speak

June 8, 2021

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.

April 21, 2020

Top Ten Tuesday: Titles That Would Make Good Band Names

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about book titles that would make good band names. I do enjoy picking out phrases that I hear and thinking they would make good names for musical acts, so this one seemed like fun!

Daisy Jones and the Six: I’m cheating, this is the name of a fictional band already, but there’s no denying that it works really well!

There There: Can’t you just picture a chart-topping single by a band called There There? I see them as an indie rock style group.

Anthem: This would be a band that did like stadium rock music for sure.

The Black Dahlia: The Black Dahlia would definitely be fronted by a Lana Del Rey-type nostalgic pretty girl with a similar interest in Old Hollywood iconography and throwback-style tunes.

Twilight: A female singer-songwriter type who wants to be mysterious about her real identity.

The Interestings: This would be very self-conciously quirky indie music that would have like one big hit, one minor hit, and then tour small venues forever.

Abhorsen: I could definitely see a European DJ touring under this name.

Speak: A teen pop girl group, right?

Native Son: Native Son would be a rap duo who consciously chose to reference this book because of its message about race relations and makes very socially aware music.

The Lowland: It’s been too long since we had a Boyz-II-Men style R&B group and I think this would be a great name for one!

March 12, 2019

Top Ten Tuesday: Standalone Books That Need a Sequel

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I personally am not big into series…I do read them, but they’re more an exception than a rule. That being said, there are definitely books that I put down and wish I had the next entry waiting to pick up to see what becomes of these characters! Here are ten books I’d read a sequel to.

Pride and Prejudice: I know modern authors have done spins on this idea, what happens to Lizzy and Darcy, but I wonder what Austen herself would have done with them and how she would have kept their spark alive as a married couple.

Gone Girl: I want to hear from the child Amy’s carrying at the end of the book…did his/her parents stay together long-term? What would it be like to grow up with those people raising you? I feel like there’s a compelling story to be told there.

The Bell Jar: We know that Esther survives, goes on to (presumably) get married and have a child. How did that come to be? Like Sylvia Plath, does Esther continue to struggle?

Speak: I first read this book nearly two decades ago as a high school freshman and it’s never left me. I’m still curious how Melinda grows up and how her high school experience continues to impact her.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: Don’t get me wrong, I love the coming-of-age aspect of this book, but I want to know what becomes of Francie Nolan, how she deals with moving away from Brooklyn, and what she makes of her life.

Matilda: I hope it all ends happily, but I do wonder how it plays out for Matilda and Miss Honey.

Catherine Called Birdy: The book ends on a hopeful note for high-spirited Catherine, but I don’t think she’d easily adjust to life as a wife and mother, so I can only imagine there would be hilarity to ensue!

The Namesake: The tale of Gogol coming into his own is powerful, but I do find myself wondering what kind of husband and father (if he becomes a husband and father at all) he would be to his own children.

Let Me In: I mean, honestly, this book was super duper dark and I didn’t want it to be any longer than it was, but I am interested in how Eli and Oskar survive together in the world.

The Lords of Discipline: I loved Will McLean and wish we would have gotten a glimpse at his adult life after college.

August 7, 2018

Top Ten Tuesday: Books To Read Together

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! I’m taking a slightly different tack on this week’s topic. We’re supposed to be writing about books we’d like to mash together to make an epic story, but honestly I had no idea what I’d do with that. I don’t read a lot of fantasy, and I know you could do it with other kinds of books but I wasn’t feeling creative so here’s what I came up with instead: books that complement each other when read together. Each of them portrays a “side” of a story, so putting them together makes for a more well-rounded look at it.

Gone with the Wind and Beloved: Margaret Mitchell’s classic of the antebellum South did bring us the incredible character of Scarlett O’Hara, but made no attempt to critically examine the machine on which that society was built: chattel slavery. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the story of a slave who escaped to the north at a great price, makes the horrors of it viscerally real. We often romanticize the plantation lifestyle, and we need to reckon with the terrible cost, too.

Little House on the Prairie and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: I used to get in trouble in school for reading books while I was in class, and when I was a kid, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories about her family’s journey across the country were ones I tucked inside my textbooks to read again and again. But the westward drive of white settlers had a devastating impact on the people who’d lived there for hundreds of years, so Dee Brown’s nonfiction recounting of the desperate, doomed fight of the Native Americans to retain their land and traditions is necessary to understand what the Ingalls family was actually a part of.

To Kill A Mockingbird and Native Son: That poor Tom is innocent of the charges against him is, of course, a critical part of the injustice Harper Lee’s novel asks us to understand. But while Lee wraps it in a soft, white-savior narrative, Richard Wright’s searing book is much less comfortable in its story of a young black man who does assault a white woman. It examines the social conditions of the Jim Crow era that perpetuated criminality in a very up-front way, really forcing us to consider our own complicity in the system.

Lolita and Speak: Don’t get me wrong, I consider Vladimir Nabakov’s tale of Humbert Humbert’s obsession with the vulnerable Delores one of my all-time favorites. It’s an incredible book and not nearly as salacious as most people expect. But it’s the story of the predator, and for a story about the impact of being the very young prey of a rapist, it’s hard to beat Laurie Halse Anderson’s incredible YA novel about a teenage girl ostracized after she calls the police when she’s assaulted at a party. Anderson makes her nightmare real, and she’s not even dependent on her rapist as Lolita is on hers.

The Great Gatsby and A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: I actually didn’t love it when I first read it in high school, but F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has come to be The Great American Novel in my eyes. It’s come to symbolize the grandeur and excess of early 20th century New York City so thoroughly that people don’t talk about having Roaring 20s parties, they talk about Great Gatsby parties. But for all that excess and wealth, there was also poverty and want, and Betty Smith’s beautifully rendered coming-of-age story shows the struggle beneath the glitter.

November 14, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Books I Want My Future Children to Read

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week, we’re believing that children are our future, and thinking about what books we’d want our own kids, or nieces/nephews, or our friends’ kids to read. I do want kids someday, and here are ten books I am going to stock on their bookshelves (arranged, roughly, in order from youngest to oldest).

Greek Myths: This book of Greek myths, rendered as comic strips that kids can understand, inspired in me a lifelong love of these classic stories.

Charlotte’s Web: Although I don’t plan on raising children vegetarian (I think it should be their choice to make), I would like them to understand where meat comes from and this book is gently upfront about raising animals for slaughter. It also was something that I remember being particularly helpful to me in gaining a more mature understanding of death.

A Wrinkle In Time: I loved this whole series and no matter what gender my future child(ren) may be, I want them to see a girl who doesn’t play nice as being a hero.

Harry Potter: OBVIOUSLY.

Speak: Again, regardless of gender, this book explores sexual assault and its aftermath and how hard it can be to make the accusation, and that’s something everyone should be aware of.

1984: This book made me question the way information is disseminated and the way the public is expected to consume it even as an eighth grader (even more so now).

Lord of the Flies: It’s perhaps a dim view of humanity, especially in groups, but I haven’t seen anything in my life to this point to make me think that it’s not a fair one.

To Kill A Mockingbird: The lessons here about not judging people without understanding their circumstances are timeless and important.

The Lord of the Rings: This series has its issues (including a horrifying dearth of female characters), but it’s a wonderful adventure tale and the basis of a lot of fantasy media.

A People’s History of the United States: The version of history we’re presented in school is a very sanitized one, and I hope my kids have the intellectual curiosity to investigate past the shiny surface.

August 22, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Set In/Around School

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! It’s Back To School week, and so this week we’re picking a school-themed list of our own choosing to share. I decided to highlight some books that are set at school, whether that be high school or college. It also made me think about my own last first day of school and that was somehow eight years ago and I’m really old, guys.

Speak: I first read this book when I was a high school freshman and I think every high schooler, boys and girls alike, should read it. Smart and insightful and makes a big impact.

The Secret History: An all-time favorite (sorry not sorry that this book is on like a million of my lists), this book focuses on a small clique of Classics students at a little liberal arts college in the Northeast and the murder they commit and it’s amazing.

The Serpent King: Three high-school outcasts bond together to get through their senior year in rural Tennessee and this takes you right back to the loneliness and confusion and hope of that time of life.

The Lords of Discipline: Author Pat Conroy’s own experiences at The Citadel, the military academy, inform this incredible, heartbreaking book about a recruit’s reflections on his past and experiences during the year he’s about to graduate.

Chemistry: The sole grad school book on this list, this recent release is about a young woman working on her Ph.D. who finds herself questioning whether it, and the rest of the life she’s arranged for herself, is what she actually wants. A great book for college and grad students.

Spoiled: Back to high school for this frothy, fun book about two sisters at a snooty L.A. private school trying to figure out who they are, and want to be, in the public eye. It’s packed with high-school-movie tropes in the best possible way.

Friday Night Lights: This nonfiction book looks at high school through the lens of high-visibility sports…in this case, football in Texas. Unflinching look at the incredible pressure that these teenagers exist under while trying to do the same school stuff everyone else is doing too.

The Last Picture Show: This book also features sports as a motif, but it’s more about the relationships between high school seniors, and growing up in a dying town, and wanting to escape but being afraid of escaping at the same time. It’s really heartwrenching, honestly.

Harry Potter: Okay, this isn’t American schooling, but how could I leave out the Harry Potter series? They all take place in and around the wizarding school of Hogwarts and they’re the best.

Daughters of Eve: I was recently reminded of this Lois Duncan book that I loved in high school, which is campy delight. It’s about a teacher getting together a group of female students to be a sisterhood support club…or are they actually just out to destroy men? Well, not men so much as garbage people who happen to be male. SO over the top and ridiculous.

March 20, 2017

My Reading Life: What I Wish I Would Have Read In High School

The title is a bit of a misnomer. There are some books that I read in high school that were amazing: To Kill A Mockingbird (read in 10th grade), The Great Gatsby (read in 11th grade, and which I super hated at the time and think high school is too early to really appreciate it). But there were also some clunkers: Of Mice and Men (read in 9th grade), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (read in 12th grade). High school is such a heady time, hormones and emotions running high, and the right book at the right time can instill a lifelong appreciation for books and the worlds you can explore through them. If I was redesigning the standard-issue high school curriculum (which I know doesn’t really exist, my in-laws are teachers), here are the three works I would want everyone to read each year

Freshman Year

Romeo and Juliet: I read this one freshman year, and I think that’s the perfect time to read it. Romeo and Juliet is a bonkers play, you guys. Fighting in the streets! Romantic obsession! Sex! Death! It’s a story about teenagers being crazy and stupid and perfect for 14 year olds.

1984: In terms of actual reading comprehension level, this is very understandable for a teenager. Some parents would probably freak out because of some very mild sexual situations, but they need to chill out. This is a great novel to inspire kids to start to think critically about political and media manipulation (especially in this new age of “alternative facts”)

The Hunger Games: I think recently popular lit gets overlooked on school reading lists, but I think this would actually go great with 1984. The language is a bit more modern but touches on similar themes about government control, and features a badass female heroine.

Sophomore Year

To Kill A Mockingbird: This literary classic was on my own 10th grade reading list, and I think that was a great time to have read it. Scout is a fantastic heroine, and lessons this book imparts about standing up for what’s right and empathy for others are powerful at any age, but especially around this time.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower: This story, about the tight bond that develops between flawed teenage outcasts, is sensitive and powerful. As much as parents would love to pretend otherwise, teenagers do have sex lives and sexuality, and this novel speaks to those developments in a way that will ring true for 15 year-olds.

Speak: On the dark side of that idea about teenage sexuality is the reality that sexual assault is a real risk during these years. The book is incisive and witty and can help girls understand that unwanted sexual attention isn’t their fault…and boys understand the importance of consent.

Junior Year

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn: The story of Francie Nolan is one about overcoming the odds, mostly because of a love of reading and school. Francie lives through some pretty tough stuff and manages to stick it out, and I know when I was 16, I was pretty sure I had it pretty bad myself, so this book will bring both perspective and an example of triumph over obstacles.

The Catcher In The Rye: I really think this book speaks most powerfully to teenagers, who are obsessed with the idea of being real, the idea that adults are fake. By the time I read it, in my early 20s, I mostly wanted to give Holden a hearty smack across the face and tell him to snap out of it. But for a 16 year-old, the sense of aimlessness and feeling like you should know what you want from your life even though you totally don’t is very identifiable.

Fahrenheit 451: Our world today has more easy distractions than ever, making the relevance of this novel, about the importance of books and reading and how easy it is for these things to fall by the wayside, even more obvious. This book will likely not speak to every 11th grade student, but for those who make the effort to understand it, it would be richly rewarding.

Senior Year

In Cold Blood: Truman Capote’s masterpiece about a shocking murder in Kansas is a fantastic way to work with 12th graders about style. It was one of the very first non-fiction novels, and is perfectly paced and plotted. The appeal of a story is about the way it’s told as much as anything else.

A Brave New World: This fits right in with the 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 suggestions earlier along the way about the ways that the powerful can subdue the masses through social control. This one is, for my money, the most mature of the three I’ve picked and as you’re about to send kids out into the world, one that I’d like to have fresh in their minds.

Lord of the Flies: I think I actually read this in 11th grade, but it works fine here too. Finding and trying to fit into groups is a big part of the teen years, which continue into college, and the power of those groups to influence their members is something that’s good to put into 17 and 18 year-olds minds as they get ready to really experience life outside the home for the first time.

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