Top Ten Tuesday: Signs You Might be a Book Lover

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

PREVIOUS TOP TEN TUESDAY TOPICS:

• February 4: Books On My TBR I Predict Will Be 5-Star Reads
• February 11: Love Freebie
• February 18: The Last Ten Books That Gave Me a Book Hangover (submitted by Deanna @ A Novel Glimpse)
• February 25: Characters I’d Follow On Social Media (submitted by Tilly @thebiblioshelf)
• March 3: Books With Single-Word Titles (submitted by Kitty from Kitty Marie’s Reading Corner)
• March 10: Authors Who Have a Fun Social Media Presence
• March 17: Spring 2020 TBR
• March 24: Genre Freebie 

FORTHCOMING TOP TEN TUESDAY TOPICS:

• March 30: Ten Signs You’re a Book Lover (basically, people know you’re a book lover because… i.e., you’re always carrying a book or two, your library card broke from overuse, etc.)
• April 7: Books I Bought/Borrowed Because… (Fill in the blank. You can do 10 books you bought for the same reason, i.e., pretty cover, recommended by a friend, blurbed by a favorite authors, etc. OR you could do a different reason for each pick.)
• April 14: Books I Enjoyed but Rarely Talk About (This is for the books you liked, but rarely come up in conversation or rarely fit a TTT topic, etc.)
• April 21: Titles That Would Make Good Band Names (submitted by Michelle)
• April 28: Books I Wish I Had Read As a Child

Yes! In these troubled times, let’s just be silly and recognise ourselves in each others’ book lover anecdotes and memes… Thank you, Jana!

The List: You might be a book lover if…

1. You stockpiled reading material rather than toilet paper when coronavirus struck!

I downloaded the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, as well as the International Booker shortlist just before the shutdown – along with The Mercies, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and a dozen more…

2. You get criticised at work because your ebook library causes a system wide slowdown.

Yes seriously. I was told that saving books on the network shouldn’t make a difference to it because ebooks are relatively small files… and then I pointed out that there were over 2,000 books the IT technicians went pale.

3. You realised that no one knows how many ebooks you have… so you keep on buying: if your partner can’t see the book, they don’t count, right?

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4. You are prepared to turn the car around and drive back the 30 miles you’ve gone because you left your book behind: True story, I have done it so many times!

Even when facing a four hour journey, heading back to get that book was, yet, reasonable.

5. You find that very people can get in the way of your reading, and you are happy to let the people go.

6. You worry that, if your TBR pile collapses, it may cause structural damage to your home.

7. You choose who to sit next to on public transport by the book they are reading – and get stressed when everyone is on ebooks because you cannot tell if you’ll sit next to a psychopath or not.

8. Your child thinks that having three books on the go at the same time is the usual state of affairs and does the same –

Mine is 6 and we have a picture book, a Disney book and a chapter book (currently Fortunately The Milk by Neil Gaiman) being read most nights. She also loved Fing by David Walliams and is looking forward to Slime, the Jolley Rodgers series and the Amelia Fang series.

9. You assume that other people are definitely going to be your best friend because they are reading a book you love – and you feel unreasonably disappointed when you don’t get on.

10. You become overwhelmed and emotionally crippled because there are just too many books to read and only so many hours in the day

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11. There are still fictional deaths you can’t get over

I worry about the apostrophe in that meme… but forget Snape or Hedwig; forget Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web, Patrick Ness has ripped my heart out too many times: Conor O’Malley’s mum in A Monster Calls and, oh, Manchee in The Knife of Never Letting Go…

Is that then? It feels like more than ten. It is more than ten, isn’t it. I just counted and it was eleven…. Oh well!

So, let’s keep our spirits high and laugh at our own foibles! Drop me a comment to let me know what I have forgotten!

Again, a David Mitchell book is an event, and a thing of beauty! But the music industry is not my natural setting and again I was caught between this and another book – Daisy Jones and the Six in this case – and Daisy Jones was read first. This time, because it was nominated on a book club I was part of.

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Bonus: The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch

This one has been on my TBR for years. Literally years. I have heard nothing but praise for it, but so far have never quite got around to reading it! Go figure!

So, there we go: a range of books that I got in 2020 – save for the Scott Lynch – and do regret not reading during the year. Is regret the right word? Probably not to be honest: I do not regret the reading that I did do last year at all. But these are books that I would like to find time to catch up with this year – before prize season hits us again!

Pop in the comments below your thoughts on these – maybe let me know which I should read first!