Top Ten Tuesday: Shortest Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week's subject is technically books we've read in one sitting, but I don't tend to read that way...I pick up books and put them down pretty frequently throughout the day. So I'm focusing instead on short books that really grabbed my attention, even if they took me more than one sitting to finish. 

Civilization and Its Discontents: Breaking the rules here almost immediately, as this isn't really a "one-sitting" kind of book despite being very short. If you've heard of Freud and have an opinion on his theories but have never actually read his work, this is a totally fascinating exploration of the tension between society and the individual.

Men Explain Things to Me: The concept behind the title essay in this collection has become widely recognizable as "mansplaining", but that doesn't mean the essay itself isn't worth reading, along with the others that touch on various aspects of the experience of being a woman in the world.

Number the Stars: A childhood favorite, I recently revisited this story about a Danish girl and the Jewish friend whose family her family helps to escape on audio and honestly I think it holds up.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: The "life-changing teacher" is a stock character in media, but this book explores a much darker side of a charismatic educator influencing young minds. 

Lord of the Flies: A lot of people have hated this since they read it in school and had to analyze the obvious symbolism, and while there is certainly room to disagree with its premise, I found it a really interesting examination of the evolution of power dynamics. 

The Sense of an Ending: The story in this novel is the kind that some authors would have indulged themselves padding out to 350 pages, but the sparseness really makes it work.

A Clockwork Orange: Deliberately meant to be hard to get into because of the use of words from its own invented language but once you do get into it, it's great!

Exit West: This one I did come very close to reading in one sitting. The story of immigrants Nadia and Saeed just flew by.

Breakfast at Tiffany's: I love the movie, it's wonderful. The original novella is different...darker, and sadder, and just an incredible piece of writing.

The Awakening: This is one that has hung with me since high school...short, but elegant and powerful.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Shortest Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Assigned Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a back-to-school freebie! I know the phrase "assigned reading" makes some people break out in hives (there's something that immediately turns us off about being forced to read a book instead of choosing it ourselves, isn't there?), but a lot of the books they make us read are actually pretty good! Here are ten books that were required that I actually really loved.

Number the Stars: This book, which I read in middle school, about a young Danish girl whose family works to protect her Jewish best friend during the Holocaust is a well-told, engaging story.

The Giver: Another middle school read. I'd actually already read it before it was assigned in class, and even though it's pitched towards and able to be understood at that level, I still found it very solid when I re-read it as an adult.

Lord of the Flies: I think this one, about a group of British schoolboys marooned on an island who descend into chaos, was part of our tenth grade curriculum. I recently revisited it on audio and found its message about power and group dynamics still relevant and interesting.

The Great Gatsby: I hated this when I read it as a high school junior, finding it overly simplistic and boring. It wasn't until I got a little older and had more life experience under my belt that I recognized its elegance and genius.

The Awakening: I think I read this senior year in AP English, but it might have been at the end of junior year? Anyways, it's a story about a privileged Southern woman who becomes disenchanted with her life and the expectations foisted upon her as a wife and mother and it's excellent.

Cry, The Beloved Country: My AP English class led me to many wonderful books, including this powerful and poignant story of apartheid South Africa.

The Color Purple: Another AP English gem, this book about a poor black woman in the Jim Crow South coming into her own and finding happiness despite often miserable circumstances won a Pulitzer for a reason.

The Scarlet Letter: Guilt is a theme that gets explored in a lot of books, but I really did like what Hawthorne did with this one, which is much more interesting than you'd probably expect. Read this one in AP English too!

The Secret History: I've known almost no one who has failed to enjoy this twisty story of a group of Classics students who kill one of their own. It has something for everyone: it's well-written, has a suspenseful plot, and does solid character work. And it's yet another AP English selection.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: This I read in my honors Introduction to Psychology class and was so taken with it that I changed my major and got a degree in Psych instead of Political Science.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Assigned Books

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Vivid Reading Memories

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books for which we have particularly vivid and detailed reading memories. I don't often have super strong recollections of where I was and who I was with when I read (even if I really like the book!), but for some books, I do, and here are ten of them.

Fifty Shades of Grey: I KNOW, okay? I have very vivid memories of reading these blissfully brain-engagement free books on the boat at my mom's house when I was studying for the bar exam. I raced through them, because goodness knows I needed something easy on the gray matter that summer.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Another memory very tied to the boat...years after their big popularity boom, I read them over the summer after my first year of law school. That year in particular was not great for me in a lot of ways, so I relished getting lost in these twisty, propulsive books.

Never Let Me Go: I can still picture the little purple bookcase in my room my senior year of college that this book sat on after I read it for the first time...and the couch in our living room that I read it on.

The Virgin Suicides: I remember picking this up at the bookstore and starting to read it while sitting in the backseat on the way home with my mom and sister and getting really excited about seeing Bon Secours Hospital, where I was born, turn up in the text.

A Wrinkle In Time: This is very unglamorous, but in the interests of honesty, this book was always sitting in a basket in the bathroom with reading material growing up and so I read and re-read it over and over again in there in little bits at a time.

Bridget Jones' Diary: I remember getting this book in high school and staying up late to read it (my light dim so I could turn it off quickly if my mom came to tell me to go to sleep), trying desperately to stifle the sound of my laughter.

Zodiac: This isn't really honeymoon reading, but that's when I read it. There was one night we were in Chicago that we had a just crazy thunderstorm (the night we were going to go down to the fireworks at the Navy Pier, in fact) and I remember sitting on the little loveseat by the window and just hearing the thunder crash while I read.

A Suitable Boy: This isn't just one memory, because this book is crazy long, but I remember very much living at home after my sophomore year of college and reading this book when I wasn't working my very short-lived stint as a checkout clerk at the local grocery store. I would stay up in my room for hours because it was so absorbing.

The Awakening: We read this book late my senior year of high school in AP English and got these really cheap paperbacks, and I remember very much freaking out because I'd managed to rip off a big chunk of the cover accidentally. Thankfully it was only like $5 to replace it.

Gone With The Wind: My mom once dated a guy who had a cottage in northern Michigan on Torch Lake and I remember that we went up there for a long weekend one summer to open it and this is what I was reading...it's forever linked in my mind with the slightly musty smell of a house that's been shut up all winter.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Vivid Reading Memories

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Favorite Books I Read In School

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! The kids in Washoe County have already been back in school for nearly a month (we have some weird extended scheduling where there are more breaks in the school year and a shorter summer), but for most people, classes just recently started or will soon. Hence, this week's theme: back to school! I chose to highlight ten books I read in school (both high school and college) that I loved.



To Kill A Mockingbird: This was one of the books everyone at our school read for 10th grade English, and while I think it could just as easily be read in 9th grade, it's a good book for young teenagers either way. It's a beautiful coming-of-age story that (especially in very homogeneously white towns like the one I grew up in) inspires the reader to actually think critically about prejudice and racism. And as a kid that grew up to be a lawyer, Atticus Finch was close to my heart (I haven't read Go Set A Watchman yet).

The Great Gatsby: This was 11th grade English, and while the prose level is appropriate for high-schoolers, I just don't think you can really understand this book as a 16 year old. I actually hated it when I read it for school...it wasn't until I read it again later, in my 20s, that I started to appreciate it. You have to have had a past, to have loved and lost, to really feel this book in the way it should be felt.

The Alchemist: My 11th grade humanities teacher, Mr. Snow, was one of those teachers that kind of had a cult of personality around him. He was young and dynamic and sometimes unpredictable and taught the class as much as art appreciation than anything else. He really liked our class, and so had us read one of his favorite books, a story of love and self-discovery, which I loved.

Cry, The Beloved Country: My AP English class was amazing. The teacher (Mrs. Helppie!) was one of the most incredible teachers I ever had (I give her credit for teaching me how to actually write...to the extent I can, anyways). She gave us two assigned texts at the beginning of the year and then gave us choices on a theme for the other 7 or 8 books we read on our own, in addition to our classroom texts. This was an assigned text that everyone had to read and the lessons about disappointment and mistakes made and the futility of vengeance are so beautifully presented.

The Scarlet Letter: This was a "choice" novel from AP English...I can't remember what the other option was. I was expecting a dull testament to Puritan social values, but Hester Prynne (and her impish daughter, Pearl) are vivid and interesting characters who undermine the very system of shame-based behavior modification they exemplify. Also, through Arthur Dimmesdale, a much more compelling exploration of guilt than Crime and Punishment.

Snow Falling On Cedars: Another AP English choice novel (the other book I could have read was The Secret History, which I ended up reading anyways), in the category of contemporary fiction. It asks a question that seems ever-more relevant into today's world: can a community that has been oppressed (in this case, the Japanese population of a small town in the Pacific Northwest after internment) ever really be reconciled to its oppressors? There is no final answer, but it's thought-provoking with lovely prose.

The Color Purple: The final AP English choice novel for this list (also could have read The Bluest Eye, which I read a few years ago) in the area of Black female experience. I'm glad this is the one I read in high school. Toni Morrison is a powerful and important writer, but Alice Walker's book is much more ultimately life-affirming and overall hopeful in tone.

The Awakening: I can't recall if we read this at the end of the year for 11th grade or AP (I think it was AP, but I could be wrong). Now that I've read Anna Karenina, it feels like Karenina-lite to me. A woman trapped in a boring marriage has a fling and the social consequences reverberate in life-changing ways. But it's a good kind of intro to Tolstoy's work...if you enjoy Chopin's, you'll likely enjoy the longer one.

Inferno: I took a whole class in college on The Divine Comedy, and while Purgatorio was only so-so to me and Paradiso bored me to tears, Inferno is fantastic. It's full of dishy Middle-Ages Italian gossip (there's a whole backstory about Florentine political conflict that it's really worth it to look up because Dante totally puts his enemies in terrible places in Hell) and the system of contrapasso (punishments that match the sins of the condemned) he develops is incredible. It's a masterpiece.

Metamorphoses: It's a pity that Edith Hamilton's dull Mythology has become the standard-issue introductory text for ancient myth, because Ovid's Metamorphoses is so much more interesting. I read this for a Greek Mythology class in college that wasn't quite everything I'd hoped for, but it did introduce me to this delightful book.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Favorite Books I Read In School

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Every Young Woman Should Read

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Every Young Woman Should Read