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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved that Made Me Want More Books Like Them

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 loved so much we immediately started looking for the next thing that would scratch the itch. Here are ten books that I have been looking for "the next" version of (but haven't found yet). 

The Bear and the Nightingale: This gave me such a longing for more non-Western mythology (I know Russia can technically be considered Western, but there are equally compelling arguments that it's not) based stories. I haven't yet found anything that comes close.

The Secret History: Like so many others, I keep reading other books described as "dark academia" and they just keep being not as good as this book. 

Speak: I read this my freshman year in high school, and while there have been many books that aim for its blend of dark humor and emotional honesty, I haven't found any that quite measure up.

Stardust: This draws on the tropes of fairy tales to create something that feels both new and timeless in way that nothing else I've read manages to pull off.

The Remains of the Day: This book balances exquisitely restrained writing against big and powerful emotions. I don't think even Ishiguro himself has been able to match it since.

Wicked: Maguire has made a bit of a specialty out of these sorts of children's stories retold, but he hit a peak with this book that neither he nor anyone else has been able to fully replicate.

The Proud Tower: This spurred a deep and profound interest in the pre-WWI era that has driven me to buy and read several other books covering this time period, but none nearly as effectively.

1984: For me, this is the dystopian novel every single other one tries (and fails) to be.

The Red Tent: I have read a lot more Biblical fiction than one would expect for someone who is not religious, and it's because I keep trying to find something that matches this.

The Stranger Beside Me: This is great true crime, but it's made all the more compelling because of the author's personal connection to the killer and nothing else has managed to do it quite as well, for me.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Loved that Made Me Want More Books Like Them

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Take Place In Other Worlds

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, it's the annual Halloween-themed freebie. I had a hard time coming up with something I haven't done before, especially considering I don't read a lot of horror (I'm too easily frightened!), but decided to look at books that take place in other worlds.

His Dark Materials: This amazing series takes place in a parallel version of England, called Brytain, which is both quite similar to and very different than our own.

The Old Kingdom: Perhaps my favorite other world, this richly-imagined land has its own magic system and an intricately designed world of Death as well.

Wild Magic: Like many (maybe all?) of Tamora Pierce's books, this series takes place in the medieval-esque, magical world of Tortall.

The Lord of the Rings: Middle Earth may be the most iconic fantasy realm of all!

Oryx and Crake: This is less "another world" and more "a version of what our world could become". Honestly besides her thinking that CD-ROMs were going to be the storage mechanism of the future, this felt eerily prescient.

The Hunger Games: This is another one that is, I think, technically set in the far future, but it's such a different social arrangement that it's basically another place entirely.

A Song of Ice and Fire: These gigantic novels create and explore the rich territory of Westeros, its seven kingdoms, and the larger world beyond. It's loosely inspired by medieval Europe.

Wicked: This one is based on an already-established fantasy world, Oz, which is familiar even to those who haven't read Baum's books because of the enduring popularity of the film. I love the rich politics of the world that Maguire fleshes out!

Stardust: This is a fairy tale, and has both a "real world" and fantasy realm of its own. It's truly magical to read!

A Wrinkle in Time: This series of books is almost more magical realism than anything else...rooted in our world, but with supernatural possibilities for the Murray family (time travel! space travel! angels!) that mean it's not quite our world as we know it after all.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Take Place In Other Worlds

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books With Single-Word Titles

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl!This week, we're talking about books with one-word titles. I thought about doing my least favorite single-word titled reads, but decided to be positive about it so here are some of my favorites!

Less: I was reluctant to read this when it was a book club pick, but I wound up just adoring this story about a middle-aged man on a trip around the world to escape having to attend his younger ex's wedding.

Wicked: I picked up this book, which tells the "real story" of the Wicked Witch of the West, for the first time in high school and have loved it ever since, through many re-reads. I also love the musical!

Twilight: Shut up, I know this book (and the whole series) are objectively not great. But I found them very enjoyable to read despite my own better instincts, and I've re-read them all more than once.

Musicophilia: I talk pretty often about my love for Oliver Sacks' most famous book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, but I also really enjoy this one, about the ways that music effects the brain.

Blindness: Bleak and kind of depressing and no quotation marks to indicate speech so a little confusing to read at first, but so incredibly good.

Stardust: I love fairy-tale-esque stories and Neil Gaiman's trademark wit makes this one a real treat!

Prep: This book plunged me so powerfully back into adolescence it was almost physically uncomfortable to read but so well-executed.

Gilead: I am not religious, and had previously not cared for a book by Marilynne Robinson, so my expectations going into this book were low. It seemed like I was going to be right through the early going but it eventually cast its spell on me and I found it intensely moving.

Battleborn: I'm not generally into short stories, but this Nevada-centric collection really blew me away!

Americanah: Such an incredible, rich book with amazing characters and powerful themes and beautiful prose.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books With Single-Word Titles

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Retellings/Folklore-Inspired Tales

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a freebie, so I decided to highlight one of my favorite subgenres...retellings! There is so much potential in taking a look at stories we already know and changing the perspective on them.

Wicked: Gregory Maguire has made a career of retellings, but his first was this take on the Wicked Witch that is so much deeper and richer than the musical (which is also fantastic in its own way). 

The Bear and the Nightingale: There's a kind of vague Cinderella aspect to this, but the real treat is the Russian folklore, alongside an incredible heroine and a wonderful story that continues over two sequels.

Polite Society: I just recently read this take on Emma, transported to modern day India, and found it really enjoyable, striking a great balance between the broad strokes of the original while still telling its own story.

Ella Enchanted: Teenage me loved this YA spin on Cinderella where she's cursed to always be obedient.

The Song of Achilles: I did not especially enjoy reading The Iliad. But I did enjoy reading this take on it that posits Achilles and Patroclus as a long-term, committed couple.

Boy, Snow, Bird: I did not love one of the concluding "twists" of this book, inspired by Snow White, but until then had found it complicated and rich and interesting.

The Red Tent: Dinah, only daughter of the biblical Jacob, is barely a footnote in the Bible, but this book takes her portrayal there and fleshes it out with life and love and sorrow and joy.

Lamb: This is another retelling of a Bible story, but takes on a much more prominent character...Jesus himself, given a dumbass best friend called Biff, who narrates the "real" story of the Son of God. 

Bridget Jones's Diary: It's a pretty loose take on Pride and Prejudice, but I love this book. So few "funny" books actually work for me and it's hilarious.

The King Must Die: I super loved Greek mythology growing up, and the religious aspects of this retelling of the story of Theseus made for a fascinating read.

American Gods: Neil Gaiman's vivid imagination brings together the spirits of mythological tradition from all over the world to face off with "the new gods" to which society has dedicated itself (media, technology, etc).

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Retellings/Folklore-Inspired Tales

Top Ten Tuesday: Series I Have Given Up On

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're looking to series we've tasted and decided not to go back for a second helping of. I don't do a ton of series reading, to be honest, but here are ten books that didn't do it well enough for me to pick up sequels.

Crazy Rich Asians: This series is usually pitched as a frothy delight, and for me, it was a little too frothy. I didn't care enough about any of the characters to feel compelled to continue to follow them.

The Hangman's Daughter: I'm convinced it must have been poor translation that made this book such a dud, because it's got a bunch of sequels and there was nothing I read that made me feel like even one was necessary.

The Paper Magician: This book was fine and made good airplane reading (engaging enough to keep you reading along, but not threatening to make you actually think) but it didn't have the spark that made me want to re-immerse myself in its world.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: I read and loved the original trilogy, but I'm generally not into the idea of a new writer picking up where another left off...and nothing I've read about the quality of the continuation makes me feel any particular regret about this.

Divergent: I thought the first one was alright, but the second one was definitely not good. The final entry was widely panned, so I will be a-okay if I never read it.

The Giver: One of my favorite books as a teenager, I think it told such a good story that the idea of continuing on doesn't feel remotely necessary.

Eragon: I read and really liked the first one when it came out, and then when the second one came out I read like 100 pages and never picked it back up again and can't muster up an interest in getting back into it.

Dune: I know there are people who just can't get enough of this world since there are approximately a billion sequels, but the first one was more than enough for me.

Wicked: I've re-read this book probably a dozen times, I like it that much, and I've liked other work by Maguire, but the idea of reading the sequels has like zero appeal.

Uglies: I read the first and second one and enjoyed them both and then just lost interest entirely.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Series I Have Given Up On

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Worlds I’d Never Want to Live In

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we're looking at the worlds books create and whether or not we'd actually want to live there. We did a similar topic late last year about places we would want to go, so this time around I'm going to be talking about places I would not want to find myself!

Westeros (A Song of Ice and Fire): I would love to see a dragon, but Martin does not flinch from the reality of a world which has been in a state of war for years on end. It is gloomy.

Bon Temps (The Southern Vampire Mysteries): The risk of getting killed by a vampire or were-creature or even rogue maenad seems disproportionately high.

Camazotz (A Wrinkle in Time): A conformist world where everyone has outsourced all decision-making to a central authority is not for me. Also the idea of that giant brain totally freaked me out as a kid.

Gilead (The Handmaid's Tale): I like having control of my own reproductive decisions, thanks.

Olandria (The Winged Histories): Another fantasy world riven by war.

Dune (Dune): A desert world so arid that every drop of water your body produces needs to be purified and recycled so you don't die of thirst, populated by giant sandworms? Ick ick.

Oz (Wicked): A rising authoritarian state where some citizens are treated as second class is no place to want to be.

Orisha (Children of Blood and Bone): Again with totalitarian government and a war-ravaged society being a less-than-pleasant destination.

Panem (The Hunger Games): It sounds like life in the capital and the first few districts isn't too bad, but what an awful world overall.

The hospital (Blindness): This book was brilliant but the devolution of society inside the hospital is harrowing.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Worlds I’d Never Want to Live In

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 Villains

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Villains

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books Set On Campus

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week's topic is books in X setting (X being whatever you want it to be). What floated into my mind immediately, with summer starting to wind down, was books set on campus. I'm going to cheat a little here: not all of these books are entirely set on a campus, but all of them have at least portions that take place there.



The Marriage Plot: This book tells the story of three students at Brown in the 70s, moving Jeffrey Eugenides's autobiographical focus from his Detroit childhood to his college education. This book follows the journey three characters as they navigate both campus and post-graduation life, and is honestly my least favorite of his three novels even though it's still pretty good (I really want him to come out with a new one).

The Secret History: This is probably my favorite campus novel and one of my favorite books overall. It's about a group of Classics majors at small liberal arts school Hampden College (usually assumed to be based on Bennington, Tartt's own alma mater) who you find out commit a murder right at the beginning. The mystery is the why, and the way the book unravels it is SO GOOD.

The Group: Most of the action in this novel takes place post-graduation, but flashbacks take us back to Vassar during the days that the girls who make up the titular group were in college.

Private Citizens: Again a book that takes place mostly after school but the events that transpired at school (in this case, Stanford, which was my dream school when I was applying and from which I was rejected) are recounted at length and are an important part of the narrative.

Lords of Discipline: I just finished this incredible book, about a cadet at a thinly-disguised version of The Citadel, and even though I didn't have high expectations going in I loved it.

The Namesake: While Yale is only a small part of the overall narrative here, it's an important part of Gogol's life. It's at college that he finally sheds his hated birth name and begins going by Nikhil, symbolizing his attempts to shed the identity his parents tried to create for him.

Lucky: I read this book, a memoir of sexual assault and its aftermath while Alice Sebold (who also wrote The Lovely Bones), during my own college years. While Sebold's experience is the less-common-on-campus "stranger rape", the struggle she went through to have her rapist prosecuted is still harrowing and really opened my eyes to how the justice system "works" in these kinds of cases.

The Golden Compass: And moving into the fantasy campuses, this novel is set at least in part in a parallel version of the University of Oxford. Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of the book and the rest of the series that follows it, is a headstrong preteen growing up among the scholars who populate the college.

Wicked: Another fictional school, this take-off on the Wizard of Oz features the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, as roommates at Shiz University. It's really a wonderful book and the musical is pretty awesome too!

Harry Potter: And it's not a college campus, but the campus of Hogwarts is still one I desperately want to visit (I've got a trip to the Harry Potter theme park in Orlando with my best friends coming up and I CAN'T WAIT)!

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Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books Set On Campus