American, and to be American is to speak English. It actually reminds me of a story my dad has told me about my grandfather, who is 100% pure Polish but speaks not a lick of the language. When my dad asked his grandpa about it, he said something similar: we're Americans now. We speak English. The Gangulis and their friends in The Namesake, on the other hand, make an effort to preserve their Bengali language and culture with their children. Their offspring hold oral fluency, at least, in their parents' native tongue along with their spoken and written English. When I was at the University of Michigan, I had friends whose parents were immigrants from the Middle East or Asia, and it wasn't uncommon to hear them answer calls from their parents in Mandarin, Hindi, or Farsi. There was never a sense of judgment attached to it. But there's a real hostility to Latino immigrants and their children speaking Spanish with each other, although their children brought up in America speak English just as well as anyone else. The perception of immigrants and their children who speak a second language seems to be tied more strongly to the social class of the speaker than any value judgment about having a non-English home language.

Tell me, blog friends...do you or anyone you know have immigrant parents? Did they speak a second language at home?

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 22: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Book 21: The Namesake

"He hates having to live with it, a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second. He hates seeing it on the brown paper sleeve of the National Geographic subscription his parents got him for his birthday the year before and perpetually listed in the honor roll printed in the town's newspaper. At times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the scratchy tag of a shirt his has been forced permanently to wear."

Dates read: February 16-19, 2016

Rating: 9/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Time Magazine Best Books of the Year

One of the quirks I've noticed since I've been living in Nevada is how proud people are of how long their family has been in Nevada. If someone is a third, fourth, or fifth generation Nevadan, that will be one of the first things out of their mouths when they meet you. Growing up in Michigan, I never heard someone proudly call themselves a third-generation Michigander. It never would have occurred to anyone to say. Part of it, I think, is the immigrant culture of the other side of the country. Plenty of people aren't even third-generation Americans.

When I went to school at the University of Michigan, it it felt like all the Indian kids knew each other. They had built-in friends as soon as they walked on campus. Good friends, not the "that girl who graduated a few years ahead of me and we were in the National Honors Society together" friends. Their parents knew each other, they would explain. But I didn't really get it...with some exceptions, I wasn't necessarily close to my parents' friends' kids. And then I read The Namesake, and it clicked.

Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is the story of Indian immigrants and their children in America. It begins when Ashima and Ashoke Ganguli are about to have their first child, recounting a bit of their individual histories in India and how they came to have their marriage arranged. When the boy is born, the pet name his parents give him while waiting for an Indian grandparent to send a letter with his "real name" ends up being recorded on his birth certificate out of confusion. Their child is named Gogol, after a Russian writer who is meaningful to Ashoke. Although his parents eventually settle on Nikhil to be his real name, Gogol sticks until he gets to college. Gogol hates his name, the way it sounds, the way it stamps him as unmistakably "other" in his American life. He changes it legally to Nikhil once he becomes an adult, but it is not quite so easy to deal with the uneasy internal tension between the Indian culture of his parents and the American culture he was raised and lives in, between who he was/is, and who he wants to be.

Although the novel takes turns, illuminating the story briefly through the eyes of Ashima and Ashoke, it mostly follows Gogol/Nikhil as he navigates childhood, college, and his adult relationships (curiously, it never follows his sister Sonia, who remains on the periphery, although it does very briefly follow the woman who becomes Gogol's wife after their marriage). Lahiri's prose is magnificent...it's rich without being flowery, and her words beautifully illustrate the dilemmas the characters face in a way that shows you without telling you. The characters themselves are well-rounded, multi-faceted, and face their entirely normal lives and problems in a way that feels like actual people you might know rather than characters on a page. Lahiri doesn't need to put them through incredible obstacles to show you who they are and why you should care. She just writes them with such humanity that it wouldn't even occur to you not to care. It's a wonderful book and I loved it.

Tell me, blog friends...do people tell you how many generations they've lived there in your state, or is that just a Nevada thing?

Note: review cross-posted on Cannonball Read

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Book 21: The Namesake