Category Archives: Blog Hops

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Thank you to A Hot Cup of Pleasure for submitting this theme!

Here are ten of my favourite books from series I’ve read. I had to dig deeply to come up with a sufficient number of answers because I almost never read series these days and only read them occasionally when I was younger.

That is to say, most of these titles were published many years ago.

For the sheer fun of it, I will include a brief, spoiler-free description of why I picked each one in this post.

1. The Giver (The Giver, #1) by Lois Lowry

Why: The world-building left readers plenty of room to come up with our own theories about what happened next.

2. The Girl with All the Gifts (The Girl With All the Gifts, #1) by M.R. Carey

Why: There is a fantastic twist in this book that takes a little while to fully reveal itself to the readers.

3. Flowers in the Attic (Dollanganger, #1) by V.C. Andrews

Why: This series begins with a wild premise that I will allow other readers to discover for themselves. I thought it worked best when it was first introduced because of how unusual it was.

4. The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis

Why: There are a lot of Easter eggs here about things that were discussed in books #1-5 – especially The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – so that is why I strongly recommend reading this series in publication order instead of chronologically. You need that previous knowledge to fully understand why certain scenes are so thrilling.  This is my favourite Narnia story because of its beautiful descriptions of how Narnia was created and how many different ways characters could find themselves in that magical land.

5. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Why: It worked perfectly nicely as a standalone story, but it also sets up and foreshadows so many important elements of the Lord of the Rings trilogies. I also thought the pacing in this one was much stronger than later instalments in this series.

6. Dead Until Dark (Sookie Stackhouse, #1) by Charlaine Harris

Why: Look, I adored Sookie and though this was a fun universe…but she also tended to make the same mistakes over and over again. This became repetitive later on, but it was endearing when I first met her. If you’re in the market for vampire romance novels, the first few books in this universe are the best ones.

7. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Why: It was such a zany introduction to these characters!

8. Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery

Why: This was a period of Anne’s life when so many of her dreams began coming true. I loved seeing her finally have the chance to attend college and enjoy her youth.

I’d say eight answers is pretty good considering my strong preference for standalone novels!

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One of the interesting ways my reading habits have changed since I was a kid or a teenager is that I’m much less interesting in reading long books these days. If something is more than 200 to maybe 250 pages, it generally needs to be a story I think will be a five-star read for me in order for me to finish it.

I’m glad I read much longer books when I was younger and had more time for such doorstoppers as some of them did have excellent storylines, but I can also see the value in trimming down side quests and lengthy descriptive passages in order to make the reading experience a faster one.

Here are some books that I think would have been better if they were shorter. Some of them are classics as books from roughly 100+ years ago were often more verbose than what is published today due to how English has evolved since then.

1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (as well as the sequels, of course!)

2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

3. The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1) by Ken Follett

4. The Stand by Stephen King

5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

6. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

7. The House of the Seven Gables  by Nathaniel Hawthorne

8. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

9. Paradise Lost by John Milton

10. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Thank you for suggesting this week’s topic,Cathy @ WhatCathyReadNext!

My selection is Shepherd’s Sight: A Farming Life by Barbara McLean. It’s a nonfiction book about a year in the life of the author and her farm as she goes through the typical routines of each month of the year.

I left a five-star review for it on Goodreads back in March, so keep an eye out for it if you click on the link.

This is what I loved about this book:

1) Nothing was sugarcoated. Just like anything else in life, rural living has positive and negative aspects to it. The author included both of them in her book in vivid detail, from the delicious meals her family cooked made from the many different types of food their farm grew to the difficult aspects of choosing this lifestyle like needing to put sick livestock down.

2) The food descriptions. They made me so hungry.

3) How the weather influenced everything the author and her family did. Travelling on rural roads during ice storms is still pretty dangerous, to give one example, so they always had enough food and other supplies to stay home for a week or two if the roads were all iced over or it was otherwise unsafe to go into town.

4) Balancing the needs of nature, humans, and animals was constantly on the author’s mind. She might want to start planting her garden on a specific date, but the weather may or may not actually cooperate that day! The same can be said for lambing season, harvesting the large garden on this farm, and so much more.

5) The author’s memories of how rundown and rustic the farm was in the 1970s when she and her husband moved in. They really made this a nice property!

6) Family reunions. My grandparents’ are farmers, too, so I know how special it is for all of that work to be put aside for the day so the kids and grandkids can visit.

7) Neighbourly behaviour. When you live on a farm or in a rural and isolated area, you never know when you might need the assistance of a neighbour or when they might need your assistance. Building good relationships with those who live nearby can mean the difference between life and death in an emergency.

8) Baby lambs. There are so many adorable stories about them in this book.

9) Losing skills. Whether it’s due to disability, chronic illness, or as a part of growing older,  nearly everyone will eventually realize that they are no longer capable of things they could easily do in the past. The author was in her 70s or 80s when she wrote this book and had reached a stage in life when she simply didn’t have the strength or endurance she did 50 years ago.

10) The question of retirement and when it should happen. Many jobs can still be safely done by senior citizens, but the sheer physicality of farm work can make it really hard for older people  to keep going as long as they could if they were, say, an accountant or a paediatrician who didn’t need to throw hay bales around or chase mischievous sheep around in the rocky and uneven soil of the pasture all day at work. (And some seniors can still do a lot of that stuff, of course! I’m related to one of them 😉 )