Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: things that make me instantly want to read a book. Not in the sense of “long committee meetings” or “when my husband pops in a sports video game”, but more like things about the book itself that make me want to pick it up. I try to read a pretty broad spectrum of books, but here are ten things that I get a little extra excited about when I see in a book I’m thinking about picking up.
Royalty: Not even going to lie, this is probably the top one. Both fiction and non. I love me some royalty books. Give me queens and kings and princes and princesses.
A Michigan connection: As a native Michigander, I’m always a sucker for books about my homeland.
Female friendships: Some of the deepest and most meaningful relationships in my life have been with the women that are my friends. I love reading about the platonic-but-no-less-profound-for-being-so bonds that form between women and comparing and contrasting them to my own friendships
Dysfunctional families: It’s like Tolstoy said…every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Really getting into the dynamics between people that might not have picked each other, if given the chance, but are tied together by blood and love anyways is a favorite reading experience of mine.
Coming of age: The experience of growing up is a universal one, and one that I don’t feel quite “done” with yet, even at 31. So stories that draw on that experience are, to me, just incredibly compelling.
Post-apocalyptic: I used to be more interested in dystopias until it seemed like they were everywhere (but not always very well done). I’m finding myself more drawn these days to books that think about the world we live in and what might happen after a catastrophic event.
Character-driven: At the end of the day, I’m happy with a book that might not have much in the way of exciting storylines as long as it creates memorable and vivid characters.
True crime: Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated with stories about awful crimes and the detectives that solved them. It’s a weird morbid streak that’s not something I think most people I know would think that I have.
Neurology: Oliver Sacks did it best, but I love reading about our brains and how the ways they get it right and wrong impact human lives.
Retelling: Folklore and fairy tales, those first stories that we ever know and become ingrained in us, are all the more interesting to take apart and see from another angle.