Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved but Will Never Re-Read

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 really liked but will never re-read. I figure for a lot of people this will include the gigantic books like War and Peace and such but I am crazy enough to think that one day I might actually get back around to them.

The Divine Comedy: It's just too much theology and Italian history to wade back into. Glad I read it once, but it's hard to imagine I'll read it again.

My Sister's Keeper: Just tooooo many feelings here. Tear-jerkers are a category I'm generally not particularly into re-reading.

The Hobbit: I really enjoyed this book, but I prefer the LOTR trilogy and when I want to revisit Middle Earth, I turn to them rather than the prequel.

Number The Stars: This is a very good book, and I re-read it several times as a kid, but I think it would lose some of the magic now as an adult reader. Middle grade is hard to get back into now when I want so much more from my reading.

Eat Pray Love: I quite liked this book when I first read it, but with the strong criticism of it I've absorbed over the years, I'm hesitant to go back to it and have it fall apart for me.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower: This book meant so much to me in high school and I'd happily recommend it to high schoolers, I just feel like I'm past the point in my life where it's going to have that kind of impact on me and I want to keep it as it is in my memory.

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: I loved this book as a teenager, but now that I've actually lived in the South, I think the stereotypes of southern womanhood would bother me.

Ella Enchanted: Charming, delightful middle grade that I just don't think would hold 32 year-old me's attention anymore.

The Pianist: A harrowing, powerful story that's good to read once but I can't think about reading again.

The Chaneysville Incident: This book packs a punch, but it's pretty bleak. I'm glad I experienced it but don't feel any need to do so again.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved but Will Never Re-Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Horrifying Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! With Halloween around the corner, it's fright season. I enjoy a good pumpkin patch and seeing the neighborhood kiddos in their costumes, but actually scary things like haunted houses have never been for me (I don't like corn mazes either because being lost makes me panicky). I don't read much in the way of "horror", but I do read things that creep/freak/wig me out more often than you'd think for someone so jumpy. Here are ten favorites:

Go Ask Alice: Huge caveat here- I thought this was horrifying when I first read it at like, 11. A young teenager tries drugs and before you know it's she's getting sexually abused and runs away from home (I think, I can't really remember it very clearly) and it was supposed to be a true account of someone's life. Even though I think of it as laughably overblown now, I somehow was surprised when I found out recently it was complete fiction written by someone who's done a lot of these "scared straight" books.

The Stranger Beside Me: Ann Rule was a volunteer at a suicide hotline in Washington, and often worked the late shift beside a likeable young man named Ted. They became friendly, and sometimes spoke of what was then front-page news in Washington State: a series of murders of pretty young women. Ted, of course, was Ted Bundy...the serial killer who was committing all those murders. Realizing how little we actually know about other people is definitely frightening to consider.

In Cold Blood: The horror of this one comes from the sheer unpredictability of the gruesome murders of the Clutter family of Kansas, and Truman Capote's rendering of how their murderers came to them. The Clutters were just sleeping in their beds, minding their own business, when their home was broken into and they were brutally slaughtered. That's so scary to think about.

The Hot Zone: We've all heard, after the Ebola scares that happened fairly recently in America, about what that virus can do to you: bleeding out internally is not a pleasant way to go. But before those few cases that developed on American soil, there was another close brush with Ebola: an outbreak of a strain among imported monkeys just outside Washington, DC. Ebola-Reston turned out to be a version that didn't infect humans, but how easy it would be for a pandemic to spread in our globally linked world freaks me out to think about.

Under The Banner of Heaven: This is not really a book about Mormonism (even though there's a lot of interesting historical information in there), it's a book about fundamentalist religion. As a lady person, the treatment of women is especially awful.

Devil In The Grove: You learn about Jim Crow-era injustices and violence and lynching and the profound mistreatments of African-Americans in school, but it's sanitized. Reading this book, about four young men on trial in Florida for raping a white woman, doesn't sanitize anything. The actual constant threat and terror of black existence in the South during Jim Crow is eye-opening and just gut-wrenching.

The Pianist: The Holocaust is flat-out horrifying. There aren't words for it. Of the Holocaust memoirs I've read, this one's elegant-but-unsparing prose hit me the hardest.

The Shining: I don't read much traditional horror, hence this mostly-nonfiction list. But I love the Kubrick movie, and even though the original Stephen King book is almost entirely different, I love it too. Like most of the rest of this list, it's mostly about the monster inside of a man (the malevolent hotel plays a role, too, but it's Jack Torrance's internal demons that are the root of the issue).

The Stepford Wives: I've tried to keep the politics to a minimum here on this blog (we're here for books, after all), but I will never keep my passionate support for women's rights, including rights to control our reproduction, to myself. This quick-read satire makes you wonder, particularly in this election cycle, what men really do want from women.

The Circle: I read this very recently, so there's no review up yet, and it's problematic in a lot of ways. But the picture it paints of a world in while we give up more and more privacy to the internet is really scary to consider, because the slipperiness of that slope is real.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Most Horrifying Books I've Read

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Of My Most Recent 5 Star Reads

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic: Ten Of My Mose Recent 5 Star Reads. Since the bulk of my content are actual review posts with ratings, I don’t want to sit here and type more about things I’ve already typed about at length (unless, of course, you want to go back and comment on the posts, in which case I’d LOVE to have a conversation about anything I’ve reviewed). So I’m going to look at books I read in the year or so BEFORE my 30^th birthday/the start of this blog and highlight ten of the best books I read.

Bring Up The Bodies: I'd read the first volume of this series, Wolf Hall, and actually not really cared for it despite being a sucker for Tudor historical fiction. I think part of it might have been reading it on my Kindle...some books really benefit from being read physically. But I was willing to try the second novel in a hard copy and I LOVED it. The slow build of the first book pays off in this one, the intrigue and drama fly fast and furious, and reading it from a different perspective than we usually see in these kind of books was fascinating. It was great.

Remains of the Day: I'd read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I liked a lot, so when I saw this at a secondhand book sale, I figured it was worth the $1. I was right. This one grabbed me right from the start, ripping my heart out as I read about Stevens' life and the happiness and meaning it could have had if he'd have only opened himself up to it. It's gorgeous and sad and wonderful.  

A Thousand Splendid Suns: Like everyone else in the world, I read and loved The Kite Runner. I was a little wary of this one because I had such high expectations from Khaled Hosseini's debut, but I knew this was a story about women and I'm always a little suspicious of men writing women's stories. I didn't want to be disappointed, and I wasn't. It was a lovely portrait of female friendship and the power women have when they work together.  

Blindness: I'd seen the movie first, because I love Julianne Moore, and found it well-done but difficult to watch. But I heard the book was a struggle to adapt and better than the movie, and it's true. It tells the story of a world where blindness has become a contagious disease. The first round of victims are quarantined, and an eye doctor's wife refuses to leave her husband despite not being affected and so pretends that she too is blind. It's about humanity and inhumanity, and even though it's written with nameless characters and lack of dialogue markings, it's so good that you just adapt to it and the pages fly by.

High Fidelity: Another one where I'd seen the movie first. The movie is a really solid adaptation, Nick Hornby's novels seem to move well to screen. He really nails that "adult who hasn't quite grown up yet and finally takes significant steps towards maturity over the course of the story" place, which, even though his characters are mostly white dudes, I think is a place that's relatable for a lot of people (myself included). It's a coming-of-age novel, just with the actual age being older than the traditional version of that reliable story. 

The Age of Innocence: I actually still haven't seen the movie for this one! But I want to, because I loved this story of smoldering passion and the ritualistic social manners that keep the players stuck in their roles. It's a love triangle, but one where all the players are sympathetic, the ties that bind them are real, and no one is an interloper just created to be an obstacle in the Twu Wuv of the "real" couple. It explores a lot of the same themes as Anna Karenina, and while it's not quite as masterful, it's beautifully written and a lot shorter. If you enjoyed this, and you should because it's great, the Tolstoy should be on your TBR too.  

The Pianist: And yet another entry in the "I watched the movie first" file. And while the book is excellent and heartbreaking (as Holocaust survivor stories are), this might be one of those cases where the movie measures up to a really good book. Both are incredible stories of survival and the power of music to play on the humanity of both performer and listener. 

So Big: This was something I never would have picked up on my own, but it went on sale for the Kindle and when I saw it had won the Pulitzer Prize, I figured it was worth a read. And yes, yes it is. So Big is the story of Selina, a high-spirited young woman who leaves her native Chicago to teach in farm country for a year. She plans to return home, but instead falls in love with a strong, handsome farmer. They marry and have a child, but her husband dies not long thereafter. Her young son is nicknamed So Big, and her struggle to raise him as a single mother is affecting and inspiring. She's an amazing character and this book is unforgettable. 

The Interestings: I'd heard a lot of buzz around this one when it first came out and finally got around to reading it when I scored a secondhand copy for cheap. It's the story of a group of kids that come together at a summer camp for the artistically gifted and whose friendships wax and wane over the course of their lives as they unfold in many directions. I find these kinds of friendships-changing-over-time novels to be incredibly compelling, and the current running through it about what it means to think of yourself as special and how it impacts your perception of happy-but-ordinary circumstances is just icing on the cake.

Stardust: Last one where I saw the movie first (which is cheating, because this is the last book on the list)! The movie was fun and forgettable, but the kind of epitome of "the book is better"...there's nothing wrong with the film, it's just not as good. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Of My Most Recent 5 Star Reads