Top Ten Tuesday: Places In Books I’d Love to Live

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about places in books that we'd love to live. Not all of these are necessarily places I'd want to live forever, but would enjoy spending at least a long weekend!

 

Hogwarts (Harry Potter): I mean, of course, right? I think everyone who read these books as a teenager dreamed of their own four-poster bed in the castle!

Pemberley (Pride and Prejudice): Austen is full of covetable houses, and the one so beautiful that it overrides the heroine's reluctance to seriously consider the hero is probably the best one, eh?

Gatsby's mansion (The Great Gatsby): This place hosts a new totally incredible party constantly, I want in on at least one of them!

Highgarden (A Song of Ice and Fire): There hasn't actually been a scene set at the seat of House Tyrell in the books yet as I recall, but it is frequently described as a particularly lovely part of the Seven Kingdoms.

The Abhorsen's House (Sabriel): The Abhorsen's house is where Sabriel meets Mogget (pretty much my favorite character in the series), and I love the idea of the Charter Magic sendings who are so old they just do what they want.

Darlington Hall (The Remains of the Day): The guests that were in attendance there were not ones I'd like to mix with, but the old English country estate itself sounds beautiful.

Rivendell (The Lord of the Rings): It IS the Last Homely House East of the Sea.

Hampden College (The Secret History): I think Ann Arbor was a lovely place to go to school, but there's always been a part of me that wishes I'd gone to a college in the northeast!

Brideshead Castle (Brideshead Revisited): For all of Charles's attachments to the Flyte family, it feels like what he's in love with as much as anything is their beautiful ancestral home of Brideshead Castle, and it's described as so lovely that it's not hard to see why.

Manderley (Rebecca): There's plenty of darkness within, of course, but Manderly was so beautiful to look at that it was on postcards, so I think it would be worth a visit.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Places In Books I’d Love to Live

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Characters I’d Invite To A Party

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about the bookish parties we'd throw, and I decided to focus my list on the characters that would be fun at a party. Here are ten characters I think would make excellent party guests!

Lizzy Bennet (Pride and Prejudice): If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me!

Jordan Baker (The Great Gatsby): Anyone who shows up to Gatsby's parties is welcome at mine.

Bridget Jones (Bridget Jones's Diary): Every party needs a bit of a hot mess.

Margaery Tyrell (A Storm of Swords): She's both politically astute and genuinely good-hearted and talented at putting the people around her at ease, all of which make for a good party guest.

Sookie Stackhouse (Dead Until Dark): Sookie is savvy and kind and loyal and while parties probably aren't her favorite because of the whole mind-reading deal, she would be fun to hang out with!

Georgia Nicolson (Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging): She's a delightfully daft teenager and would absolutely do something unintentionally hilarious.

Lady Brett Ashley (The Sun Also Rises): She's kind of a tragic partier, but she parties nonetheless.

Vianne Rocher (Chocolat): Vianne would bring the good chocolate to share.

Ifemelu (Americanah): Ifemelu would be absolutely fascinating to get into a corner and have a serious conversation with.

Kolya Vlosov (City of Thieves): This party is otherwise all women, so let's throw a charming flirty young guy into the mix.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Book Characters I’d Invite To A Party

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

Book 149: Mrs. Dalloway

"How much she wanted it- that people should look pleased as she came in, Clarissa thought and turned and walked back towards Bond Street, annoyed, because it was so silly to have other reasons for doing things. Much rather would she have been one of those people like Richard who did things for themselves, whereas, she thought, waiting to cross, half the time she did things not simply, not for themselves, but to make people think this or that; perfect idiocy she knew (and now the policeman held up his hand) for no one was ever for a second taken in. Oh if she could have had her life over again! she thought, stepping on to the pavement, could have looked even differently!"

Dates read: May 29 - June 4, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/Awards: Time All-Time 100 Novels, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Newsweek Top 100 Books

Our lives are the series of hundreds, even thousands of choices that we've made day by day. Sometimes those choices are the obvious, life-changing kind: where to go to school, who to date, the career path we pursue. But sometimes they're little things that we couldn't imagine having big ramifications. Going out instead of staying in one night, or vice versa. Like Sliding Doors. But it's all the choices, taken together, that really make up having a life.

Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway takes place over the course of just one day, as the titular Clarissa Dalloway prepares for and throws a party, but its scope is really her whole life and the choices she's made. Most importantly, the summer when she rejected the suit of her friend Peter and instead chose to marry Richard Dalloway, a minor politician with whom she has a daughter who's now a young woman herself. Peter is suddenly back in town, in pursuit of a divorce for the younger-but-married woman he's been courting, and comes by Clarissa's home that morning, spurring her to think about that time of her life, when she was more passionate and free-spirited.

There's a parallel story going on as well, that of Septimus Warren Smith. Once an idealistic student studying Shakespeare, he joined up to fight in World War I without really thinking about what he was getting into. He ended up with what we'd probably now diagnose as PTSD, and when he was sent to the villa of an Italian hatmaker to recover from his shellshock, impulsively married Lucrezia, the hatmaker's lively daughter. Although the pair has been married for several years by the time the book takes place, they have not yet had children, much to Rezia's chagrin. Septimus' mental state, always delicate, has taken a turn for the worse and his wife is desperately trying to find him adequate help. Although the stories at first seem disconnected, it becomes obvious that Clarissa and Septimus are foils for each other. Each is reflecting back on their lives and choices and the consequences of decisions long-since made, and teetering between hope and despair.

This is one of those literary classics that I'm glad I came to outside of the typical "high school English" setting. Like The Great Gatsby (which I hated when I read it in high school, but loved once I read as an adult), it's steeped in themes of remembrance and regret and reflecting on the choices made or not made that have shaped your path. And I'm sure I would have been disgusted that Clarissa had decided to marry steady, boring Richard who struggles to even just tell her he loves her because he's so uncomfortable with feelings instead of Peter, who struggles to contain his wellsprings of emotion and with whom she clearly has a more natural chemistry. But adult me understands that sparking passion isn't the same thing as love, and that Peter has not been able to make a steady relationship last, while Richard and Clarissa are still married, indicates that her instincts had merit.

Although it's only about 200 pages long, Mrs. Dalloway is a dense novel that I read at about half of my usual pace. The narration skips around, following mostly Clarissa and Septimus but also Rezia, Richard, Peter, and others. As a book focused on memory, it's presented in a more stream-of-consciousness style and demands close attention. It's one of those books that you read and immediately know you're going to get more out of every time you go back through it because there's a lot there, and I'm sure this is a book I want to revisit. Woolf's writing is lovely, not flowery or excessive but still packed with powerful themes and emotions. Since I wasn't an English major, this is actually the first time I've read her work and I walked away wanting to read more. I'd recommend this book to everyone.

One year ago, I was reading: The Royals (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Sophie's Choice

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Book 149: Mrs. Dalloway

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 To Read Together

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I'm taking a slightly different tack on this week's topic. We're supposed to be writing about books we'd like to mash together to make an epic story, but honestly I had no idea what I'd do with that. I don't read a lot of fantasy, and I know you could do it with other kinds of books but I wasn't feeling creative so here's what I came up with instead: books that complement each other when read together. Each of them portrays a "side" of a story, so putting them together makes for a more well-rounded look at it.

Gone with the Wind and Beloved: Margaret Mitchell's classic of the antebellum South did bring us the incredible character of Scarlett O'Hara, but made no attempt to critically examine the machine on which that society was built: chattel slavery. Toni Morrison's Beloved, the story of a slave who escaped to the north at a great price, makes the horrors of it viscerally real. We often romanticize the plantation lifestyle, and we need to reckon with the terrible cost, too.

Little House on the Prairie and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: I used to get in trouble in school for reading books while I was in class, and when I was a kid, Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories about her family's journey across the country were ones I tucked inside my textbooks to read again and again. But the westward drive of white settlers had a devastating impact on the people who'd lived there for hundreds of years, so Dee Brown's nonfiction recounting of the desperate, doomed fight of the Native Americans to retain their land and traditions is necessary to understand what the Ingalls family was actually a part of.

To Kill A Mockingbird and Native Son: That poor Tom is innocent of the charges against him is, of course, a critical part of the injustice Harper Lee's novel asks us to understand. But while Lee wraps it in a soft, white-savior narrative, Richard Wright's searing book is much less comfortable in its story of a young black man who does assault a white woman. It examines the social conditions of the Jim Crow era that perpetuated criminality in a very up-front way, really forcing us to consider our own complicity in the system.

Lolita and Speak: Don't get me wrong, I consider Vladimir Nabakov's tale of Humbert Humbert's obsession with the vulnerable Delores one of my all-time favorites. It's an incredible book and not nearly as salacious as most people expect. But it's the story of the predator, and for a story about the impact of being the very young prey of a rapist, it's hard to beat Laurie Halse Anderson's incredible YA novel about a teenage girl ostracized after she calls the police when she's assaulted at a party. Anderson makes her nightmare real, and she's not even dependent on her rapist as Lolita is on hers.

The Great Gatsby and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: I actually didn't love it when I first read it in high school, but F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece has come to be The Great American Novel in my eyes. It's come to symbolize the grandeur and excess of early 20th century New York City so thoroughly that people don't talk about having Roaring 20s parties, they talk about Great Gatsby parties. But for all that excess and wealth, there was also poverty and want, and Betty Smith's beautifully rendered coming-of-age story shows the struggle beneath the glitter.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books To Read Together

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Red, White, And Blue Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're highlighting books with red, white, and blue covers because tomorrow is Independence Day! Or as my very British brother-in-law calls it, Unruly Colonists Day. Since this is a cover-focused list, I'm not going to write about my choices, but I will note for the record that all of these books take place in the USA!

The Great Gatsby

Into The Wild

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

From Dead to Worse

Americanah

Fahrenheit 451

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Beloved

All The King's Men

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Red, White, And Blue Covers

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Quotes

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're highlighting our favorite quotes from books. I love highlighting/dog-earing my books to remind me of pieces of writing I found particularly meaningful, so I enjoyed going back through some of my favorites and pulling out words I especially loved to share with y'all!

"Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul." (Lolita)

This book is FULL of gorgeous writing. Hands-down the most beautifully written book I've ever read. But this part of the intro has always stuck with me.

"Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls. Our parents thought it had to do with our music, our godlessness, or the loosening of morals regarding sex we hadn't even had. Mr. Hedlie mentioned that fin-de-sicle Vienna witnessed a similar outbreak of suicides on the part of the young, and put the whole thing down to the misfortune of living in a dying empire. It had to do with the way the mail wasn't delivered on time, and how potholes never got fixed, or the thievery at City Hall, or the race riots, or the 801 fires set around the city on Devil's night." (The Virgin Suicides)

I re-read this book, one of my all-time favorites, recently for my book club, and this passage has always struck me as both representative of the quality of writing in this book as a whole as well as capturing something real about the downswing Detroit experienced.

"Midway through the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the true way was lost." (Inferno)

This line has been translated many different ways, but I've always loved the way the copy I studied in college did it.

"All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina)

Obviously this one is a classic. It's not exactly true, but has the ring and spirit of truth, which counts for as much anyways.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." (1984)

This book was so prescient in so many ways and this is one of the truest things in it.

"'I wish it need not have happened in my time,' said Frodo. 'So do I,' said Gandalf, 'and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.'" (The Fellowship of the Ring)

Basically my personal motto when I start feeling like life's unfair. In many ways, our circumstances are beyond our control and all you can do about it is figure out how to make the best of it.

"Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring." (Breakfast at Tiffany's)

I'm one of those people who's never quite been able to let go of that sense of the new school year starting as the real beginning of the year, though my last school year started in 2009.

"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (The Great Gatsby)

This is my literal favorite line in all of literature. The only thing that rivals its perfection as an ending is the end of Six Feet Under (don't @ me).

"Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win." (The Shining)

If you've only ever seen the movie (which I love), I'd recommend reading the book as well. The latter tells a story not about a haunted hotel, but a haunted man and how his internal demons are played upon until he loses the battle to keep them at bay and it's really really good.

"The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously." (Jitterbug Perfume)

This is one of my favorite books, and while Tom Robbins isn't always an author that it's easy to pull a quote from (it's more about the writing as a whole), I love this one and it's something I think about when I start feeling down.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book 76: Reading Lolita in Tehran

"The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality."

Read: August 3-7, 2016

Rating: 7/10

I was allowed to read pretty much whatever I wanted growing up. Which was awesome! My mom definitely encouraged my sister and I to read whatever we liked, which often meant things she wouldn't have picked out for us (my brief Lois Duncan phase comes to mind), but it was more important to her that we were reading and enjoying it than that she put a lid on what we wanted to read. I've always been suspicious of people who want to exercise a lot of control over what other people read. Sure, there are some books that have themes that are more mature and younger readers might benefit from being able to talk about, but books are just books. They develop your imagination, hone your curiosity, open you up to experiences outside your own. What's so bad about that?

Totalitarian regimes tend to believe everything about that is bad. An uninformed, incurious population is much easier to control. Theocracies, too, tend to be interested in suppression of alternate ideas. So a totalitarian theocracy, like the modern-day Republic of Iran, is doubly suspicious of books. So when native Iranian but American-educated former university professor Azar Nafisi starts teaching Western literary classics to a small group of past students in her home, she's doing more than assembling a book club with promising young minds. She can't even get enough black market copies of Lolita for everyone to have one...some of the girls use photocopies to read from.

Nafisi uses four major works of the literary canon as lenses through which to tell her story: the titular Lolita, The Great Gatsby, Daisy Miller, and Pride and Prejudice. She touches relatively briefly on her childhood in Iran, her emigration to the United States to study, and her brief, unhappy first marriage followed by her second, much better one. The book spends much more time discussing life when she returns to Iran with her husband and begins teaching as the Islamic Revolution unfolds, and the restrictions on female and literary life under the ayatollahs.

Nafisi has a unique perspective on the Islamic Revolution as both insider (she was born and spent a large portion of her childhood in Iran, and married a fellow Persian and moved back) and outsider (she spent her early adulthood in the United States and got a Western education before she came back). It's fascinating and horrifying to read about how women's roles and rights were pushed back and back as time went on...Nafisi is never run out of the workplace per se, but she is threatened with an anonymous note and was subject to constant harassment over not wearing her headscarf properly, and eventually decides that continuing to teach is more trouble than it's worth. As she watches her students struggle to make their own lives and raises her daughter, it becomes obvious to her that she can't stay in Iran even though she doesn't want to leave, either.

It's useful to come in with a working comprehension of the novels Nafisi focuses on, since she discusses them and how their themes relate to situations she deals with at length. I'd read three of the four coming in (no Daisy Miller for me), and while it's certainly possible to understand the book without the literary references, it's definitely richer and deeper if you can follow along. For the most part I enjoyed the way she used the focus novels, though I did get a little irritated in the section on Lolita when she claimed repeatedly that she wasn't comparing the ayatollahs to Humbert and Iranian women to Lolita and then went on to do just that over and over. I think it's an interesting and valid way to look at Lolita, but if you're going to go there don't pretend that's not what you're trying to do. On the whole, though, it's a very interesting memoir, especially for a bookish audience!

Tell me, blog friends...have you read all four of the classics that Nafisi uses in this book?

One year ago, I was reading: The Witches of Eastwick

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Book 76: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Top Ten Tuesday: All-Time Favorite Couples

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Today is Valentine's Day, y'all, so this week's topic is All About Romance. Since I've actually never done just a straightforward list of my favorite couples in the books I've read, I figure that's a great thing to highlight on the holiday of loooooooove.

Anne and Captain Wentworth (Persuasion): Persuasion was actually my first Austen, and I've never lost my fondness for this tale of love found, and lost, and then found again. Anne and Wentworth are a lovely couple and that they come together again after they've lived enough to really appreciate each other makes it sweeter.

Scarlett and Rhett (Gone With The Wind): Both bold and brash and so perfect for each other, although by the time Scarlett realizes how perfect he is for her, she's already pushed him away. I admit, the onscreen portrayals of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable bias me towards them because they're so amazing.

Jay and Daisy (The Great Gatsby): The kind of all-consuming love that makes someone devote themselves to becoming the kind of person they'd need to be to win the object of their desire is hard to argue with.

Elphaba and Fiyero (Wicked): This incredible take on The Wizard of Oz gives the green woman a full backstory, including a sweet and powerful love story.

Henry and Clare (The Time Traveler's Wife): I'm not big into "chick lit", but this story about a woman and man who love each other through a unique blend of space and time was powerful enough to overcome my biases.

Lyra and Will (The Amber Spyglass): I just finished going through this trilogy again on audiobook (which I highly recommend, Pullman narrates his own novels beautifully) and the scenes where they have to part broke my heart all over again.

Sabriel and Touchstone (Sabriel): I've always loved the way that Nix wrote Sabriel, so strong and independent, and that her love story feels like what love is in the real world: an addition, not the end-all-be-all of either person's existence.

Daine and Numair (The Realms of the Gods): I loved this series as a teen, and even though I now look a little more askance at the age difference between the young woman and her teacher, I like the way Pierce paces it. No insta-love here, rather a changing and deepening relationship between two people, which makes the payoff even better.

Alobar and Kudra (Jitterbug Perfume): I really enjoy Robbins, and the centuries-long love that he draws between a Bohemian king and an Indian widow is just one part of an epic about the power of smell and the quest to live forever.

Bridget and Mark (Bridget Jones' Diary): It feels like sacrilege to say that I didn't have especially strong feelings about Pride and Prejudice, but this modern take on it gets me much more invested in the relationship between our Lizzie stand-in and her Darcy.

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Top Ten Tuesday: All-Time Favorite Couples

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is All About Visuals. I had a hard time with this initially, since I'm not a graphic novel person, but I decided for this week I'd highlight some of my favorite book covers! A great cover can really make a book stand out...even when I'm browsing through NetGalley and Edelweiss, I find myself drawn to covers when I'm thinking about what I might want to read next, sometimes even more than the authors! And I'm just going through trade editions for this purpose...the fancy special edition hardcovers are just not fair to compete with.

The Great Gatsby: This cover is just iconic. The woman's face superimposed over the city sky, the single tear, the naked ladies inside the eyes...instantly recognizable.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: That statute, which actually existed in the Savannah cemetery, was apparently removed because people were tromping through so much to see it (at least, that's what my husband told me based on a childhood visit to Savannah).

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: So bright, so bold, so eye-catching.

To Kill A Mockingbird: That tree, so symbolic in the story, is a perfect cover. Striking in its simplicity.

Twilight: Two pale hands, offering an apple. The apple and its connotation of falling innocence, gives you a subconscious clue to what you'll find inside. I know there is a lot of disdain for the content of the book, but the cover design is amazing.

Life of Pi: It's so straightforward- a dark skinned boy, curled in the fetal position, in a small boat with a tiger, surrounded by fish. But doesn't it promise one heck of a story within the pages?

The Hunger Games: Considering how deeply the role and power of symbols is explored over the course of this series, that the first cover is essentially just the mockingjay pin, arrow in its beak is perfect.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: A dorky looking boy on a broomstick, with a visible scar on his forehead, trying to catch...something. A unicorn racing by. Three dog faces in the corner. All of this sets you up for a magic story unlike any you've ever read before.

The Handmaid's Tale: Those two figures on the cover are so ambiguous. You can't tell who they're supposed to be, not even if they're boys or girls. It's the kind of thing that makes you look again.

A Million Little Pieces: This was actually the inspiration for the direction I chose this week. Even though it turned out the book was a bunch of crap, that image of teeny sprinkles clinging to fingers is so evocative and intriguing.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Book Covers

Dreamcasting: The Great Gatsby

As I've talked about before, I'm super into movies. I've seen more movies (over 1500) than I've read books (definitely less than that), although recently the balance has started to tip in favor of the latter rather than the former. After I finish a good book, I start to toss it around in my head a little...who would I cast in these roles for the movie adaptation? I thought it might be fun to do a little recurring Dreamcasting series here every so often just for something different but still bookish.

I actually loathed The Great Gatsby when I first read it as a high school junior. Gatsby was a moron, Daisy a twit, Nick a fool. But when I was bored a few years later during a summer home in college, I found myself devouring it and relishing the experience. I've continued to re-read it and been grateful that I picked it back up again...while the reading level of the prose is suitable to a high school student, I feel like it's hard to understand before you've loved and lost, before you've drowned in the feeling of wanting another chance, wanting to start over and try again because you messed it all up and you'll do it better the next time, you swear.

And yes, I know, Baz Luhrmann JUST made a new version of this a few years ago. But it wasn't as magnificent as I'd hoped it would be when I first heard about it. Part of it was the casting: Leonardo DiCaprio was too old and had no chemistry with Carey Mulligan, who was competent but not as luminous as I was hoping as Daisy. Tobey Maguire would have been amazing casting as Nick Carraway...except being, again, too old. Here's how I would cast the main roles if I was making it today:

Jay Gatsby: Leonardo would have been amazing casting...if he'd been a decade younger. Gatsby has to be charming, with a willpower that can make you believe he'd make almost anyone believe in him. The one actor that I think could just knock it out of the park? Michael B. Jordan. He's been amazing since The Wire when he was just a teenager...just effortlessly electric onscreen. 

Daisy Buchanan: I think this is one of the hardest roles to dreamcast, honestly. She has to be so beautiful and compelling that you can believe that a man would go to the lengths Gatsby has gone for her, grounded but also floating with deliberate ignorance past the ruins she leaves in her wake. She's the on-the-cusp It Girl of the moment, so how about lovely Haley Bennett? She's actually got kind of a 20s look working for her.

Nick Carraway: For the wide-eyed and relatively innocent Nick, I like Michael Cera. Nick is a reactive character, the events of the novel happen to/around him, and for me he needs to be kind of bland-but-good-hearted-seeming in a way that I think Cera satisfies.

Tom Buchanan: He needs to be attractive but callous, the kind of man that would conduct his affairs openly in front of his well-bred wife and pick up a white trash social climber married to a poor man for his mistress. Jonathan Rhys Meyers has that kind of almost cruel look that I think Tom needs.

Myrtle Wilson: This is kind of a throwaway role, the aforementioned white trash mistress. Someone lovely but with a kind of hardness underneath, sexy but in an almost artificial way. She's as blue-blooded as they come in real life, and a little too young, but once I started thinking about Cara Delavigne in the role, I can't shake the idea...

Jordan Baker: I actually thought Elizabeth Debicki was a perfect Jordan in the Luhrmann version, but if we're recasting, we're recasting. It's a minor role, she really needs to be energetic and charming but capable of casual thoughtlessness. I'm going to go with Nina Dobrev, whose work on The Vampire Diaries had her playing a charismatic sociopath very convincingly.

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Dreamcasting: The Great Gatsby

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 I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This is another hard topic for me! I generally don't shift much in opinion once I've made my mind up about something (it takes me a while to get to the mind-made-up part though). Although I've historically done a lot of re-reading, it's not been so much a thing for me recently, so it's hard for my opinions to shift too much. But here's my best shot at it:



The Great Gatsby: This was the first thing that came to my mind, because when I read it as a high schooler I hated it, but when I read it again after I'd been in college a few years I loved it (still do). While it may be appropriate for high school on a prose level, I think it's hard to appreciate this novel without some rough life experiences behind you.

Anna Karenina: This feels like cheating a little, because the first time I tried to read this (in high school), I dropped it about 100 pages in because it felt soooo boring. So I didn't actually read it the first time, but when I picked it up a few years ago, I loved it and flew through it in like, a week. Another one where life experience really helps connect you to the novel and characters.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: I legitimately loved every single entry of the Harry Potter series as I read them when I was a teenager. And when I re-read the whole series a couple years ago, I loved them again. Except for this one, which I've started thinking of as Harry Potter and the Teenage Angst. So. Much. Stupid. Drama. Which is honestly probably fairly realistic for that age group, but was so tiresome to read about.

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: I haven't actually re-read this one since high school, when I loved it. But when I think back to it, I wonder what all the fuss was: as hard as it tries to convince you it's about a bunch of devil-may-care sassy dames, it's actually about a bunch of self-centered overgrown adolescents who are bound together by their love of making excuses for themselves. I have no desire to ever read this again.

The Prince: I tried to read this in high school and thought it was incredibly boring. A more recent re-read shows it to be a really astute look into governance, which I wasn't as interested in then but I am interested in now, so I think it's more about my preferences shifting than anything else.

Uglies: I got pretty into this series early in college (my younger sister had the books and I borrowed them), but looking back on them, it's hard to believe I took books with something called "The Pretty Committee" seriously. I don't think they're awful or anything, but I'd no longer be inclined to read or recommend them.

Tuesdays With Morrie: I found this really touching when I first read it when I was 18 or 19, but reading it a few years later, I was dismayed to find it mawkishly sentimental and trite. I grew up reading Mitch Albom's columns in The Detroit News and he's a talented sportswriter, but I don't want to read any of his books again.

Go Ask Alice: Not that I would have been the type of kid to get into drugs, but I found this really horrifying and realistic when I read it when I was around 13 or so. It was based on a true story...or so I thought, until an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Liar City, when they exposed it as complete baloney.

Flowers In The Attic: I actually read this whole series as a teenager and loved their over the top drama. When the first novel went on sale on the Kindle for $2 recently, I thought I'd revisit it. They do not hold up and I couldn't get more than a few chapters in.

Evening: This is a fairly recent one...I read it right after law school, after seeing and enjoying the movie, and really liked it, finding the story heartbreaking and poignant. When I was cleaning out my bookshelves right before my last move, I remembered it was about a woman who never really gets over a one night stand at a wedding and though it's written well, I couldn't fathom ever wanting to read it again.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven't Talked About Enough

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven't Talked About Enough. Since I’ve posted fairly little about my reading outside this blog and obviously I read a lot before I started, I’m going to take this opportunity to write about ten of my all-time favorites as mini-reviews!

Lolita: An incredible book that I really believe everyone should read. Humbert Humbert is objectively an evil man, a child molester that marries a mother just to get close to her pre-teen daughter, and once the mother dies, takes advantage of Lolita's powerlessness to finally satisfy his desire for her. But it's an astonishingly beautifully written example of how everyone is the hero of their own story, even terrible people.

The Secret History: This was a book I read originally in AP English in high school and have read so often I had to replace my copy when the cover fell off. When a working-class California kid goes to school at an elite Northeastern liberal arts college, his background in Latin gains him entrance into a tight-knit group of Classics scholars. The book opens with the group murdering one of their own, and then goes back in time to show you the before, and then the after as the group struggles to cope with what they've done. So good. 

The Virgin Suicides: This is my all-time favorite book, and my signed copy (from a reading Eugenides did at Michigan while he was there) is one of my most prized possessions. I connected with it instantly: when the youngest Lisbon sister is taken to the hospital after her first suicide attempt right at the beginning of the book, she goes to Bon Secours Hospital, which happens to be where I was born. It's a wonderful coming of age story about infatuation and obsession and bad parenting and those the marks those heady teenage years when you feel so much so deeply leave on your psyche. 

1984: This is the first book I can remember loving. I must have read it in 7th or 8th grade. From the opening line ("It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen"), I was just totally hooked on the story of Winston, Julia, and the dystopian world they live in. In today's increasingly surveiled society, this novel is more relevant and important than ever. 

Emma: I wasn't a girl that grew up on Austen. It was only a few years ago that I read my first (Persuasion) and have from there read my way through most of the rest. And maybe it's colored by my affection for her modern-day incarnation Cher Horowitz, but Emma Woodhouse is one of my favorite characters in literature...I think as much as anything because she's a fundamentally happy character, not given some sort of trial to suffer through but whose conflict is mainly coming to terms with the consequences of her own non-malicious but oblivious mistakes. 

The Cider House Rules: I saw the movie first, in high school, and loved it. Once I found out it was based on a book, that was my introduction to John Irving. It's still my favorite Irving, probably because it illustrates (beautifully) one of my most deeply held principles: that this world doesn't exist in black and white and sometimes virtue means re-evaluating your ideals to accommodate real life in all its infinite complexity. 

The Great Gatsby: I read this for my junior year English class and hated it. HATED. I thought Gatsby was a moron and Daisy was a twit and thought the ending that left no one happy was just fine for a group of awful people. But then I grew up and experienced loss and heartbreak and regret, and did a complete 180 on the book. It's so great but I think it's read way too early in the standard high school curriculum. I feel like you need to have at least one big romantic loss in your rearview mirror to really appreciate this one the way it deserves. 

Skinny Legs and All: This was a book I actually grabbed at my dad's house growing up, and the trademark Tom Robbins mix of sex, metaphysics, religion with a quick-moving plot and bold female characters just grabbed me and didn't let go. The adventures of Ellen Cherry Charles and Boomer the accidental artist and Can o' Beans and Dirty Sock and Spoon has always had a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf. 

Remains of the Day: I read this a few years ago and it just ripped my still-beating heart out and stomped on it. As English butler Stevens reminisces about his past piece by piece over the course of the book, you see how his sense of duty and propriety has robbed him of the chance to experience any real happiness in his life. Gorgeous and sad and wonderful.

The Stranger Beside Me: I've always been fond of true crime...my mom had some Ann Rule books laying about here and there when I was growing up and I enjoyed them, but this one is the one to read. You see, when she was just getting started in her writing career, Rule spent time volunteering at a suicide crisis call center. And one of her frequent partners, with whom she grew fairly close? Ted Bundy. Yes, that Ted Bundy. She tells the story of his criminal history while at the same time telling the story of her coming to terms with the reality of the bright young man she had thought of as a friend. Fascinating stuff. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven't Talked About Enough

Top Ten Tuesday: Five Characters Everyone Loves But I Just Don't Get and Five Characters I LOVE But Others Seem To Dislike

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: characters you either love that everyone else hates or you hate that everyone else loves. I feel a little like this prompt is tilted towards reading that’s fandom-oriented (i.e. YA), which isn’t most of my reading. Since I can't come up with ten either way, I’m going to split this as 5 Characters Everyone Loves But I Just Don’t Get and 5 Characters I LOVE But Others Seem To Dislike.

Not For Me

Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter): Honestly, she was the first character that came to my mind when I read the prompt. People ADORE Luna, and I just...don't. I re-read the series a few years ago and my first impression was confirmed. She's not an awful character or anything, she's just not my cup of tea...I find her quirkiness irritating rather than endearing, which leaves me feeling all aloney on my owney.

Lizzie Bennett (Pride & Prejudice): Everyone falls all over themselves about what an amazing heroine she is, but she's my least favorite of the Austen novel leads. I get that the whole thing with the book is her and Darcy learning to get over their pride (hers) and prejudice (his), but she's kind of a jerk enough along the way that I'd have been just as happy to see her not get the happy ending (I think Darcy's pretty yuck himself, though, so they totally deserve each other anyways).

Tris Pryor (Divergent): I tried and failed to get into the Divergent books (I thought the first was decent, but the second annoyed me so much I didn't even pick up the third. I will at some point, probably, but I'm in no hurry at all. Tris completely failed to grab me...she just immediately felt like a poor man's Katniss Everdeen, except with all the real interest sucked out of her. Pass.

Scarlett O’Hara (Gone With The Wind): The only reason anyone can stand her, I think, is Vivian Leigh’s incredible performance in the movie adaptation. In the book, I found her selfish and spiteful and petty and just a terrible mother. I enjoyed the book much less than the movie and the character of Scarlett was the main reason why.

Don Quixote (Don Quixote): The power of my hate for this book a year after I've read it is unabated. If the guy were just being weird by himself and not getting anyone else involved in his nutty take on the world, I have no beef. But like old dudes everywhere, he goes ahead and decides that his view of the world is the only correct one, dammit. Ugh. Ugh. Hated him, hated Sancho, hated the book. 

But I DO like...

Daisy Buchanan (The Great Gatsby): She's selfish and shallow, but I've always seen her as a sad and ultimately sympathetic character. To me, she's trapped inside the world she's chosen and swallowed up by it. She's a pretty little bird, raised in a cage, that lives in a cage, and ultimately will die there without ever knowing true happiness. 

Cho Chang (Harry Potter): This is maybe cheating a little because I'm not a hardcore Cho fangirl, but I think she gets an unreasonable amount of pushback. Harry gets a crush on her, waits forever to make a move, and then gets all butthurt when she's had the audacity to start going out with someone else who likes her. And after that guy dies, she tries to move on with her life and give going out with Harry a shot and figures out she's not ready to date again yet. What's to hate on here? I genuinely don't get it. 

Frodo Baggins (The Lord of the Rings): He's not anyone's favorite character in The Lord of the Rings trilogy...not even mine. But I feel like he gets brushed off as whiny or boring, when he's actually incredibly brave and dedicated. Guy has never left his hometown and then VOLUNTEERS to take the most powerful evil object that exists to the worst place in the world to destroy it, and stays true to his mission even though he's given plenty of chances to ditch it. He only falters at the very end, when the Ring's malevolent influence that has been working on him the entire time finally overcomes him. Frodo is a badass, yo. 

Humbert Humbert (Lolita): I know. He's reprehensible. He's a child rapist. If he were an actual human, my legs couldn't carry me away from him fast enough. But as a character in a book, he's fascinating: witty, erudite, and completely undone by his infatuation with Lolita. It's a testament to the power of Nabokov's talent that he can write this absolute monster of a man with such pathos that he's not nearly as loathsome as he should be. 

Becky Sharp (Vanity Fair): I totally did hate Becky for the first portion of the novel as she schemed away without any apparent thought for the consequences for other people, up to and including her only real friend Amelia. But as the plot pushed forward, I found myself rooting for her. She's totally a sociopath, but girl is a SURVIVOR. She does what she needs to do to. Now that I'm thinking about it, she's a lot like Scarlett O'Hara, but for some reason I find her struggles to work her way up the ladder from the bottom more compelling than Scarlett's quest to retain a top-level perch. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Five Characters Everyone Loves But I Just Don't Get and Five Characters I LOVE But Others Seem To Dislike