Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl
Happy 10th anniversary to Top Ten Tuesday! I decided to do the July 23, 2018 topic entitled Books That Are Linked to Specific Memories/Moments In Your Life.
I haven’t reread any of these books in years, so my memories of all of their plot twists is fuzzy. If any of you read them, I hope you like them!
1. Brighty of the Grand Canyon by Marguerite Henry and Wesley Dennis
The Memory Attached to It: Sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car late one night while we were driving home from a long road trip. Mom read this book to me while my younger siblings slept next to me. I couldn’t wait to find out if Brighty would survive all of his dangerous adventures and kept begging her to read just one more chapter.
2. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Memory Attached to It: Sitting on the hammock on my parents’ back porch on a muggy summer day. (I think my dad might have been travelling that week and hadn’t been able to install our window air conditioner yet?) It was too hot for even mild physical activity like a walk, so I slowly drank unsweetened mint tea while reading this book.
3. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
The Memory Attached to It: Sitting in my grandparent’s basement while eating crisp saltine crackers, drinking a deliciously cold can of cola, and trying to stay as cool as possible on that hot summer day. My grandparents use something called a swamp cooler, so while there is some relief from the heat you still don’t want to run around too much in their house when the temperatures and humidity soar. Quiet activities are best. I really don’t enjoy heat waves, so maybe that’s why they’re playing such a prominent role in today’s post.
4. The Kind of Girl I Am by Julia Watts
The Memory Attached to It: Sitting down to a hot, filling lunch after running around for five straight hours at work. I was famished and exhausted. It was such a relief to eat again, feel the aching in my feet temporarily reduce, lose myself in a book, and enjoy some peace and quiet before jumping back into the fray for the rest of my shift.
5. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
The Memory Attached to It: A coworker asked what I was reading and was a little surprised by the fact it was a romance novel. I had the reputation of being the resident science fiction and horror expert, but everyone needs to expand their horizons sometimes!
My headaches often spiral into a negative feedback loop of pain leading to tense muscles that in turn lead to more pain.
I know I talk about my love of long walks a lot on this blog, but this time I’m thinking of them as a type of distraction instead of a form of exercise.
Edited on May 13, 2020 to include two responses to this post: 
There may be some people on this planet whose interests all exist in well-defined bubbles that never intersect with each other, but I’m not one of them.
Look, would I ever tell someone else what to write about on their site? Absolutely not!
My youngest brother was about two or three then, so sometimes he’d need a parent to carry him if we walked for a long distance. But the important thing was that we were together and we got to explore rocks that felt impossible large to me as a child.
My earliest memory involves an apple tree.
Occasionally, I wander away from the usual topics on this site to share personal stories from my life. Today is one of those days.
When I was about seven, my family was surprised by Halloween. A few neighbourhood kids knocked on our door to say trick-or-treat one night. We had nothing sweet to give them at first until my dad remembered his small stash of 
My family started celebrating secular Halloween when I was eleven. By that time, we’d moved into a neighbourhood that was known for its generosity, so the streets were packed with families from other areas as well as from our own.
When I was a preteen, one of my uncles gave me copies of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I read and enjoyed The Hobbit immediately.
Because it’s a challenge.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I was homeschooled for the first several years of my education. One of the best parts of that experience was being able to read after my lessons were finished. There were times when Wyoming was far too snowy and cold of a place for a child to be wandering around outside in, so I read the entire afternoon and evening away on some of those wintry days.
I no longer remember which genres I read during that thirty-book month, but I do remember the genre I became obsessed with shortly after that: poetry.
Over the last decade or so, I’ve found myself gradually becoming more interested in nonfiction than I ever was before. My favourite high school English teacher used to talk about how much she enjoyed reading about things that really happened.
