Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books we wish we could open for the first time all over again. I'm a big re-reader, but there is something magical about discovering where the narrative is going as you read along, so here are ten books that I'd love to experience for the first time again!

The Secret History: I first read this as a senior in high school and it was so completely unlike anything I'd ever read before, it just blew my mind.

The Bear and the Nightingale: I'd always been interested in Russia, but this book spurred it to a full-blown obsession and it was just so rich and magical and I love it!

The Queen of the Night: I read this as an advance review copy so I had NO idea where it was going and each twist and turn of the plot surprised me.

The Amber Spyglass: I remember how excited I was to read this book, to find out how the story that had been told through the first two books would be wrapped up...and I was not at all disappointed!

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: I really wish I could go back to the time before I knew that J.K. Rowling was a transphobe and just enjoy the magic of these books.

1984: I'm pretty sure I was 12 or 13 when I read this for the first time, launching a lifetime love of dystopian stories.

Gone Girl: I did NOT see that twist coming and it completely melted my brain.

Wicked: I read this at some point during high school and it introduced me to the concept of retellings for the first time ever, which has become a mini-genre of books that I really enjoy.

The Remains of the Day: I had no idea how much this book was going to emotionally wreck me until the end and going in blind made it hit that much harder.

A Wrinkle in Time: For me, this book was special because it was the first time I felt like I really saw myself in a work of fiction...as an angry, awkward, smart-but-underachieving middle schooler, Meg Murray was EVERYTHING.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Follow On Social Media

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's topic is characters that we would follow on social media. But of course, social media comes in different flavors, so I've divided my list into those I'd follow on Instagram and ones I'd follow on Twitter instead.

Instagram

Emma Woodhouse (Emma): I am sort-of cheating here, because the Emma retelling I read (and liked!) last year, Polite Society, wrote its central character as a social media influencer...which is perfect because it's exactly what she'd be doing!

Francis Abernathy (The Secret History): Francis would be the type to post mostly (amazing) outfit-of-the-day photos, with occasional picture of the exclusive things and places his wealth allows him access to.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary): Bridget seems like the kind of messy friend that it can be fun to keep up with through social media. She would post lots of pictures of drinks with captions that probably overshared in an entertaining way.

Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby): A socialite who married rich, Daisy would be all about showing off the glittering exteriors to hide the hollowness of it all.

Lily Bart (The House of Mirth): She's basically trying to sell herself in marriage, and what better way to do that than to be the classiest kind of insta-model she could be?

Twitter

Lizzy Bennett (Pride and Prejudice): I'll be honest, I am not a super Lizzy fangirl. But she is definitely witty and could be very entertaining in 280 character bursts.

Ifemelu (Americanah): She would be the queen of those long strings of tweets that manage to somehow blow up the things you think you know and give you an entirely new perspective.

Catherine/Birdy (Catherine, Called Birdy): Quality teen snark.

Yunior (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao): The high-energy, pop culture reference-heavy way that Yunior tells the story would make for very entertaining tweeting.

Amy Dunne (Gone Girl): Anyone who could produce the Cool Girl speech could kill it on Twitter. I feel like she would mostly scroll and judge to herself, but every once in a while would give a truly inspired rant.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Characters I’d Follow On Social Media

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Great Titles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about book titles. Specifically, good ones! I'm only human, and as susceptible to the pull of a great title as anyone. So here are ten that got my attention!

A Clockwork Orange: I remember reading one that Burgess wanted to contrast the idea of mechanics/clockwork with the most alive thing he could think of, and came up with the juicy burst of an orange. I loved the book, and the title is captivating in its own right.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: I understand why this wouldn't have worked as the title of a movie, but it's so much better than Blade Runner.

The Color Purple: Every time I think about the title, I remember the central tenet of the book...which is effective for a title to do!

Exit West: This one just immediately suggests questions you have to read the book to find the answers to, like who's doing the exiting, and west of where?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: This title is a spoiler for its own book! But it promises an interesting story, and it delivers.

Skinny Legs and All: Tom Robbins has a way with eye-catching titles.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: I read this book because a college roommate liked it, but I would have 100% picked it up based on the title alone anyways.

Thank You For Smoking: There words in this order is so unexpected to see that it immediately grabs your attention.

Pride and Prejudice: The alliteration on this one just gets it stuck in your head. And it has a nice rhythm to it when you say it out loud!

Gone Girl: More alliterative goodness. The single syllables here give it a distinctive ring as well.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books With Great Titles

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: Best Antiheroes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is actually a villain freebie, so I decided to make a list of the best heroes-of-the-book that are actually the villains (which to be honest, usually means they're more interesting).

Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair): Becky is an unapologetic relentless social climber who thinks nothing of manipulating wealthy men to get their affection and is about a billion times more compelling than her sweet-natured friend Amelia.

Amy Dunne (Gone Girl): She and her husband Nick are both awful people, but honestly I'm always glad that Amy gets away with it.

Jaime Lannister (A Storm of Swords): Jaime was a fairly straightforward villain in the first two books, but when we start getting his perspective in the third one...he's still terrible but he's much more sympathetic.

Nick Naylor (Thank You For Smoking): The gleeful amorality with which this tobacco lobbyist/spokeman plies his trade is delightful.

Humbert Humbert (Lolita): He preys on a child and actively seeks to isolate her so he can continue to take advantage of her. But there's something captivating about him, a testament to Nabokov's skill as a writer.

Hannibal Lector (The Silence of the Lambs): He's suave and sophisticated and totally brilliant and eats people. Shame about the last.

Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo): Lisbeth is violent and doesn't care about most people. She's amazing and terrifying and enthralling.

Thomas Cromwell (Wolf Hall): He's basically the male version of Becky Sharp in his eagerness to throw morality aside to climb the ladder and then stay at the top, except he's real and since he's a dude he doesn't have to play the marriage game to get power.

Henry Winter (The Secret History): He's rich, obscenely smart, and dynamic, and it's easy to see him through Richard's enchanted eyes and forget that he killed a person accidentally and then killed his own friend when he thought he might have to face consequences for the first death.

Alex DeLarge (A Clockwork Orange): Alex so enjoys his life of rampaging around fulfilling every cruel urge he has that you almost feel a little sad when he's brainwashed into being unable to do it anymore. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Best Antiheroes

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: Books I Could Re-Read Forever

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books that we could re-read again and again. I LOVE a good re-read, so here are books that have really held up for me the second (and third, and fourth, etc) time through.

Lolita: There's so much to this novel that every time I read it I notice a new brilliant bit of wordplay or layer to the story. If you've let its subject matter keep you away, please don't. It's really an amazing book.

The Secret History: I first read this book in my AP English class my senior year of high school and though I've long since known how it all turns out, it sucks me in all over again every time I pick it up.

A Game of Thrones (series): This is cheating (there's another cheat down the list), but I re-read one of these books every year over the holidays and they're so dense and rich and the amount of foreshadowing is just incredible.

The Virgin Suicides: I first read this book at least 15 years ago and re-read it just late last year for my book club and countless times in between and it never fails to give me that very real, very powerful feeling of place that it did on the first time through.

Gone Girl: This is the book on this list I've re-read the least often, only twice. But Flynn's sharp-as-nails evisceration of the ways the world is bullshit to women is so insightful and hard-hitting that it's just as good when you come back to it.

In Cold Blood: Truman Capote's storytelling skills are really top-notch, which is why the pleasure of reading along as he tells the tale of the men who murdered the Clutter family doesn't diminish over time.

A Wrinkle In Time: I read this whole series over and over again as a young teen, but the first one most of all. For such a slim volume, L'Engle really packs it full of not just plot, but themes that resonate for kids and adults too.

Harry Potter (series): My second cheat, because picking just one of these books feels impossible. It's really all together, as the story of Harry (and Ron and Hermione), that they're best and so, so, re-readable.

1984: My sister still has the copy I got when I was like 12 on her bookshelf and it is a book I constantly reference and go back to because it is so prescient and smart.

Bridget Jones' Diary: Pretty much all of these are serious books, so I needed to throw in something funny. This is one of those books that literally makes you laugh out loud reading it and its cleverness is undiminished over time.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Could Re-Read Forever

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: Most Original Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is original books. When I think of books that are original, I think of books that are kind of the first of their kind or kicked off a trend. I don't tend to read a lot of books that fall into any sort of avant-garde category, so there are the books I've read that I think changed up the landscape for what came after them (and some that are just kind of offbeat).

Lord of the Rings: Forget just books, I think most high fantasy movies and video games owe a significant debt to J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork. My husband loves playing the Elder Scrolls video games, and I couldn't believe he hadn't seen the LOTR movies beforehand because they have so much in common.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: While the book itself is certainly an enjoyable twisty mystery, it's really here for the amazing character of Lisbeth Salander. Usually a slight female is the victim, but she turns all that on its head and is a brutal force to be reckoned with in her own right.

Gone Girl: Besides some genuinely shocking twists and a depiction of a compelling female sociopath (a rare creature indeed), this book propelled a boom in domestic thrillers. How many times have you seen something labeled "the next Gone Girl"? Exactly.

Life of Pi: I can't think of another book that tells a story quite like this one: a teenage boy trapped on a lifeboat with a variety of zoo animals, including a Bengal tiger, floating in the Pacific Ocean. Or was he trapped with any animals at all?

In Cold Blood: Truman Capote's incredible work basically created new genre: the non-fiction novel. Pretty darn original.

Bridget Jones' Diary: This hysterically funny book kicked off a boom in "chick lit" with flawed, quirky heroines. None of them were quite as much fun to spend time with as Bridget.

Moby-Dick: When I read this a few years ago on a classics binge, I was expecting something boring. But it's actually very modern, interspersing its revenge saga with details about whales and whaling that made it surprisingly enjoyable.

American Gods: Gaiman's incredible book manages to juggle multiple threads and characters along with an incredible main story about a clash between the gods people brought to the US from "the Old World" and the ones they've raised in the New. There's nothing quite like it that I've read.

A Wrinkle In Time: Maybe it's not nearly as special as I remember it, but to this day I don't know that I've ever come across as defiantly prickly a character as Meg Murray in a YA book...when I was a prickly girl myself, discovering Meg felt like a revelation.

Flowers for Algernon: I don't think I've ever read another book quite like this one, with its trajectory of genius found and lost. It's a heart-ripper.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Most Original Books I've Read

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

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

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Resolutions for 2017

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is a freebie, so I'm going to use the opportunity to make my reading resolutions for 2017. I know it's typical to do this a little closer to the beginning of January, but here we are.

Read 50 books: This is always my goal (though I "count" my years beginning and ending on my birthday for the purpose of this blog). Last calendar year, though, I read 101 books. I don't expect this year to be so robust for job-related reasons, but 50 is definitely something that I can do.

Buy fewer books: I own several hundred books that I haven't actually read, both in hard copy and on my Kindle. I know, but almost all of them are secondhand so it's not quite as horrifying in the bank account as you might think. I don't need any more books, but I know that won't stop me from buying them. I'm just going to try to buy less often.

Read more ARCs: I'm really bad at ARCs, you guys. I read about so many awesome books, so I request and sometimes get review copies, but then I have so many backlist books, too! I'm resolving to both work my way through the ones I have and be much more judicious about requesting new ones so I feel less guilty about being a bad ARC reader (I definitely do plug the books, if I like them, once I've read them, so I don't feel abjectly terrible).

Keep better statistics: I love reading other people's year-end posts with charts and graphs about their reading, but I keep only pretty minimal statistics on my own. I'm going to do a much better job of finding some metrics that matter to me and tracking them in 2017, and try an infographic to sum it up!

Read more authors that aren't like me: I'm a middle class, able, heterosexual, cisgendered, white lady. The experiences people like me have are mostly easily accessible. But of course, they are far from the only ones in the world. I'd like to read more books by people who have different experiences, that show me the world in a way other than the one I usually see it.

Interact more with the bookish community: I've got a dedicated Twitter for this blog, but I don't do nearly enough to keep up with all the bright, witty people I follow there. And I know that there have been times where I read a good post on another blog and don't bother to say anything about it. I'd like to be more present among the book lovers of the internet this year!

Do more re-reading on audio: I've finally found my speed for audiobooks- celebrity memoirs and re-reading the books I love but haven't had much time, with all the reading-for-the-first-time I do, to dive back into. Hearing His Dark Materials in Phillip Pullman's own voice is pretty magical and an excellent way to revisit the books I love while I'm walking the dog or driving to work.

Make room for mood reading: I tend to stick to a strict reading schedule, based on approximately when I bought the books in question (oldest books first), with ARCs rotated in as well. While I'm not often a mood reader, there are some books I'm holding back on reading that I'm interested in now, simply because I bought them "too recently". That's silly. Maybe I'll rotate in at least one "mood read" per month going forward.

Go to a bookish event: Reno doesn't tend to be much of a literary hotbed, but there are authors who come through and do speeches and/or signings (Stephen King came last year...on my wedding day). Maybe one of these days I'll make it a priority to get to a literary conference (I do really want to go to one), but for this year, I'm going to try to make it out for at least one event!

Read more outside my comfort zone: I know what I like- mostly contemporary literary fiction, some historical fiction, and a bit of nonfiction history. And that's generally the wheelhouse I like to stick to, because it's the one where I'm most likely to find books I enjoy. But the pool of "books I loved" can only be broadened by getting regular doses of sci-fi/fantasy (like A Song of Ice and Fire), or mystery/thrillers (like Gone Girl), or romance (like the Southern Vampire Mysteries), or YA (like The Hunger Games), and so I owe it to myself as a reader to pick up the occasional book that doesn't fit my usual pattern so I discover more books like the ones I highlighted, which are favorites.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Resolutions for 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Villains

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's subject is villains, which is an interesting stretch for me because I don't read a lot of book with clear-cut "bad guys". The kind of literary fiction (which makes me feel so pretentious to say) to which I am drawn tends to find its drama in the conflicts of people who don't fall super neatly into "hero" or "villain" categories. But here are the ten I chose!



Elphaba (Wicked): I know, this is cheating. The villain in the book is the Wizard, Elphaba is our protagonist. But the Wicked Witch of the West is one of pop culture's great villains, and Gregory Maguire's book examining the story from her side is a classic in its own right that spawned several sequels (none of which I've read).

Amy Dunne (Gone Girl): Also mostly not a villain, she's much more accurately an anti-hero. But also, she's a lady who faked her own death and framed her husband for her murder, which is pretty damn villainous. But damn if ladies don't understand her rage at a world that tried to shove her neatly into a box she had no desire to fit into and broke out of to forge her own deranged path.

Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada): Most of us have had a bad boss or two. But Miranda Priestly (allegedly based on Anna "Nuclear" Wintour) takes the cake: she's demanding, demeaning, virtually impossible to please. Or is she just a woman who's had to become that person in order to get to the top of her profession?

Mrs. Coulter (The Golden Compass): Much like our protagonist Lyra is, we're both drawn to and repulsed by the beautiful woman with her shiny hair and the golden monkey who accompanies her everywhere. She may be ultimately redeemed by her love for her daughter, but she's still a hateful and fearful person and a worthy adversary. 

Cersei Lannister (A Song of Ice and Fire): She's such an asshole (you know, cheating on her husband with her own twin brother, giving birth to several of her brother's children and passing them off as her husband's, the way she treats the Starks, etc). But when Martin starts giving you her POV chapters, she's still terrible but much more understandably so. A ruthless and ambitious person who is neither given the opportunities she wants because of her gender nor nearly as smart as she thinks she is, she's very rootable-against.

President Snow (The Hunger Games): The detail that Collins includes about the smell of him, his heavy rose perfume not quite able to mask his oral bleeding, is the kind of thing that lodges in your mind even if you have no real frame of reference for bloody roses. His ruthless rule over Panem is just the icing on the cake.

Humbert Humbert (Lolita): Probably the best example of a sympathetic villain in modern literature, Humbert's sophisticated excuses for his own behavior and passion for Lolita can overwhelm, on first read, the fact that he's a child rapist who preys on and attempts to dominate a vulnerable youngster who has no one else to turn to.

The Volturi (New Moon): A powerful Old World ruling court of vampires with superpowers is sort of cheesy but also sort of awesome. Once they start getting more developed in later books they lose a lot of their mystique, but when they're a shadowy force in the second book, they're a compelling adversary for Bella and Edward.

The Overlook Hotel (The Shining): I love both the book and the Kubrick movie of this story, but they're definitely different. The hotel is a far more malevolent force in King's original work, slowly poisoning Jack Torrance's mind. 

Grandma (Flowers In The Attic): Saved the cheesiest for last, because this lady is totally over the top and awful and just the most ridiculous villain. Will any of us ever forget about arsenic-laced powdered donuts? Or when she poured TAR in Cathy's HAIR? 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Villains

Top Ten Tuesday: Beach Reads Week

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This is a topic very near and dear to my heart: I grew up on an inland lake in Michigan, and until I moved out to Nevada, you could find me in the summer going back to my mom's pretty often to take advantage of the opportunity to lay out on the boat. I did plenty of reading while basking in the sun, and even though I'm generally of the opinion that any read can be a beach read if you take it to the beach, here are ten books I think match the breezy feel of a day by or on the water!



The Devil Wears Prada: I've talked about the life lessons about balancing work and home that can be taken away from this novel, but it's also a thinly-disguised expose about working for Anna Wintour at Vogue and the descriptions about how the rich and fashionable live are frothy and fun to read about.

Pride and Prejudice: A lot of Austen would be very beach-readable, but this one, to me, has the most lightness and humor. There's lots of romance, too, and it's very easy to just enjoy without having to think too hard.

Gone Girl: Gillian Flynn takes the domestic drama suspense novel to a whole new level. Nick and Amy's awful behavior gets you hooked and the plot races forward at a breakneck pace, so you're sucked in and it's hard to put down.

Bridget Jones' Diary: This book is as rip roaringly funny now as it was when I first read it in high school. Whenever I feel like I'm not adulting very well, a dip into Bridget's story makes me realize I have it much more together than I give myself credit for. And that I'd rather die than record my daily calories and alcohol units in my diary.

The Other Boleyn Girl: I imagine lots of people will have long since read this one, but a good royalty-behaving-badly book based in the Tudor era will never not be a great way to pass a day in the sun. If you've read this one but you haven't read any of the companion novels dealing with Henry's other wives, they're cut from the same cloth.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: Chuck Klosterman is a fantastic writer, and his collection of insightful and witty essays on pop culture pull tons of references together to make you think (but not too hard) about the world we live in.

Dead Until Dark: As you've probably heard even if you never watched the series, True Blood was a sexy, soapy romp that also touched on some larger themes. The book series mostly stays away from the larger themes part, but keeps all the steamy fun recounting the romantic adventures of Sookie Stackhouse, psychic waitress. This whole series is actually pretty delightful even if paranormal romance isn't really your genre.

Chocolat: They made a movie out of this, but I hated the movie so if you did too don't let that dissuade you. This story of Vianne, a single mother, who makes chocolate, and her young daughter in a small French village has romance, female friendship, and a running battle between our heroine and the local priest who takes a strong and instant dislike to her.

The Rosie Project: When a socially awkward and intensely logical (and probably autistic) college professor decides it's time to get married, he devises an intensive questionnaire to find him the most ideal mate. But when one of his friends puts Rosie, who definitely would not score highly on the survey, in his path, he finds himself drawn to her despite knowing she's not "right" for him. Or is she? I'm no fan of romance, but this is sweet and funny and perfect to take for a day by the water.

The Big Rewind: I juuust posted about this, but it's the best beachy book I've read in a while, so I'm adding it to this list. Fun and smart and witty and a quick read, this is a great choice to tuck in your beach bag.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Beach Reads Week