Tag Archives: Top Ten Tuesday

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The geographical term I chose for this week’s prompt is wetlands. That is to say, areas of land that link water and land together. Some of them are always wet, while others can go through periods of being as dry as regular land depending on the season. Wetlands include swamps, marshes, and bogs.

I chose this term because one of the places I grew up in used to be a wetland before the land was drained and turned into farmland. It’s a beautiful place, but the mosquitoes there are overwhelming in the summer. I’ve often wished that my ancestors had left it the way it originally was and built their homes somewhere else instead.

1. Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination by Barbara Hurd

2. Swampwalker’s Journal: A Wetlands Year by David M. Carroll

3. Danger in Blackwater Swamp by Saundra Kelley

4. Birds of Lake Pond & Marsh: Water and Wetland Birds of Eastern North America by John Eastman

5. The Ghost Orchid Ghost: And Other Tales from the Swamp by Doug Alderson

6. The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise by Michael Grunwald

7. The Geese of Beaver Bog by Bernd Heinrich

8. In the Salt Marsh by Nancy Willard

9. Meadowlands: A Wetlands Survival Story by Thomas F. Yezerski

10. The Bog by Michael Talbot

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I don’t own a lot of books due to how amazing my local public library is, but here are some I loved that I do own in ebook form.

If I’ve written a review for a particular book, the link will take you to my review of it. In all other cases, it will go to Goodreads instead.

1. Becoming by Michelle Obama

2. My Evil Mother by Margaret Atwood

3. The Visitor by Mark Lawrence

4. The Reluctant Familiar’s Guide to Christmas Tree Defence by Bethany Hoeflich

5. Safer at Home by Zoe Cannon

6. Boo and the Boy by Wayne Barrett

7. 1NG4 by Berthold Gambrel

8. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

9. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

How many of you also have wonderful local libraries? I hope all of you can say yes to that question!

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I struggled with this week’s topic. As I mentioned back in June, I think many modern books have too many sequels instead of not enough of them.

Here are a few series that break that rule of mine. There is still plenty of room for character development in them if only their authors had written one more book.

Do note that there are some mild spoilers included in my post.

As most of them were written years ago, I hope it’s safe to assume that everyone who still wants to remain unspoiled about their plot twists has had ample opportunity to read them.

If that isn’t the case for you, please feel free to avoid the sentences that explain why I think these series might benefit from one more instalment each.

1. The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1) by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Why I Want a Sequel to This Series: I’d like to see how the gods in this universe respond to contemporary society. Would they become more visibly active here? Would they completely retreat from us?

2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1) by C.S. Lewis

Why I Want a Sequel to This Series: Susan’s storyline needs to be resolved once and for all. I loved so many things about this series, but I hated the way she was treated in the final book. She deserved better.

3. The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid’s Tale, #1) by Margaret Atwood

Why I Want a Sequel to This Series: Don’t get me wrong. I was thrilled to finally have a sequel to this book and get a good resolution to Offred’s story. If this were to become a trilogy, I’d want the third and final instalment to focus on the society that formed after Gilead was destroyed. There were tantalizing hints in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments that future generations had either not learned their lesson from this terrible period or had never quite understood the gravity of what happened. I’d love to dive into their world more deeply and see if they’d made the necessary changes to ensure that no one would ever be harmed the way Offred and the people she knew were harmed again.

4. Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes #1) by Bill Watterson

Why I Want a Sequel to This Series: In 2011, someone wrote a one-off comic strip about Calvin’s experiences as the father of a daughter who was just as mischievous as he was when he was a child. I would love it if either Bill Watterson or someone he approved of were to pick this up again and give little Bacon years of adventures in our modern era. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

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Sometimes I’ve had to expand Top Ten Tuesday topics a little in order to come up with decent answers for them. Today I’m going to contract my options down to books written between the years of 2000 and 2012.

You see, this is one of those topics that I could start an entirely new blog about and instantly have years worth of material to choose from. I regularly read books that were written last week as well as ones that were written a few hundred years ago.

Memorable stories come in all shapes and sizes and can be found in any period of time in my experience.

So let’s look at some books that were written in this century that I enjoyed!

1. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

2. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

3. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt

4. Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1) by Margaret Atwood

5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

6. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

7. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

8. The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

9. Coraline by Neil Gaiman

10. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

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This was such a fun and easy prompt to do!

Summer makes me think of ice cream, cookouts, picnics, sand, sunscreen, swimming, beaches, sandals, swimsuits, and more.

I tried to incorporate as many different types of these images and similar images into my response as possible.

No, I have not read these books yet. I tend to read a lot of science fiction that has nothing at all to do with typical summer topics, so I had to get a bit creative in order to participate.

If you have read any of these books, I’d love to hear what you thought of them!

1. Love & Gelato (Love & Gelato, #1) by Jenna Evans Welch

2. Murder Cuts the Mustard by Jessica Ellicott

3. Thank You for Flying Air Zoe by Erik Atwell

4. The Southern Side of Paradise (Peachtree Bluff #3) by Kristy Woodson Harvey

5. Honeymoon for One by Beth Orsoff

6. A Starless Sky by Paige Agnew

7. Tropical Dreams by Kelly Cozzone

8. Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way by Francis Mallmann

9. Shug by Jenny Han

10. We Had a Picnic This Sunday Past by Jacqueline Woodson