Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about venturing outside our literary comfort zones to discover that sometimes, the kinds of things we think we don’t read turn out to be pretty delightful after all! I struggled with this subject, because while I think my reading comfort zone is mostly “highbrow” contemporary fiction, I do tend to read pretty broadly across styles. But here are ten that I put together that I was maybe not super comfortable with the idea of before I started that I actually had a good time with!
The Rosie Project (romance): I usually feel like love stories are mostly interesting to the people inside them, and feel too manipulated by romances to get into them. But even though I could see the strings being pulled on my heart as I read this, I didn’t care. It was a treat!
The Hate U Give (young adult): I know plenty of adults read and enjoy YA, but I generally find it too straightforward to really engage me. This story about a black teenager who watches her friend get murdered by a cop, though, really grabbed me.
Battleborn (short stories): I am by and large not into short stories (I read way more of them for my book club than I would ever pick up on my own). I like sinking into a full-length narrative! And maybe it’s because I live in Nevada, but this collection set in and around the Silver State are truly excellent.
The Nazi Officer’s Wife (WWII memoir): I’ll be honest, I tend to steer away from World War II memoirs, finding them emotionally taxing but often treading very similar territory to work already available. This one, though, had a perspective that was new to me and was very well-told.
The Lords of Discipline (military fiction): War stories are a big snore for me. This book is set in a military academy, but it’s a beautifully rendered coming-of-age story that I’m so glad I took a chance on, because I love it.
The Girl With All The Gifts (horror): Usually telling me something has zombies in it is a ticket to a quick “no thanks”. I heard this recommended so often that I decided to pick it up, and really enjoyed the tale it told about the relationship between a zombified girl and her teacher.
The Sky Is Yours (science fiction): This book is bananas. There are dragons, there’s genetic engineering, there’s all kinds of bizarre stuff. On paper, it seemed like something that would not at all do it for me but I couldn’t put it down.
The Bear and the Nightingale (fantasy): I’m actually fairly amenable to fantasy if it’s done well, and this whole series was a magical romp through Russian folklore.
In The Woods (mystery): I love books that are character-focused, and most mysteries are plot-focused, so that tends to leave me out of them. I appreciated that some things were left unresolved, but I mostly really enjoyed reading about the people.
Lincoln in the Bardo (experimental fiction): This is written like a play rather than a novel, and initially I found it off-putting but once I got past about halfway through, I was suddenly all in and wound up loving it.
