Tag Archives: Top Ten Tuesday

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Thank you to Astilbe for submitting this theme!

I’m tweaking the theme a little so I can share some books that turn weather or nature into a character.

I don’t know about all of you, but sometimes when a particularly bad snowstorm or blizzard hits southern Ontario it almost feels like there’s an angry creature shrieking outside as it tosses snow everywhere.

Logically, I know it’s just the wind, of course, but it’s fun to imagine more paranormal explanations for why the weather is so dangerous that day.

Here are ten books where the weather – whether snowy, sunny, bone-dry or otherwise – feels like another character to contend with. I suspect that all of them would good reads during a storm.

1. Dry by Neal Shusterman

2. The Great Wide Sea by M.H. Herlong

3. Trapped by Michael Northrop

4. To Build a Fire by Christophe Chabouté

5. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

6. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

7. Snow by John Banville

8. The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane

9. Summer at Mount Hope by Rosalie Ham

10. Rose in a Storm by Jon Katz

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Thank you to Nicole@BookWyrm Knits for submitting this theme. You’re a lovely person who came up with a fun idea for this week.

Honestly, I do not think my answers are going to be very impressive this week. When I was a teenager, I read dozens of classic novels and enjoyed many of them. The classics I have still not yet read are, for the most part, books that do not appeal to me for a variety of reasons and that I will probably never read.

Almost everything I read these days has been published within the last five or so years unless someone who shares my taste in book recommends something older or I happen to find an older title some other way that sounds amazing.

Most of what I read these days are ebooks from my local library and they typically buy new or new-ish titles for our community instead of older ones.

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These days I am generally not interested in:

• Poetry
• Long books
• Polemics
• Classic or traditional-style fantasy
• Nonfiction about disease, war, or suffering
• Gory horror
• Romance
• Classic novels
• Dark endings
• Fairy tales

(There are occasional exceptions, of course, but these aren’t categories that immediately spark my interest in most cases).

And I have a deep interest in:

• Short stories and novellas
• Cozy science fiction and fantasy
• Memoirs, biographies, or autobiographies of people who make the world a better place
• Nonfiction about scientific advancements in any branch of science, animals, food, and plants
• Ghost stories
• Psychological horror (e.g. no blood or gore, just apprehension)
• Humorous books
• Stories about emotionally healthy platonic relationships*
• Hopeful writing in general
• Historical fiction about the lives of ordinary people
• Justice being served to the antagonists

*they don’t have to be perfect by any means!  I simply prefer to read about characters who genuinely try to be good and treat each other kindly than about characters who are stuck in dysfunctional patterns of behaviour with their family and friends.

My tastes seem to shift every few years, so I’d have to make this a much longer post to document every little change I’ve experienced since childhood. Honestly, I don’t know that I’d even remember all of them anymore.

All I know is that I tend to dive deeply into a topic for a few months to a few years and then move on to other topics in most cases.

I look forward to seeing how everyone else’s tastes have evolved over time.