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?
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.