Top Ten Tuesday: Fictional Crushes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about the characters from books that make our hearts go pitter-patter and give us little fictional crushes. I'm going to split my list and first talk about the characters that I had crushes on as a teenager (when I read the most books that had swoony characters) and then ones that appeal to grown-up me!

Calvin O'Keefe (A Wrinkle In Time): A cute, popular boy who's super into the angry, awkward teenage heroine? Definitely something teenage me hoped (and failed) to find. 

Logan Bruno (The Baby-Sitters Club): This is another one where a cute boy was into the "nerdy one" and I'm starting to see a pattern here.  

Dave the Laugh (On the Bright Side, I'm Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God): Robbie was the dreamy, older musician, but Dave is the one Georgia actually likes and that makes her, well, laugh. Even teenage me knew that was a better deal than the dude who's super cute but you can't talk to. 

Will Parry (The Amber Spyglass): I have to admit I'm not sure how much of my teenage book crush on Will was related to being all that interested in the character rather than investment in the love story Phillip Pullman tells for him and Lyra, but I definitely got all heart-eyes emoji. 

Edward Cullen (Twilight): I am not proud of this one, but years of watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer primed me to think that an immortal vampire obsessed with a teenage girl is romantic and not creepy! I know better now!

Morozko (The Bear and the Nightingale): These books only came out after I was an adult but I looooved this character even though there is a similar kind of "immortal being obsessed with teenage girl" vibe...except that Vasilisa is given actual agency and I'm not sorry about this!

Eric Northman (Dead to the World): Okay, but these are mostly the closest things I've read to romance novels and the storyline in this book is like, designed to make the reader fall in love with Eric.

Aragorn (The Lord of the Rings): I'm sure this has been influenced by seeing Viggo Mortenson in the movies so many times at this point, but an adult man in literature who is responsible and faithful is pretty hot stuff. 

Frederick Wentworth (Persuasion): I just re-read this recently and while he's a little bland, the romantic letter at the end would many any lady swoon. 

Andrei Bolkonsky (War and Peace): Apparently becoming an adult means that reading about handsome men who are mature and kind-hearted is what makes for a crush!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Fictional Crushes

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Want With Me While Stranded On a Deserted Island

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about the books we'd want with us if we were to find ourselves stranded on a deserted island. For me, a desert island book has two main requirements: being decently long so it's not just something you can get through in a few hours, and having high re-read value. Here are the ten I came up with!

War and Peace: This book is super duper long and very layered, so every read-through will reveal more.

Lolita: One of my all-time favorites that I have read at least a half-dozen times and I never fail to find it an interesting reading experience. It's so brilliant there's always something new to appreciate.

A Suitable Boy: Another one that brings the pages. It's on my list to re-read one of these days but the time investment required means that a deserted island would be perfect for it!

The Secret History: Another one I've gone back to several times since I first read it as a high-school senior. The characters and story get me every time!

Vanity Fair: This one would be particularly interesting to read right before (or after) War and Peace, as they're both set during the Napoleonic Wars but in very different contexts. Also it's very lengthy!

Sabriel: This is by FAR the shortest of the books on this list, but it makes it because the re-read value is so high. I've definitely re-read this one over and over and it still entertains me.

A Game of Thrones: If it wasn't cheating to put the whole Song of Ice and Fire series up here I would, I love these books so much even if the last season of the show was a huge letdown.

The Queen of the Night: This book was so much fun to read that it would be a great diversion if I was just stuck alone on an island with my thoughts.

Americanah: This book is decently long and has a lot of depth to it so there's a lot to get out of returning to it!

A Tale for the Time Being: This one is kind of a wild guess but this book has definitely stuck with me since I read it a few years ago and it's different enough from everything else on this list to keep me from getting too bored!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Want With Me While Stranded On a Deserted Island

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Want to Read Again

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about re-reading. I LOVE re-reading, which means that my focus lately on reading things that are new to me means I have missed out on going back and revisiting the books I've loved for years. I do engage in some re-reading via audio, which has proven to be a fun way to experience familiar favorites in a new way, but here are ten books I haven't had the chance to re-read yet but very much want to!

War and Peace: This one will be a commitment to re-read because it's super long, but it was so good and so rich that I can't wait to dive back into its world.

Possession: I found the way this story was told, with the parallel timelines, to be just enthralling and I really feel like it would reward a revisit!

Beloved: Obviously this book is a challenging one, but it is just phenomenal and important and worthy of being re-read often.

There There: This book was so dazzling that it feels like I need at least more run-through (and possibly more) to really catch everything it did.

The Blind Assassin: Such a delicately constructed story-within-a-story, and so wrenching.

Great Expectations: You can definitely tell Dickens got paid by the word, and of his works I've read, this is the only one that I think is going back to again because there's a genuinely compelling story there (even if it's too wordy).

The Lords of Discipline: This was a highly satisfying read and I'd just really like to explore it again.

The Queen of the Night: Reading this book the first time through was just fun as it took turn after turn. I want to read it again and really enjoy the characters and details knowing how the plot goes!

The Devil in the Grove: One of my most-recommended nonfiction books, this incredible true story about corruption and racism in Jim Crow-era Florida is depressing but so fascinating and very well-told.

Vanity Fair: This is another one that's really long, but Becky Sharp was just such an interesting heroine that I want to read it again from the beginning knowing how it'll end.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Want to Read Again

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.

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

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Like To Switch Places With

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're looking at characters whose lives look pretty good...good enough to switch into for a bit, as long as I got to come back anyways!

Hermione Granger (Harry Potter): Being Harry Potter himself is dangerous and scary. Being Hermione, though, means you get to have all the adventures and be the smartest person in the room at all times, which is the dream.

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): The lessons she learns are fairly gentle, and she's handsome, clever, and rich, which honestly seems like a great way to be.

Daine Sarrasri (Wild Magic): Growing up, her magical connection with animals was something I loved and really wished I had!

Vasya Petrovna (The Bear and the Nightingale): She's brave, smart, beautiful, and magical, and one of my favorite recent series heroines.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones' Diary): Her life is honestly pretty easy even if her escapades are hilarious.

Professor Maud Bailey (Possession): She's lovely and smart and a feminist scholar and that's not a bad way to find yourself being.

Natasha Rostova (War and Peace): I will never get over what Tolstoy does with her in the end, but right up until then she's got the best, most interesting personality and journey of anyone in the book, and is one of the most unforgettable characters I've ever read.

Astrid Teo (Crazy Rich Asians): Okay, she's got romantical problems. But so does everyone and she's gorgeous and absurdly wealthy.

Cersei Lannister (A Game of Thrones): SHE'S THE WORST. But she's also beautiful, rich, powerful, and utterly (albeit wrongly) convinced of her own intelligence and rightness.

Sookie Stackhouse (Dead Until Dark): Yes, the constant unwanted intrusions of others' thoughts would be stressful, and the frequent murder concerns are a problem, but she also gets to have a bunch of love affairs with hot dudes, so...

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Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Like To Switch Places With

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: Longest Books I’ve Ever Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about the longest books we've ever read. I know a lot of readers find gigantic books kind of unwieldy, but I actually quite like doorstops! Some of them have been amazing, some less so, but here are ten of the longest ones I've made it through (if one author has multiple entries, I'm going with the longest one for that author)!

A Suitable Boy: This will almost certainly be the longest book I ever read because it's looooong, y'all. I spent weeks reading it during a summer in college. It was really good and I want to read it again but that is a COMMITMENT.

Les Miserables: I know a lot of people complain about the extended digressions into things like the history of the sewer system in Paris, but I actually really liked the whole thing!

War and Peace: It's so long but it's soooo good! The size can be intimidating but once you get started it really draws you in.

A Storm of Swords: The longest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series! All of these books are super long, and this one is actually my favorite but it took me until my second try to actually get all the way through it.

Gone With The Wind: In the ultimate bookish heresy, the movie is better. The subplots that got cut were worth excising for a still-sprawling but more focused narrative.

The Executioner's Song: I still maintain that there's a very good 600 page book inside this 1000+ pager about the first person executed after the death penalty was re-instituted in the United States but as is it's just too bloated to really recommend

Don Quixote: I hated this book so much.

The Cider House Rules: The movie inspired me to pick this one up, and though I haven't read it again in ages I want to someday because it's really good.

The Memoirs of Cleopatra: I read this (and quite a bit of other Margaret George) in high school, and I feel like I liked it? My memories of it are vaguely positive anyways.

Shantaram: I read this fairly recently, and after about page 200 it was hate-reading. For the next 700+ pages.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Longest Books I’ve Ever Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Popular Books that Lived Up to the Hype

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! If you've ever read a book everyone told you was really good, and thought "really?" when you finally finished it, you've been bitten by the hype bug. I think a lot of us have gotten a little gun-shy over the years about the next hyped release! So here are ten books that (at least for me, everyone has different tastes) actually lived up to high expectations!

Jane Eyre: Classics, especially "beloved" classics, have literally hundreds of years of hype. I thought this book was going to be a straightforward romance and was delighted to find a story about a young woman coming into her own that happened to end with marriage. It's really good, y'all!

War and Peace: I tell everyone I've read War and Peace both because it's a gigantic classic and half the point of reading it is to brag about it but ALSO because it's honestly an incredible book that people think is intimidating and likely serious and boring and it is long but it is wonderful.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: I resisted this one for a long time because mystery/thriller is not a genre I've had particular luck with and I figured that its bestseller status confirmed that it was dumb. Joke's on me for being snobby, once I read it I raced to get the sequels because I looooved it.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: I remember a list I read several years back that said this was the best book since the turn of the century, which made me raise my eyebrows because it's a book about dudes writing comic books. How good could it be? The answer is: phenomenal.

The Hunger Games: I don't read a ton of YA. I'm not trying to sound like I'm hating on it, but I usually find that I'm looking for books with more complex characters/plots and more elegant prose styling for my personally most enjoyable reading experiences. So when this series got a ton of buzz, I kind of wrote it off as not for me and then I raced through all three of them because they're so good.

Gone Girl: A missing wife. A husband with a secret. Sounds like something you pick up at the airport to read on the plane and immediately forget. But I found myself staying up late and reading while I ate because I didn't want to put it down and that Cool Girl breakdown is a masterpiece.

Americanah: I read this just recently and there have been years of continually low-level hype about it that made me almost sure it would inevitably disappoint. Nope, turns out it really is that good.

A Game of Thrones: I actually watched the first season of the show before I picked up the books. Though I love The Lord of the Rings, I'd tried reading some other fantasy epics before and they'd just never clicked, but these books are so damn good and I re-read one over the holidays every year and I just want the sixth one nowwwwwwww.

Me Talk Pretty One Day: People love David Sedaris, which had always made me a little wary. Humor can be tricky on the page, and I've often found myself reading things that are supposed to be funny and being completely flummoxed. But happily, this book kept me laughing and I've picked up several of his other works to read.

Big Little Lies: I literally just posted my review of this last week, so I won't belabor the point. I read it as the miniseries (which I STILL haven't watched) was airing and getting raves so I read it at Peak Hype and still really liked it.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Popular Books that Lived Up to the Hype

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.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Couples I Did NOT Root For

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Can't Believe I Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books we can't believe we read. Since we've got a topic coming up later that's about books we read but hated, I'm going to use this one as a bragging opportunity for the giant books I've managed to conquer.

A Suitable Boy: This book took me the better part of an entire summer in college because it's enormous. And it was really good and I learned a bunch of things about India but holy wow I can't believe I made it through it because it seriously took months.

War and Peace: You never have to ask if someone's read War and Peace, because if they have, they'll tell you. Also please don't let this book's size deter you, it's great and moves much more quickly than you think it will (it will still take a long time though).

The Executioner's Song: This 1000+ pager is considered a masterpiece of true crime and while I didn't like it as much as all that, I read the whole thing, even the boring parts about the sale of the movie rights for the story while the guy was still alive.

Les Miserables: Another gigantic classic that I was kind of like "ughhhhh" about reading before I read it and then it turns out it's fantastic! I do think having seen the movie helped so I had at least some vague idea of where the plot was going because there's a lot going on here.

A Game of Thrones: I only started to read these books because of the show and they're all huge (this one, the first, is actually one of the shorter ones) and they are amazing and I love them and re-read one every year.

I Know This Much Is True: This is a big, lifespan-crossing book about twin brothers, one of whom is mentally ill and the other of whom is not. It feels so much like the kind of book I should have loved, and it's well-written but didn't quite earn its length, for me.

The Cider House Rules: This was the first Irving I read (in high school, after I saw the movie), and honestly it's still my favorite even though I've read several of his other books. Something about it really resonated with me.

Vanity Fair: I'm not always down for an unlikable lead character, especially when the page count is as long as this book's is, and in fact when I tried to read it in high school I didn't get too far. But when I read it a few years ago, I came to almost enjoy how awful Becky was...that kind of determination is interesting.

The Fountainhead: We all went through that Ayn Rand phase in high school, right?

Blonde: I remember this fictionalized take on Marilyn Monroe's life by Joyce Carol Oates taking me forever to read and it turns out that's because it's over 700 pages long.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Can't Believe I Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Bookish Settings I'd Love to Visit

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week we're talking about book settings we'd love to visit. There are SO many places I've read about that I'd like to go that this was hard to narrow down! I've divided my list into two sections: those from fantasy novels and don't actually exist, and those that are based on/are places in the real world.

Hogwarts (Harry Potter): Obviously. For real, though, I am expecting to see this on just about every list today haha!

Jordan College (The Golden Compass): Philip Pullman creates such a magical place in this grand university that I'd give anything to see it in person!

Abhorsen's House (Sabriel): The ancestral home of the Abhorsens sounds so cozy and lovely! (PS: this book, one of my favorites, is on Kindle sale right now for just $1.99)

Lothlorien (The Fellowship of the Ring): It was so hard to pick just one setting from this book! Because of course I want to visit the Shire, and Tom Bombadil's house, and Elrond's house too. But if I could only see one, it would be the beautiful forest ruled by Celeborn and Galadriel.

The Fairy Market (Stardust): The way Neil Gaiman paints this enchanted festival makes me want to be able to wander the stalls and see the goods for myself!

The unspoiled Nebraska prairie (My Antonia): This would be impossible to actually visit because it's long gone, but the way Willa Cather describes the loveliness of the prairie before widespread settlement makes me wish it was still around to be marveled at.

Napoleonic St. Petersberg (War and Peace): This one goes back in time, because the way that the balls and parties of the old nobility are portrayed seems so exciting!

Charleston (The Lords of Discipline): This book, apart from its primary narrative, also serves as a love letter to Charleston, which made me really want to see the city.

Hampden College (The Secret History): The northeast is packed with beautiful little liberal arts campuses, and while Hampden is technically fictional, it's apparently based heavily on Bennington College.

Hever Castle (The Other Boleyn Girl): The next time I go to England (which is an amazing thing to be able to say), I really want to just go all-out on a royalty binge and visit castles...and I'm particularly eager to see this one, which was the home of the Boleyn family.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Bookish Settings I'd Love to Visit

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Crushes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is book boyfriends/girlfriends...you know, when you're reading a book and get all swoony about one of the characters. This is a bit of a tough one, for me, because I don't read a ton of books with a central romance (which tend to be the type of books that make you all swoony over characters), so I'm splitting it up: five boy crushes, and five girl crushes!

The Dudes:

Captain Wentworth (Persuasion): This was the first Austen I read, and the hero remains my favorite. He's loyal and good-natured and big enough to forgive a foolish spurning means that even though she's an "old maid" (at 27!), the love he and Anne have for each other is just delayed rather than denied and this book is great and so is he.

Kolya (City of Thieves): Rakish and high-spirited, Kolya tends to win over everyone he meets with his charm. Especially women, and it's not hard to understand why: young and handsome and endearing tends to be an easy sell.

Charles O'Keefe (A Wrinkle In Time): This series is so amazing because it has such great characters: prickly Meg, self-possessed Charles Wallace, and brave, kind Charles, who is able to maintain his own stable goodness despite adverse circumstances. It's easy to understand why Meg loves him and it's hard not to love him a bit yourself.

Eric Northman (Dead To The World): This whole series has a rotating cast of love interests for Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone whose favorite isn't Eric, particularly in the fourth book, where he's lost his memory and imperiousness and he's just a tall, handsome sweetheart.

Jean Valjean (Les Miserables): A man who recovers from some previous missteps to live virtuously and devote himself to the loving raising of a child who isn't his? If that's not dreamy to you, we have different ideas of what dreamy is.

The Ladies:

Sabriel (Sabriel): Smart and brave and with powerful magic, Sabriel is enchanting and one of those characters who you can never forget once you've experienced.

Yvaine (Stardust): An actual star, kidnapped by a young man named Tristan to be a present for the girl he pines for, Yvaine is sarcastic and witty and it is no surprise that Tristan eventually realizes that he's actually in love with her after all, because she's great.

Natasha Rostova (War and Peace): If you can read this book and not fall a little bit in love with Natasha, you've got a heart of stone. Her spirit is what holds this enormous epic together, and the way she ends up still doesn't sit quite right with me.

Ellen Cherry Charles (Skinny Legs and All): Tom Robbins is a love-him-or-hate-him writer, and I tend to be in the former group. Ellen is a waitress who wants to be an artist, and her struggle to figure out her relationship with her husband and the world and herself and her pride and vulnerability make her a winning heroine.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary): Bridget drinks too much, can't stick to a diet and exercise plan, and speaks before she thinks. She is a delight and I want to be best friends.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Book Crushes

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Took Me A Long Time To Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Today's given topic is books that took a long time to read, and to be honest, this is a list I struggled to put together because I generally read really fast. Even for books I don't like, because I try to burn through them as quick as I can so I can move on to something better. That being said, there are definitely some books that I had to chip away at bit by bit, mostly because of length but sometimes because they were genuinely difficult.

War and Peace: This book took me about three weeks to read, because it is very very long. But there's a reason it's virtually always at the top of lists of best books: it's really incredible. Natasha might be one of my favorite characters in literature. Very much worth the time investment.

Les Miserables: Another super-long epic. I've actually never seen the show, but I did see the (very hit and miss) movie before I read it, and honestly I think it helped to have some sort of idea of the general plotline because there are so many characters and so much story that without an idea of generally what was going on I'd have been discouraged. It's also very good and worth the time.

Creative Mythology: This was the end of a four-book series that I'd found tiresome even after the first one but I'm both a completist and very stubborn. By the time I got around to this one, I was deeply and profoundly ready for the series to be over but they were really hard to slog through so it took weeeeeks.

A Suitable Boy: I read this the summer after my freshman year in college because my mom had a copy hanging around and it had always intrigued me. Another super super long one, this book actually taught me most of what I know about The Partition. I'd like to revisit this story one day when I have a LOT of spare time.

The Grapes of Wrath: This was the bane of my senior year of high school. I'm not much for Steinbeck and this is a lot of pages of Steinbeck. We had to keep these reading logs for each chapter, so I actually had to do a close read of every part of it and by the time I finished it I was so angry about reading it.

Vanity Fair: I'd made a stab at this in high school for fun and never was able to get into it, but a couple years ago I picked it up again and made it through. I usually have a hard time with books with unlikable protagonists, but once I decided that Becky's scrapiness was actually kind of admirable I got around to enjoying it if not loving it.

A Storm of Swords: All of the A Song of Ice and Fire books are long, but the third volume was the only one that stymied me on my initial read-through. I got bored and actually had to start it over again after getting about 1/4 of the way through because I put it down for so long that I couldn't remember what was going on. Once I made a second stab at it, it went really fast, but that first try was rough.

Don Quixote: I loathed this book so hard. It was all I could do to make myself spend just 20-30 minutes a day with it, so it went by slooooooowly.

The Divine Comedy: This is kind of cheating, because I read this three-part epic poem over the course of an entire semester in college. I loved it, don't get me wrong, especially since taking the whole class gave me so much of the context behind it...well, most of it anyway. Paradiso was kind of weak, but the other two parts were great.

Wolf Hall: Once I got into it, I really liked it (and its sequel even more), but I had a hard time getting grounded in the way Hillary Mantel was telling her story. It's one of those things that I'm glad I was able to push through until I got my head around, though, because it's a great book.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Took Me A Long Time To Read

Book 57: The Winged Histories

"I don't think writing is sorcery, something forbidden. I think it's more like a comb, it separates your hair more easily than you could with your fingers. It's like riding a horse to go somewhere instead of walking. You go to the same place, but you can carry more. I think writing is a horse. Or it might be a knife. An axe."

Dates read: May 29-June 1, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I am nothing if I am not a creature of habit, and one of those habits is that I refuse to jump into a series from anywhere but the beginning. Books, TV, movies...I don't care if everyone says the first one is bad, boring, or even just not necessary to understand what follows, I read/watch it. Which makes Netflix dangerous for me...so many TV shows to watch right from the beginning! Usually that just means I get choice paralysis and decide to read instead.

Why this particular quirk of mine matters at all is that Sofia Samatar's The Winged Histories is technically a sequel, though more in a "take place in the same world as" and less "follows directly the characters from", as I understand. I wanted to read A Stranger In Olondria, but my local library system didn't have a copy and so I figured that from what I'd read about the book, I'd probably be okay this once not following my own rule and just picking it up. Which I'm kicking myself for now, because I think I would have gotten more out of The Winged Histories if I'd had some background in that world going in.

Which isn't to say that I didn't get anything, or even much, out of The Winged Histories without that background. On the contrary, I found the book beautifully written, and once I got myself grounded in its world, incredibly compelling. It follows four women: the warrior Tavis, Tialon, the daughter of a priest, Seren, a singer and Tavis's lover, and Tavis's sister Siski, a noblewoman, as the Olodrian empire is engulfed in war and rebellion, both internal and external. They're besieged by a neighboring civilization, one of their conquered territories is trying to break away, and a new religion is fighting for dominance with the traditional one...with rumors of people transforming into vampiric monsters growing in the countryside.

I don't usually read war stories, which tend to be men's stories. Endless descriptions of battles and tactical maneuvers make me lose interest quickly (they slowed down my reading of War and Peace significantly when I tackled that one in the summer of 2015). But this one was different: besides Tavis's necessarily martial perspective, the rest of the story dug into how the battles resonate far beyond the fields on which they are fought. The lives of each of these women is thrown into turmoil by the unsettled situation of their world: Tavis flees to the army to escape being used as a political pawn in marriage, Tialon suffers at the hands of her religious fanatic father, who ushers in the new religion and converts the emperor, Seren is a member of the people on whose behalf the civil portion of the war is being fought but who suffer for their "victory" as much or more than anyone, and Siski drowns her sorrow at being parted from the sweetheart of her youth in a hard partying lifestyle. These are technically spoilers, but if I hadn't read a similar summary as I was getting started I would have gotten completely lost in who meant what to whom and what was going on.

It does take a while to get into it and adjust to the setting and situations of the story. Until then, fortunately, the writing sustains interest. The writing is just gorgeous...lush, poetic, and emotionally evocative. There's very little "this happened, and then that happened" going on here, each of the four segments is written in loose clusters of interconnected plot points, full of flashbacks and questions raised that don't get answered until a later part of the story. By the end I could barely put it down. The book is a rich reward for a patient reader.

Tell me. blog friends...do you like war stories?

One year ago, I was reading: Hood

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, Small Beer Press, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**

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Book 57: The Winged Histories

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I'd Name A Child After

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is characters we'd name a child after. I've got lots of thoughts about baby names (as a nine-and-ten year old, I'd read baby name books like they were actual books, cover to cover) and I've got lots of characters I love, so here are my ten!

 

Lyra Belacqua (The Golden Compass): I love this little hotheaded, stubborn, intelligent girl so much that I'd love to name a child after her and hope she could be nearly as delightful and challenging as her namesake.

Sabriel (Sabriel): Her strength and resourcefulness make her a wonderful role model for a little girl to look up to...and the name is familiar and yet different enough to be special.

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): A little more morally complex of a heroine, Emma is handsome and clever...and spoiled and selfish and convinced of her own rightness even when she probably shouldn't be. But she's charming and she learns a lesson by the end and no one's perfect, right?

Jane Eyre (Jane Eyre): I didn't expect much when I read this one a few years ago...gothic drama has not tended to light my fire. But I really liked it, and Jane herself is strong and bright and while Mr. Rochester is problematic, Jane herself is very much rootable-for.

Natasha Rostova (War and Peace): I LOVED Natasha for most of the (long) runtime, so to speak, of this classic that more people should actually tackle. She's a shining presence in the midst of a lot of very Russian sturm-und-drang (I know that's German, but I don't know what the equivalent would be in Russian). Like many, I'm disappointed in how the best character ended up...if you want to know why, you should read it!

Daine Sarassri (Wild Magic): I never got into much else in the Tamora Pierce bibliography, but I think it's because none of her other heroine spoke to me the way that Wild Magic's Daine did. Literally raised (in part) by wolves, she's connected to nature and animals and spunky and brave and great.

Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes): He doesn't seem to be much of a functional human, but damn Sherlock is clever and interesting and it's weird but not too weird of a name for a kid, right?

Rhett Butler (Gone With The Wind): I will say that he's not as dashing on the page as he is on the screen, but it would have been really hard to measure up to Clark Gable at maximum charisma no matter what. And even on the page, he's still way better than Scarlett.

Samwise Gamgee (The Lord of the Rings): He's not the protagonist of LOTR, but I would argue that steadfast, truehearted Samwise is the hero. When I first read the books as a teenager I found him an irritating tag-a-long, but as you get older you see that the power of his devotion to his friend is the power that really destroys the Ring at the end.

Tyrion Lannister (A Song of Ice and Fire): There are so many indelible characters in this series that it's hard to pick just one. But to name a child after? The deliberate, strategic Tyrion, who recognizes that his body isn't going to be what gains him the respect he craves and develops his brain instead.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I'd Name A Child After