Showing posts with label the lovely bones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the lovely bones. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Featuring Ghosts

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! With Halloween tomorrow, this week is a holiday freebie! I did witches last year, so this year I'm going with books that have ghosts!




Beloved: This book is a masterpiece and the way Morrison uses the ghost character is incredible and if you haven't read it already you should immediately.

Sing, Unburied, Sing: This felt very much like it was positioning itself as "in the tradition of" Beloved, for me, but without quite the skill or level of success. It's a good book, and goes into some different places, but a comparison to Morrison's masterpiece is unlikely to be flattering to anyone. 


The Inferno: They're not quite "ghosts" per se, but Virgil as Dante's guide and the shades the two encounter in hell are a huge part of this amazing work.


Lincoln in the Bardo: I felt definitely echoes of Dante in this deeply weird but very good book, especially in the contrapasso-esque disfigurements the spirits were saddled with.


The Shining: I'm not big into horror as a genre usually because I am easily frightened and have a vivid imagination but this book managed to keep the scares relatively low-impact (even the very malevolent ghosts) and told a compelling story about addiction to boot. 


The Lovely Bones: Susie isn't really a ghost, but she's a disembodied spirit and at one point possesses someone so I think that's close enough.


Stardust: The growing collection of ghostly princes of Stormhold are kind of a side plot in this fantasy adventure, but the way the brothers come up with to murder each other are honestly kind of delightful.


Rebecca: The titular first wife of Maxim deWinter does not literally appear during the story, but the way her influence continues to haunt her widower, his home of Manderly, and his new wife is so pervasive as to be effectively present. 


Harry Potter: For something a little more lighthearted, the house ghosts and Peeves the poltergeist and Moaning Myrtle are a vital part of this beloved series.


Spook: And a nonfiction take on ghosties! I love Mary Roach and this exploration of whether there's any scientific evidence for communication with the afterlife has her trademark curiosity and humor.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Really Liked But Can't Really Remember

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're talking about books we really liked at the time that have kind of faded in the memory banks. As someone who reads quite a bit, I find this happens fairly often...I have a good opinion of the book when I've finished it, and then within a couple months, I'll remember only a vague outline. Here are some books that I'd need a refresher on if I ever had to describe despite liking them when I read them.



A Brave New World: I read this in high school and thought it was incredible and I could not do more than describe the gist of it if I had to. It's going on my "to revisit on audio" list.

Under the Banner of Heaven: I hated Krakauer's Into The Wild, but loved this when I grabbed it at the airport on the way back to Alabama for my second year of law school. I remember how compelling it was, but remember few of the actual details besides the most egregious ones.

The Kite Runner: My clearest memory of this book, which I know I thought was really interesting because I'd not read fiction from that area of the world much yet (I was in college), is that an ex-boyfriend lent it to me and I prepared what I'm sure was a truly embarrassing letter about how I wanted to get back together to tuck inside when I returned it. Luckily he told me he didn't need it back when I tried to give it to him.

Memoirs of a Geisha: This is sort of cheating, because I listened to it on audio a few months back so I DO remember it now, but holy smokes I'd forgotten SO MUCH of the plot. And I'd read this multiple times, too!

Never Let Me Go: I think the themes resonated so strongly in this book that the plot kind of just fell away because it's not really about the plot, is it?

Skinny Legs and All: Like many of Tom Robbins' books, this book has multiple plot threads, so I'm not going to give myself too hard of a time about the fact that I remember little about it except how much I've liked reading it the several times I've done so.

The Lovely Bones: I read this in high school and think I re-read it once (maybe twice?) in college and other than the central conceit I could tell you almost nothing about it except that I liked it so much that it still lives on my shelf.

The Interestings: I read this only a few years ago and while this is probably the one I remember the best on this list, how little I do actually remember is extra annoying because I loved reading it so much!

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: I think my memories of this book get conflated with the movie (Blade Runner), even though I'm very clear on remembering that when I saw the movie (in college) after reading the book (in high school), the book was better.

Child 44: Another one I read fairly recently and is all fuzzy anyways! In my defense, this is a thriller and the plot is all twisty-turny so the odds were stacked against me.