Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Kept Me Up Late To Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's theme is "one sitting books". Now I read a lot (obviously), but I almost never read a book in one sitting. That's just not the way I do things. So rather, in the spirit of the theme, I've made my list out of books that kept me up late to read. I'm usually pretty good about putting my book down at bedtime, because I'm one of those people who doesn't function well after a bad night of sleep. But sometimes, I'm just too into it and I can't make myself do the smart thing and get back to it tomorrow. So here are ten books that kept me up late at night to read them!



The Queen of the Night: Even though I'm usually a character-over-plot reader, I could not get enough of this plot-heavy historical fiction mystery. I kept promising myself just one more chapter until I went to sleep, and then one more, and one more...

The Last One: This book's story, about a woman on a reality TV survival show when a deadly pandemic strikes, deconstructs the way we respond to these kinds of shows and the action is hard to tear yourself away from. I loved this book.

Green Girl: This was a very recent read, and even though I didn't actually like it that much, I found it very difficult to turn away from the tale of a lost young American woman in London trying to figure out the world.

Dead Until Dark: All of the books in the Southern Vampire Mysteries did this for me, honestly. They're breezy and light and so easy to get sucked into and hard to put down.

Gone Girl: Didn't we all get totally drawn into this book when we read it? The mystery of the first half, and the twist, and then wondering how it'll all end up...how could you sleep before you find out how it resolves?

Anna Karenina: I found this gigantic Russian tome to be incredibly compelling. I finished it in about 5 days, which meant a few days of less-than-ideal resting but I couldn't tear myself away from Anna's tragic story.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Before I finally picked the first of these Swedish mystery/thrillers, I thought they couldn't possibly live up to the hype. But then I opened the first one, and found it really hard to close it again until it was over.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Ok, fellow nerds who were growing up in the Harry Potter midnight-release-party era, you gonna pretend like you didn't get the book and then immediately stay up all night until you knew how the saga ended? Didn't think so.

Child 44: I grab a lot of books that look mildly interesting off of Kindle sale pages, because for 2 or 3 dollars, why not? This was a bit hard to get into at the beginning, but once it took off, it really took off and I had a really hard time turning off the light to take a break and rest

We Need To Talk About Kevin: Even though you know from the beginning how it ends, the way it unfolds is what keeps your attention. I kept turning the pages to dive deeper long past I should have been getting some shut-eye

6 comments:

  1. I should have listed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on mine! The summer it came out my now-husband was working on our university campus and I would visit him on the weekends. The campus bookstore had a release party at like 9 a.m., but we showed up early and they were like, "Oh, this is geared toward little kids. Just take your books now." So I read from probably 8:30 in the morning until I finished at 1 in the morning. Rarely have I had a chance to devote a whole day to reading like that!

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    1. I miss the days when I could do nothing but just read! That's part of the reason I struggled to come up with a take on this topic, because it's been so long since I had free time like that! I think I was a college senior the year the final book came out, and my sister (a high school junior at the time) and I went to Borders (RIP) for the shindig. It was mostly people in their teens and 20s. I can't imagine a bookstore event like that happening today!

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  2. Great list, Gabby! Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows made my list this week too, and I'm glad to hear you enjoyed The Queen of the Night - I received a copy from NetGalley so I'll have to get to it some time this year. =)

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    1. The Queen of the Night has been a go-to rec for me lately even though it's pretty hefty in terms of length because I enjoyed it so much, so I hope you love it as much as I did!

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  3. Child 44! That's been on my TBR list forever. Probably need to give it a shot. And I'm also embarrassed to say that I've never read Anna Karenina. I'm terrible on the classics and wasn't an English major in college.

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    1. Me neither! I was psychology with a political science minor. A bunch of the classics are free on the Kindle (it's kind of hit and miss with text quality), so a few years ago I downloaded several of them and read a lot of them (Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, etc). I was expecting Anna Karenina to be a slog but it was amazing. I really loved both that and War and Peace. Tolstoy is amazing.

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