Tag Archives: Top Ten Tuesday

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Sadly, Covid killed off some my favourite bookstores that I would have loved to include in this list, so I decided to pivot to fictional answers instead.

 

1.Women & Women First from the television show Portlandia 

Why I’d Want to Visit: the owners were humorous and memorable characters. I loved seeing the absurd lengths they took some of their beliefs.

 

2. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore from  the novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Why I’d Want to Visit: It has ties to a secret society. What could be cooler than that?

3. The Travel Book Company from the film Notting Hill 

Why I’d Want to Visit: I’d forgotten travel books were ever a thing! It would be interesting to see an entire store dedicated to them.

 

4. The Village Bookstore from the film Beauty and the Beast 

Why I’d Want to Visit: Beauty and the Beast was set in the 1740s. I don’t know what the literary trends were back then, so I’d be curious to see what sorts of books were available to average citizens.

 

5. The Android’s Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop from the television show The Simpsons 

Why I’d Want to Visit: It seems pretty similar to real-life comic book stores (wacky Simpsons physics and logic and such aside), but it would be cool to make comparisons.

 

6. The Magic Box from the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Why I’d Want to Visit: To see what they had to offer. I wouldn’t touch anything, and I’d make sure I was safely back home before dark when the vampires and other monsters started causing trouble.

 

7. A. Z. Fell and Company From the novel Good Omens by Terry Pratchett

Why I’d Want to Visit: Because Aziraphale had invited me to stop by. It would be neat to see what sorts of things he’d collected over the millennia. Other than that, it seems like the sort of place best avoided due to how much it bothered him to have visitors at the private collection of materials he kept there.

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To be perfectly honest, I generally prefer book covers that include some sort of picture on them over the ones that have a fancy typographic font and nothing else.

Pictures, drawings, and other visual representations of what a book might about play an important role in helping me decide what to read. Will it be romantic, scary, or thought-provoking? Should I have my box of tissues on standby? There’s so much you can tell from what is and isn’t included in this sort of cover.

As pretty as an individual font may be, it can never convey as much information about what to expect from a story in my experience.

I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who love typographic covers, though, so I look forward to reading your posts and/or comments about why you prefer them to other types of covers.

 

 

1. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

 

2. Players First: Coaching from the Inside Out by John Calipari

 

3. Never Use Futura by Douglas Thomas

 

4. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

 

5. The Affairs of the Falcóns by Melissa Rivero

 

6.Burned (Burned, #1) by Ellen Hopkins

 

7. The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity by Lewis Raven Wallace

 

8. Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam

 

9. Oil: Anatomy of an Industry by Matthew Yeomans

 

10. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer

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Those of you who have followed this blog for a while might remember how short my seasonal to-read lists generally are since I rely so heavily on what the Toronto Public Library has to offer and prefer to be a mood reader instead of sticking to a strict schedule.

Well, this autumn is going to break that trend.

I’ve found nine books I’m excited to read that have either recently been released or are scheduled to be published later on this fall.That may be a record for me for these types of posts. Ha!

If you’ve read any of them or have them on your TBR lists, let’s talk.

 

 

Our Shadows Have Claws by Amparo Ortiz (Editor) and Yamile Saied Méndez

Why I Want to Read It: Halloween is sneaking up on us quickly, and monster stories are the perfect thing to read in preparation for it if you ask me.

 

Meet Me in Mumbai by Sabina Khan

Why I Want to Read It: I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I have several relatives who were transracially adopted. There aren’t a lot of books out there that touch on both of these topics, so I’m pretty curious about this one.

 

Ghost Eaters by Clay McLeod Chapman

Publication Date: Today!

Why I Want to Read It: Actually, I’m not sure if I do. The thought of taking a pill that allows you to see ghosts piqued my interest, but I don’t know if this will be too scary of a read for me. I will keep it on my TBR for now as I decide.

 

Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese

Publication Date: October 4

Why I Want to Read It: This is the first retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter I’ve ever seen. (If you’re a fan of retellings and know of other books like this, please speak up!) I am thrilled to finally experience this tale from Hester’s perspective.

 

They Were Here Before Us by Eric Larocca

Publication Date: October 25

Why I Want to Read It: The blurb is actually pretty vague at the moment, but the words “horror” and “novella” in it have caught my attention. This could be a fun and spooky Halloween read for sure.

 

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukheerjee

 

To Each This World by Julie E Czerneda

Publication Date: November 1

Why I Want to Read It: I love reading science fiction stories about humans being put into cryosleep and sent off to find new habitable worlds. It’s such a fascinating topic.

 

 

Fourteen Days: An Unauthorized Gathering by Margaret Atwood (Editor)

Publication Date: November 1

Why I Want to Read It: Each chapter of this novel about a diverse group of neighbours bonding together during a Covid-19 shutdown was written by a different author. Yes, Margaret Atwood wrote one of the chapters. I’m hoping it will capture that moment in history well. Fingers crossed.

 

The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama

Publication Date: November 15

Why I Want to Read It: I really enjoyed reading her memoir “Becoming.” She’s a good storyteller, so I look forward to hearing what she has to say about hope and perseverance in hard times in this book.

 

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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