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: Beach Reads Week
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This is a topic very near and dear to my heart: I grew up on an inland lake in Michigan, and until I moved out to Nevada, you could find me in the summer going back to my mom’s pretty often to take advantage of the opportunity to lay out on the boat. I did plenty of reading while basking in the sun, and even though I’m generally of the opinion that any read can be a beach read if you take it to the beach, here are ten books I think match the breezy feel of a day by or on the water!
The Devil Wears Prada: I’ve talked about the life lessons about balancing work and home that can be taken away from this novel, but it’s also a thinly-disguised expose about working for Anna Wintour at Vogue and the descriptions about how the rich and fashionable live are frothy and fun to read about.
Pride and Prejudice: A lot of Austen would be very beach-readable, but this one, to me, has the most lightness and humor. There’s lots of romance, too, and it’s very easy to just enjoy without having to think too hard.
Gone Girl: Gillian Flynn takes the domestic drama suspense novel to a whole new level. Nick and Amy’s awful behavior gets you hooked and the plot races forward at a breakneck pace, so you’re sucked in and it’s hard to put down.
Bridget Jones’ Diary: This book is as rip roaringly funny now as it was when I first read it in high school. Whenever I feel like I’m not adulting very well, a dip into Bridget’s story makes me realize I have it much more together than I give myself credit for. And that I’d rather die than record my daily calories and alcohol units in my diary.
The Other Boleyn Girl: I imagine lots of people will have long since read this one, but a good royalty-behaving-badly book based in the Tudor era will never not be a great way to pass a day in the sun. If you’ve read this one but you haven’t read any of the companion novels dealing with Henry’s other wives, they’re cut from the same cloth.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: Chuck Klosterman is a fantastic writer, and his collection of insightful and witty essays on pop culture pull tons of references together to make you think (but not too hard) about the world we live in.
Dead Until Dark: As you’ve probably heard even if you never watched the series, True Blood was a sexy, soapy romp that also touched on some larger themes. The book series mostly stays away from the larger themes part, but keeps all the steamy fun recounting the romantic adventures of Sookie Stackhouse, psychic waitress. This whole series is actually pretty delightful even if paranormal romance isn’t really your genre.
Chocolat: They made a movie out of this, but I hated the movie so if you did too don’t let that dissuade you. This story of Vianne, a single mother, who makes chocolate, and her young daughter in a small French village has romance, female friendship, and a running battle between our heroine and the local priest who takes a strong and instant dislike to her.
The Rosie Project: When a socially awkward and intensely logical (and probably autistic) college professor decides it’s time to get married, he devises an intensive questionnaire to find him the most ideal mate. But when one of his friends puts Rosie, who definitely would not score highly on the survey, in his path, he finds himself drawn to her despite knowing she’s not “right” for him. Or is she? I’m no fan of romance, but this is sweet and funny and perfect to take for a day by the water.
The Big Rewind: I juuust posted about this, but it’s the best beachy book I’ve read in a while, so I’m adding it to this list. Fun and smart and witty and a quick read, this is a great choice to tuck in your beach bag.