Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Read on Someone’s Recommendation

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

Three people sitting at a booth and laughing. The topics for this week’s post and the one on November 6 are going to be a little tricky for me because I don’t request or give out a ton of personalized book recommendations.

Taste is such a subjective thing that I feel a bit shy about these sorts of conversations unless I’m 100% sure the other person will love that book (or that what I’ve been recommended is actually my sort of read).

So I’m going to be reaching way back into my reading history to answer this prompt.

C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series.

My uncle gave me all seven books of this series as a gift when I was a kid. I quickly became a huge fan of that universe and read them over and over again.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. 

That same uncle also gave me copies of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy a couple of years later. The former was a fun right read away, and I pushed myself to become ready for the sequels a year or so later.

Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth

Someone I used to babysit for recommended this series to me when I was in my late high school or early college years. The books in it were long, but they told such engrossing stories about life in the middle ages and what it was like to build Gothic cathedral without any of the high-tech tools we’d have for such a project today.

Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time series.

I no longer recall who recommended this to me, but I’m glad they did. The narrator’s descriptions of what it feels like to have autism were so detailed. The mystery was great, too.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

18 Comments

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18 Responses to Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Read on Someone’s Recommendation

  1. Thanks for stopping by earlier! I absolutely adore Bradley’s work. Flavia de Luce is precocious and a very cool kid. I’ve heard a lot about the Haddon book but have never read it. Our tastes so far have been similar, so I’m going to add it to my TBR list.

  2. Love Narnia (it was the second series I read to my kid when she was small — the first was The Chronicles of Prydain, which is possibly my fave all time children’s fantasy series). I loved LOTR when I was younger, but honestly I can’t get through it now. Not sure why, but there you go.

  3. Lord of the rings series was one of my earliest series to own and read and I’m still thankful to my dad for gifting me my first copies.

    Here is my prompt
    https://diaryofablackcitygirl.wordpress.com/2019/10/23/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-books-i-read-on-someones-recommendation/

  4. Those were good recommendations.

  5. Hobbit and the Narnia books are so accessible…then you get to the LOTR trilogy and everything slows right down. I tried reading Fellowship a few times before giving up.

    Then my brother shamed me into getting past the preamble.

    So I feel you on the need to push through. I’m just glad things get more lively as the story goes on! 🙂

    I often feel like the Follet books are to current readers what Umberto Eco was in the 80’s & 90’s. I called Name of the Rose my “Laundry Day book” because I could only read it for short periods of time before putting it down for a week or two to try and figure out what I was reading.

  6. Good list. We have a lot of Ken Follett books at the library book sale. As for this one, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, yeah, I can’t read it. When the story opens with a dead dog… yeah, no. Tot read it and warned me.
    Thanks for stopping by earlier!

  7. I love the topic, because I really enjoy reading my friends favorites. I found some 5 star books among them and some I hated to bits. But it was always worth it 🙂

  8. I’ve always been very interested in Curious Incident, but I still haven’t read it. I love the idea of an autistic narrator—I’ve only read a few books with that POV.

  9. I’ll have to try The Pillars of the Earth. I couldn’t get into Lord of the Rings despite several attempts.

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