Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books for which we have particularly vivid and detailed reading memories. I don’t often have super strong recollections of where I was and who I was with when I read (even if I really like the book!), but for some books, I do, and here are ten of them.
Fifty Shades of Grey: I KNOW, okay? I have very vivid memories of reading these blissfully brain-engagement free books on the boat at my mom’s house when I was studying for the bar exam. I raced through them, because goodness knows I needed something easy on the gray matter that summer.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Another memory very tied to the boat…years after their big popularity boom, I read them over the summer after my first year of law school. That year in particular was not great for me in a lot of ways, so I relished getting lost in these twisty, propulsive books.
Never Let Me Go: I can still picture the little purple bookcase in my room my senior year of college that this book sat on after I read it for the first time…and the couch in our living room that I read it on.
The Virgin Suicides: I remember picking this up at the bookstore and starting to read it while sitting in the backseat on the way home with my mom and sister and getting really excited about seeing Bon Secours Hospital, where I was born, turn up in the text.
A Wrinkle In Time: This is very unglamorous, but in the interests of honesty, this book was always sitting in a basket in the bathroom with reading material growing up and so I read and re-read it over and over again in there in little bits at a time.
Bridget Jones’ Diary: I remember getting this book in high school and staying up late to read it (my light dim so I could turn it off quickly if my mom came to tell me to go to sleep), trying desperately to stifle the sound of my laughter.
Zodiac: This isn’t really honeymoon reading, but that’s when I read it. There was one night we were in Chicago that we had a just crazy thunderstorm (the night we were going to go down to the fireworks at the Navy Pier, in fact) and I remember sitting on the little loveseat by the window and just hearing the thunder crash while I read.
A Suitable Boy: This isn’t just one memory, because this book is crazy long, but I remember very much living at home after my sophomore year of college and reading this book when I wasn’t working my very short-lived stint as a checkout clerk at the local grocery store. I would stay up in my room for hours because it was so absorbing.
The Awakening: We read this book late my senior year of high school in AP English and got these really cheap paperbacks, and I remember very much freaking out because I’d managed to rip off a big chunk of the cover accidentally. Thankfully it was only like $5 to replace it.
Gone With The Wind: My mom once dated a guy who had a cottage in northern Michigan on Torch Lake and I remember that we went up there for a long weekend one summer to open it and this is what I was reading…it’s forever linked in my mind with the slightly musty smell of a house that’s been shut up all winter.