a suitable boy

July 27, 2021

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Want With Me While Stranded On a Deserted Island

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the books we’d want with us if we were to find ourselves stranded on a deserted island. For me, a desert island book has two main requirements: being decently long so it’s not just something you can get through in a few hours, and having high re-read value. Here are the ten I came up with!

War and Peace: This book is super duper long and very layered, so every read-through will reveal more.

Lolita: One of my all-time favorites that I have read at least a half-dozen times and I never fail to find it an interesting reading experience. It’s so brilliant there’s always something new to appreciate.

A Suitable Boy: Another one that brings the pages. It’s on my list to re-read one of these days but the time investment required means that a deserted island would be perfect for it!

The Secret History: Another one I’ve gone back to several times since I first read it as a high-school senior. The characters and story get me every time!

Vanity Fair: This one would be particularly interesting to read right before (or after) War and Peace, as they’re both set during the Napoleonic Wars but in very different contexts. Also it’s very lengthy!

Sabriel: This is by FAR the shortest of the books on this list, but it makes it because the re-read value is so high. I’ve definitely re-read this one over and over and it still entertains me.

A Game of Thrones: If it wasn’t cheating to put the whole Song of Ice and Fire series up here I would, I love these books so much even if the last season of the show was a huge letdown.

The Queen of the Night: This book was so much fun to read that it would be a great diversion if I was just stuck alone on an island with my thoughts.

Americanah: This book is decently long and has a lot of depth to it so there’s a lot to get out of returning to it!

A Tale for the Time Being: This one is kind of a wild guess but this book has definitely stuck with me since I read it a few years ago and it’s different enough from everything else on this list to keep me from getting too bored!

October 9, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Longest Books I’ve Ever Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the longest books we’ve ever read. I know a lot of readers find gigantic books kind of unwieldy, but I actually quite like doorstops! Some of them have been amazing, some less so, but here are ten of the longest ones I’ve made it through (if one author has multiple entries, I’m going with the longest one for that author)!

A Suitable Boy: This will almost certainly be the longest book I ever read because it’s looooong, y’all. I spent weeks reading it during a summer in college. It was really good and I want to read it again but that is a COMMITMENT.

Les Miserables: I know a lot of people complain about the extended digressions into things like the history of the sewer system in Paris, but I actually really liked the whole thing!

War and Peace: It’s so long but it’s soooo good! The size can be intimidating but once you get started it really draws you in.

A Storm of Swords: The longest of the A Song of Ice and Fire series! All of these books are super long, and this one is actually my favorite but it took me until my second try to actually get all the way through it.

Gone With The Wind: In the ultimate bookish heresy, the movie is better. The subplots that got cut were worth excising for a still-sprawling but more focused narrative.

The Executioner’s Song: I still maintain that there’s a very good 600 page book inside this 1000+ pager about the first person executed after the death penalty was re-instituted in the United States but as is it’s just too bloated to really recommend

Don Quixote: I hated this book so much.

The Cider House Rules: The movie inspired me to pick this one up, and though I haven’t read it again in ages I want to someday because it’s really good.

The Memoirs of Cleopatra: I read this (and quite a bit of other Margaret George) in high school, and I feel like I liked it? My memories of it are vaguely positive anyways.

Shantaram: I read this fairly recently, and after about page 200 it was hate-reading. For the next 700+ pages.

July 24, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Vivid Reading Memories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 30, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Can’t Believe I Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books we can’t believe we read. Since we’ve got a topic coming up later that’s about books we read but hated, I’m going to use this one as a bragging opportunity for the giant books I’ve managed to conquer.

A Suitable Boy: This book took me the better part of an entire summer in college because it’s enormous. And it was really good and I learned a bunch of things about India but holy wow I can’t believe I made it through it because it seriously took months.

War and Peace: You never have to ask if someone’s read War and Peace, because if they have, they’ll tell you. Also please don’t let this book’s size deter you, it’s great and moves much more quickly than you think it will (it will still take a long time though).

The Executioner’s Song: This 1000+ pager is considered a masterpiece of true crime and while I didn’t like it as much as all that, I read the whole thing, even the boring parts about the sale of the movie rights for the story while the guy was still alive.

Les Miserables: Another gigantic classic that I was kind of like “ughhhhh” about reading before I read it and then it turns out it’s fantastic! I do think having seen the movie helped so I had at least some vague idea of where the plot was going because there’s a lot going on here.

A Game of Thrones: I only started to read these books because of the show and they’re all huge (this one, the first, is actually one of the shorter ones) and they are amazing and I love them and re-read one every year.

I Know This Much Is True: This is a big, lifespan-crossing book about twin brothers, one of whom is mentally ill and the other of whom is not. It feels so much like the kind of book I should have loved, and it’s well-written but didn’t quite earn its length, for me.

The Cider House Rules: This was the first Irving I read (in high school, after I saw the movie), and honestly it’s still my favorite even though I’ve read several of his other books. Something about it really resonated with me.

Vanity Fair: I’m not always down for an unlikable lead character, especially when the page count is as long as this book’s is, and in fact when I tried to read it in high school I didn’t get too far. But when I read it a few years ago, I came to almost enjoy how awful Becky was…that kind of determination is interesting.

The Fountainhead: We all went through that Ayn Rand phase in high school, right?

Blonde: I remember this fictionalized take on Marilyn Monroe’s life by Joyce Carol Oates taking me forever to read and it turns out that’s because it’s over 700 pages long.

September 5, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Took Me A Long Time To Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Today’s given topic is books that took a long time to read, and to be honest, this is a list I struggled to put together because I generally read really fast. Even for books I don’t like, because I try to burn through them as quick as I can so I can move on to something better. That being said, there are definitely some books that I had to chip away at bit by bit, mostly because of length but sometimes because they were genuinely difficult.

War and Peace: This book took me about three weeks to read, because it is very very long. But there’s a reason it’s virtually always at the top of lists of best books: it’s really incredible. Natasha might be one of my favorite characters in literature. Very much worth the time investment.

Les Miserables: Another super-long epic. I’ve actually never seen the show, but I did see the (very hit and miss) movie before I read it, and honestly I think it helped to have some sort of idea of the general plotline because there are so many characters and so much story that without an idea of generally what was going on I’d have been discouraged. It’s also very good and worth the time.

Creative Mythology: This was the end of a four-book series that I’d found tiresome even after the first one but I’m both a completist and very stubborn. By the time I got around to this one, I was deeply and profoundly ready for the series to be over but they were really hard to slog through so it took weeeeeks.

A Suitable Boy: I read this the summer after my freshman year in college because my mom had a copy hanging around and it had always intrigued me. Another super super long one, this book actually taught me most of what I know about The Partition. I’d like to revisit this story one day when I have a LOT of spare time.

The Grapes of Wrath: This was the bane of my senior year of high school. I’m not much for Steinbeck and this is a lot of pages of Steinbeck. We had to keep these reading logs for each chapter, so I actually had to do a close read of every part of it and by the time I finished it I was so angry about reading it.

Vanity Fair: I’d made a stab at this in high school for fun and never was able to get into it, but a couple years ago I picked it up again and made it through. I usually have a hard time with books with unlikable protagonists, but once I decided that Becky’s scrapiness was actually kind of admirable I got around to enjoying it if not loving it.

A Storm of Swords: All of the A Song of Ice and Fire books are long, but the third volume was the only one that stymied me on my initial read-through. I got bored and actually had to start it over again after getting about 1/4 of the way through because I put it down for so long that I couldn’t remember what was going on. Once I made a second stab at it, it went really fast, but that first try was rough.

Don Quixote: I loathed this book so hard. It was all I could do to make myself spend just 20-30 minutes a day with it, so it went by slooooooowly.

The Divine Comedy: This is kind of cheating, because I read this three-part epic poem over the course of an entire semester in college. I loved it, don’t get me wrong, especially since taking the whole class gave me so much of the context behind it…well, most of it anyway. Paradiso was kind of weak, but the other two parts were great.

Wolf Hall: Once I got into it, I really liked it (and its sequel even more), but I had a hard time getting grounded in the way Hillary Mantel was telling her story. It’s one of those things that I’m glad I was able to push through until I got my head around, though, because it’s a great book.

July 19, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books Set Outside The US

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: books set outside the US! I think a lot of us (or maybe just me?) tend to read fiction set within our own country…it’s just instantly familiar, there’s no learning curve. Thankfully I do sort my books on Goodreads by country setting, so I’m going to try to do no more than one from each country!

The Kite Runner (Afghanistan): I think most of us have read this one by now, yes? If you’ve somehow managed to not, I definitely suggest that you do because this story about friendship and guilt and what we owe the people we love is universal and heartbreaking and a must-read.

Number the Stars (Denmark): I’ll admit that it’s been a hot second (read: well over a decade) since I read this book about a young Danish girl whose family helps a Jewish family escape into Sweden to avoid concentration camps. But it’s a testament to how powerful this book is that I still remember and think fondly of it all these years later.

The Remains of the Day (England): I loved this book so much. I’m going to keep talking about it forever. It’s beautiful and sad and wonderful and everyone should read it.

Les Miserables (France): I’m inclined towards theater geekery, but I’ve actually never seen the musical based off of this book. I did see the terrible movie, though. With all due respect to the musical, I have to believe the book is better, just because a book clocking in at well over 1000 pages is inevitably richer than a 2-2.5 hour musical. There are long passages about economic fairness that are still deeply relevant to the world we live in, and the sprawling story is very well-told.

A Suitable Boy (India): I read this either the summer before college or the summer after my freshman year, I can’t remember which. My mom had a copy, and I looked at its 1400 pages and figured it should keep me occupied for a while. It did more than keep me occupied, I found it consuming and read it constantly until it was done. It’s about family and love and marriage and the Partition of India and it’s incredible. Yes, it takes forever to read. Worth it.

Memoirs of a Geisha (Japan): I read this book so many times in high school and college that my original copy has a cover with corners missing. I know he had an issue with his primary source, geisha Mineko Iwasaki, who sued him for naming her in his acknowledgements when he’d promised not to and later wrote her own book. But I still wish he’d ever written anything else, because I loved this book.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Netherlands): Another high school favorite! I’d actually already liked the painting, and this fictionalized history behind it of a young woman who gets drawn into the world of painter Johannes Vermeer was really enjoyable. I re-read it several times and it’s still on my shelf, so it’s probably time for another re-read!

Anna Karenina (Russia): I used to think I hated Russian lit after some failed attempts at this book and some Dostoevsky in high school. Turns out I was just too young for Anna Karenina (still hate Dostoevsky though), because when I read it a few years ago I blew through it’s 1200 pages in like two weeks. Tolstoy is amazing.

Cry the Beloved Country (South Africa): My high school AP English teacher was a native Louisianan and had the accent to prove it, but she always encouraged us to read diverse books. And in some cases, MADE us read them: we had to choose between two books to read about the Black female experience and the Black male experience (we had to read at least one in each category), and Cry, The Beloved Country was mandatory reading for everyone. This novel’s themes of individuals bridging the deep racial divisions of their country through love and forgiveness resonates with me still today.

Let Me In (Sweden): I like vampire media. Buffy. Twilight. I never got much into Anne Rice, but not everything is for everyone. I actually saw the movie first, which is really great and creepy as hell, and then when the book went on Kindle sale I picked it up. It’s just as unsettling and delicately told, a haunting twist on the vampire lore you think you know.

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