top ten tuesday

May 4, 2021

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Most Recent Adds To My TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week’s subject is technically our ten most recent reads, but I tell you about those in my monthly updates anyways. So I thought I’d talk about the ten most recent additions to my to-be-read list instead!

Assembly: This book, about a Black British woman who reconsiders her life and choices as she prepares to go to a fancy party at her fancy boyfriend’s fancy house, sounds thoughtful and interesting!

The Nakano Thrift Shop: I will read nearly anything published by Europa Editions, and I do like to try out things that are meant to be charming rather than total downers every once in a while.

Never Saw Me Coming: I am not big into thrillers, but this one seems like something I’ll like…it’s about a group of sociopathic students enrolled in a study at their college when one of their own is murdered, and they have to decide how much they can trust each other.

Everybody Behaves Badly: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is one of my least favorite books I’ve ever read, but I am intrigued by the real-life story that inspired it.

Black Water Sister: This is part of my efforts to read more books set outside of the US/Europe, and is a fantasy novel set in Malaysia about a young woman possessed by a vengeful spirit.

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was A Girl: This one is going to be heavy…it’s a memoir a woman who was raped by a close friend as a teenager, and what that meant for her and her life and their continued friendship, and her meeting with him to talk about it years later. It’s supposed to be very very good.

Bad Girls Never Say Die: This is apparently inspired by The Outsiders, which is one of those classics I’ve never actually read, but anything that gets really into the friendships of teenage girls is something I want to try!

The Robber Barons: I have turned into a full History Dad in some ways, so this look at the era of the super rich “robber barons” sounds fascinating.

The Final Girl Support Group: I really enjoyed Hendrix’s previous book and think this looks just as entertaining!

The Fabric of Civilization: I’ve always had an interest in these sorts of “a look at history through the viewpoint of [thing]”, and this one is about textiles and I am very curious.

August 2, 2016

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books You’d Buy Right This Second If Someone Handed You A Fully Loaded Gift Card

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic are books you’d buy right now if money was no object. All of these are books I want to own in print rather than for my Kindle. While I love my Kindle, there are just some reading experiences that seem more tangible in print (usually but not always non-fiction, at least for me).

Between The World And Me: I don’t know what it’s like to be a person of color in America, which is why I try to listen when people who do tell me what it’s like. I don’t agree with everything Ta-Nehisi Coates has said, but I do think he’s a powerful voice on the black male experience and this book is supposed to be challenging but really good.

Vanished In Hiawatha: America is a great country in many respects, but the way it has treated the Native Americans is shameful in the extreme. Among the atrocities? A mental hospital in South Dakota which was used almost not-at-all for its original purpose of being an exclusively Native American mental hospital and almost entirely as a place to dump troublemakers. I’d never heard of this before and I’m fascinated and horrified and want to learn more.

The Water Knife: Ever since I moved West, water is a crucial issue. Nevada is the driest state in the nation in a good year and there haven’t been many good years lately. The moves taken by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to secure water for the Las Vegas area have been sometimes controversial, and this fictional book about a future in which water is even rarer has a character based on the former head of the SNWA Pat Mulroy. Really interested to read this.

A Little Life: This book is supposed to be incredibly, heartbreakingly sad but is recommended wholeheartedly by everyone who has reviewed it. There’s a certain length at which I prefer to read in hard copy rather than Kindle and this enormous book is definitely a get-in-paperback.

Wojtek The Bear: During World War 1, there was a brown bear who was adopted by Polish troops and trained to be their ammunition carrier. He drank beer and ate cigarettes, and was named Wojtek, which means “joyful warrior”. This is his story and I want to read it.

Off Balance: Women’s gymnastics is my favorite Summer Olympic sport (I don’t pay attention to it in the non-Olympic years like I do with figure skating, but I love watching it every four years), and who could forget the Magnificent Seven of the 1996 Olympics? Dominique Moceanu was on that team and this is her memoir of her gymnastics years.

NFL Confidential: This book about what it’s actually like to be a non-star NFL player today and I’ve heard rumors it’s by a former Michigan player. I think the lives of professional athletes are interesting because they’re so different than a “normal” one…especially for the unsung players, who aren’t getting the kinds of cash and fame that the big stars do. Plus I think it’s one my husband would enjoy too!

Neurotribes: The recent upward trend in autism diagnoses freaks a lot of people out and probably has a lot of different causes. But what if, outside of its most debilitating forms, it’s more just a difference than a disability? Autism isn’t going away and we might as well figure out how to make the most of different thinking patterns.

First Women: We talk a lot about presidents, but much less about First Ladies. Their roles are ill-defined and different women have handled it different ways, and this book takes the focus from the presidents to their wives.

But What If We’re Wrong?: Chuck Klosterman always makes me think in new and different ways, and his latest book is specifically about thinking about the world differently…as if we’re viewing it from the future. What parts of our world will seem the most unbelievable? What will be forgotten entirely and what will be the stuff they teach in history class? Definitely want to own this one in physical form.

May 24, 2016

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.

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