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Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.
This was a bit of a tricky topic for me because I have no idea which authors you all are already aware of. People that I read regularly might be well known to some of you and a brand new corner of the literary world to others. (And vice versa, of course!)
Let’s see if I can dig a bit deeper and find some new folks to mention. I’m including one recommendation of a good place to start for every person on this list as I know I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed when checking out a new author and seeing a long list of possibilities.
George MacDonald was a Scottish poet and author who lived in the 1800s and early 1900s and played a major role in creating the modern fantasy genre. C.S. Lewis was one of many writers who was inspired by him.
Read This First: “The Golden Key,” an allegorical fairy tale he wrote about death and the afterlife. He excelled at creating seemingly inconsequential details in stories that later pay off wonderfully…or at least that’s how I felt when I was a kid reading this!
Sonia Hartl is a contemporary fantasy writer who loves playing around with audience’s assumptions about what should happen next.
Read This First: “The Lost Girls,” a more realistic take on what would happen if vampires were real and actually went around falling in love with teenage girls. That is to say, a one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old man who is romantically interested in a sixteen-year-old girl probably doesn’t have good intentions and should not be trusted any further than you can throw him.
Claire Keegan is a contemporary fiction author who writes gentle but honest stories about (mostly) rural settings.
Read This First: “Foster,” a novella about an eleven-year-old girl who is sent to live with childless relatives in the countryside for the summer as her mother deals with a difficult pregnancy. This was such a kind and hopeful story that I’d love to see expanded into a tv series that shows more of their lives and what happens next. The relatives welcomed the main character with opened arms and loved her just as if she were their own child. It was so wholesome.
Nnedi Okorafor is a contemporary science fiction and fantasy author who writes dark fantasy and science fiction set in Africa. I mention the setting because it plays such a huge role in her characters’ lives in all of the books from her I’ve read. She’s another author whose work I wish would be made into some films.
Read This First:”Remote Control,” a novella about a preteen girl who has an accident that helps her develop the ability to kill or to heal people just by touching them. This was such a page turner because she didn’t know what was happening at first or what to do with her gift.
Scents are an allergy, migraine, and headache trigger for me, so my first reaction to scented candles, along with any other scented item other than most types of food, is to run away from them as fast as my legs can carry me ;).
Listening is another superpower of mine. I’m good at making people feel heard – so far as I’ve been told – and helping them to figure out what to do without actually ever giving advice.
The one thing all of these books have in common are their memorable and scary villains. Thank goodness villains can’t go traipsing around to visit other books because we’d all be in trouble if these folks teamed up!
Since I’m such a huge mood reader, some books hang around on my TBR list for a very long time. Here are some of them:
Thank you to 
Most of my picks are in the nonfiction genre, but I did try to branch out a little to other options.
I was homeschooled for several years growing up, and we sometimes visited local museums as part of our education. Those early experiences taught me not only to love museums as well as learning in general. It’s exciting to be so close to paintings, pottery, or other items that are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or even millions of years old. For a brief moment, it almost feels like stepping into a Time Machine and actually going to visit those places!
This is going to be a much longer list than the one I had a few weeks ago. I liked to loved most of the assigned reads in school, including:
Sometimes I have to include books I haven’t actually read in my answers to Top Ten Tuesday posts because those weekly topics cover things I have little to no experience reading about.