Category: Literary Lists

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Defied My Expectations

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The new school year has now begun and summer is over: my daughter has had her first day at her new school, a slew of paperwork has been thrown at me at work, another heatwave has (somewhat gently) gripped the UK. And the backlog of reviews on my blog is continuing to grow: finishing two books last night was both satisfying and a little overwhelming! This week's theme is also one that deserves a little thought: books that defied my expectations, Submitted by Sia @ everybookadoorway.com, which is glossed as books you thought you would didn’t like that you loved, books you thought you’d love but didn’t, books that were not the genres they seemed to be, or in any other way subverted your expectations! Sometimes, it's great to get a book that does exactly what you expect: a favourite author, a favourite genre, a title like The Kaiju Preservation Society or The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires which really do give you a heads up about the content. But this post celebrates those that unsettled and defied my expectations.

Top Ten Tuesday: Water

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Water is such a potent symbol in writing: it is a setting that takes humanity literally out of its element, creating a vulnerability that we don't always feel on land; it remains largely unexplored and alien and home to utterly foreign and incomprehensible creatures; it is an image of chaos, calmed by the word of God in so many cultures and mythologies. What is one of the most iconic lines in film? "Release the kraken!" The ocean can be a metaphor of our minds and emotions and imaginations - look at the language we use for our interiority be it shallow or deep, turbulent or calm, we apply maritime language to it continually; it can be symbolic of female sexuality, birth and the creation of life. There are so many oceans to choose from that this is in no way an exhaustive list, nor could I limit it to ten!

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookshops in Rome I Am Excited For

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Benvenuti a The Book Lovers' Sanctuary, questa settimana aggiorno il blog da Roma! Well, technically I am not in Rome yet: I fly out tomorrow and am scheduling this to post on Tuesday! I am currently experiencing that Christmas Eve feeling: I think everything is ready, I am looking forward to tomorrow, I am anticipating that something will have been forgotten! Tickets printed? Check. Currency? Check. New clothes? Check, and it will be a change to wear clothes that fit - apparently I am a 28 inch waist now, who knew? - and oh my god my first pair of loafers! So Italian. So freaking comfortable! So these are the ten bookshops I might be most interested in seeing... such a shame that we only have 6 days there! And whilst I may have taught myself some Italian - enough to have a good go at a GCSE exam and sort of get the gist of an Italian newspaper - I have no real concept of Geography or where these might be in relation to each other!

Top Ten Tuesday: Forgotten Backlist Titles

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This week's theme is an interesting one: Jana invites us to Spread love for books that people don’t talk about much anymore! I am not exactly sure what that means, but I will offer up books that I have loved in the past but which I have not really thought about and reconsidered and which have not received as much social media hype as they deserve... perhaps underrated books.

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Most Recent Books I Did Not Finish

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This is a bit of a challenge for me because it is really rare for me to give up on a book! I like to think that this is because I find it easy to find something to enjoy in most books: the genre may not be a favourite, but I may like the characters; I may not like the characters but the language could be sublime; I may find the language pedestrian but the plot could be thrilling; the plot might be cliched and quotidian but the ideas and themes might be powerful. And oftentimes, if I do put a book down, its because I was not in the right headspace for it then but I may well go back to it later... a pause does not a DNF make, does it? On the other hand, it may also reflect negatively on me as a person. I am generally a completionist, keen to finish a book - or a series - just because I started it. Yes, I am that sort of person who cannot leave a sidequest incomplete in a game! I also fall foul of the sunk-cost fallacy easily: I feel that when I have invested in a book (the time to start reading it probably more than the price), I must "get my money's worth" from it, even if giving up and finding a book I do love would be a much more enjoyable use of my time. And perhaps my eternal optimism: even halfway through a book, even three-quarters of the way, I might still be thinking This could get better any moment...

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With One-Word Titles

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Many thanks to Angela from Reading Frenzy Book Blog for this theme it is a list of books with one-word titles, which should bring together a range of books from different genres which is always fun! And the rules I set myself are that I will share the most recently added one-word titles in my library, excluding books whose title is the protagonist's name... although I am stretching that a little with the last book on the list!

Top Ten Tuesday: Freebie: Books Set in Rome

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This week's freebie topic, I thought I'd use to celebrate the fact that I am going abroad for the first time in ... decades! Unless you count EuroDisney which is technically in France but felt about as French as, well, Disney. I mean, I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it - even I found it hard to be cynical there - but it did not feel real, let alone foreign! And in preparation for the trip I decided to sign up to DuoLingo and learn Italian - which has taught how to ask for a coffee - posso ordinare un caffè per favore? or vorrei un caffè per favore - how to ask directions - dov'è la libreria - and bizarrely philosophical questions such as perche moriamo or che succede quando muori... To the writers and editors of DuoLingo, are you okay? Anyway, as a reader I also wanted to pre-visit in my reading the city where I am going so these are a series of books set in Rome. To be fair, many of these are yet to be read!

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Covers In the Colors of My Country’s Flag

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I do love these cover-themed topics, because they pull together a very random selection of books and are a chance to remind ourselves of books we have loved but half-forgotten, or perhaps books that piqued our interest but then never got read... but maybe that's just me! But in terms of colours for this week's theme, it is the classic red, white and blue...

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books Releasing During the Second Half of 2023

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This is in some ways the second part - the companion piece - to last week's list. Having shared the books I already have that I am intending to read in the coming weeks and months, these are the upcoming releases that I am excited about and which are likely to add to that over flowing TBR pile! I love the chance to geekily nose around and research these upcoming releases - to find out unexpectedly that our favourite authors are releasing a new book, or that something completely unknown is coming out that grips you by its cover, its premise or its blurb...

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Summer 2023 To-Read List

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This week's Top Ten theme is a look forward to the books on our TBRs for the summer - those books that will fill up the long six weeks of the summer vacation, books that will be taken to the beach with us, to the parks, to gardens. For me, books that will come with me and my family to Rome on our first 'proper' foreign holiday ... ever. Unless you count EuroDisney which I don't: EuroDisney was great but so unreal that it really didn't feel like visiting France in any way! With next week's theme looking at books to be released in the second half of the year - and I love the chance to research upcoming books - I'm going to limit my list this week to the ten books that I currently own but have not yet read.

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Wishes

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This is Jana's twice-yearly invitation to us to share our Amazon wishlists and show the books that we would love to own - with the opportunity to jump around each others' links to make one or two people's wishes come true. I shall just post my list here and edge away slowly!

Top Ten Tuesday: Books or Covers that Feel/Look Like Summer

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Can I believe that it is already the summer? After the most incredibly wonderful week of half term in terms of weather - glorious blue skies, warm and long balmy days - and mowing, paddling in the river with the little one, the sound of church bells... The hay fever, sneezing, itchy eyes... And this week's topic is a celebration of all things summery in our reading. Perhaps names or covers that remind us of summer, perhaps a setting in summer. Perhaps just books that feel summery.

Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Make Me Instantly NOT Want to Read a Book

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This week's topic is an interesting counterpart to last week's list of things that automatically make me want to read a book... It would be tempting simply to invert those notions - what would turn me off a book? Unconvincing characters, inauthentic relationships etc... and yes that would be true. But a little bit of a cheat perhaps! That said, my wife came home from work yesterday with conjunctivitis which she has merrily shared, so my vision is a little blurred right now... tonight, I am not averse to the concept of a short cut! My other issue is that I do read widely and whilst I will offer some of the themes and tropes that may discourage me from reading a book, none of these will necessarily stop me from reading it. They may, however, make it an uphill job for the author to grab my attention. I wonder what examples of these I can come up with that I did read...

Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Make Me Instantly Want to Read a Book

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This is an interesting topic: I read so widely and eclectically (I think) that sometimes its hard to discern a pattern in my reading habits. And sometimes when I feel that there is a pattern, I consciously choose to read outside the pattern... But there are certainly some authors who draw me. So lets start there.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Recommend to Others the Most

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I'm not the sort of person to recommend books to other people. Of course not. *Ahem! Ok, of course I do. It is part of my DNA! I have been known, when browsing Waterstones and overhearing shop assistants offering up a book recommendation, to feel obliged to butt in and offer a different one. My blog is broadly speaking just a list of book recommendations. I have had long conversations with colleagues that never go far beyond "Have you read...? And you haven't read...? You should read..." It is, to be fair, pretty much part and parcel of my job as an English teacher, though - and that's my excuse!

Top Ten Tuesday: The First 10 Books I Randomly Grabbed from My Shelf

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I am going to rely on the computer to select the ten books for this list, taking out all the physical and human limitations on randomness - the fact that I would be least likely to pick books from low shelves because my knees ache.... I did show my class the other week my Calibre library of ebooks and they estimated how many I had. "Twenty, sir?" "Thirty-five sir?" They seemed flabbergasted - as if they could not believe so many books could exist - when I scrolled to the bottom to show the 3,006th book! Not all read, obviously. A lot of classics. A vast and overwhelming TBR in digital form! Let's see what I thought of this random selection, and whether I remember why I bought it... And why is this strangely nerve wracking?

Top Ten Tuesday: Favourite Audiobook Narrators

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I do love a good audiobook! Half an hour commuting to work each way five days a week; half an hour running three times a week; one or two longer runs at the weekend; whilst cooking, along in the kitchen... I will often be found listening to an audiobook. Quite often, more of my reading is audiobook than traditional print or e-book... Anyway, let's turn to my favourite narrators. There are some who inhabit the characters and narratives so well that, even when I return to the print version, I am still hearing it in their voice inside my head!

Top Ten Tuesday: Non-book Freebie

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This week’s topic delves out of the bookish realm and is described by Jana as a chance to Take this time to let your readers get to know you a little! But the thing is, when you know what a person reads and enjoys, the sort of worlds and characters that inhabit their imagination and give them solace, when you know when a person seeks comfort in their reading and when they seek to be challenged, you already know so much about that other person! Yes, I am the sort of person who, when invited into someone’s house, is instantly glancing around for bookshelves; I am the sort of person who on a crowded train chooses who I sit next by their reading matter…!

Top Ten Tuesday:Titles with Animals In Them and/or Covers with Animals On Them

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This week's theme comes courtesy of Rachel @ Sunny Side who is obviously a girl after my daughter's heart who loves animals! In fact, my daughter has an avowed ambition to live in the wild in order to look after the wild animals - taking inspiration from Katya Balen's wonderful October October, perhaps. But only if there is wifi. In the wild.

Top Ten Tuesday:  Indie/Self-Published Books

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This week's themes comes courtesy of submitted by Nicole @ BookWyrm Knits and is a celebration of those pioneers of literature, the self-published and independently published authors. In the world we live in, the access to blogs and to self-publishing opportunities and small independent houses means that the range of books and publishing has blossomed without the influence of the Big Five publishers. Without self-publishing, we might have never had the whimsy of Beatrix Potter or of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books for People Who Liked Tana French

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This week's theme poses its own challenge. I love the idea of recommending books similar to a favourite author, but which author to focus on? Do I pick an author I find comforting and warm, or an author I find challenging? Do I find an adult author or young adult? Do I focus on classics or on modern writers? I want to pick my favourite author and rave about them... but again I have so many favourites...

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Spring 2023 To-Read List

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As I have said on this blog before, I don't really do to be read lists. Whilst I may intend to tackle a certain set of books, I am more than happy to pick up this other one that caught my eye in Waterstones or the library, or that one that I began and put down six months ago, or this book that a friend recommneded, or that one which is all over social media, or - let's face it - sometimes this random one which I opened on my kindle by mistake! But this time of year coincides with the release of the Women's Prize for Fiction and I do try to read along with that longlist each year - to varying degrees of success - and so this week I offer you that longlist which I hope to have read some or most of before the 14th June when the winner is announced.

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish People I’d Like To Meet

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This is a nice whimsical topic: the bookish people I'd love to meet... but there are so many of them! Authors we could have to a dinner party, or meet at a book festival; characters who might be able to step from the page like Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, bloggers and reviewers... Let's think...

Top Ten Tuesday: Genre Freebie

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This time of year is also the time when I indulge in these genres - just before we start on the tradmill of the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Booker longlists and the more self-consciously literary offerings. Do I see or recognise the distinction between genre and literary fiction...? I'm not sure that I do at all to be honest. Isn't it all just a marketing tool? All I recognise really is the ability of books to transport and entertain and challenge me in some way. Anyway, let's pick... crime as a genre for the purpose of this list after a somewhat lengthy preamble. And I offer to you my ten favourite crime books... prepare for murder, deception and violence.

Top Ten Tuesday:  Love/Valentine’s Day Freebie

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In terms of reading, romance is not my preferred genre - my imagination tends towards the darker areas, gothic and crime and literary fiction... Of Gooderads 100 best Romance novels of the last three years, I have read, well, one! I have read more romance recently than at any other time in my life, and in fairness thoroughly enjoyed them. But it is still with some trepidation that I embark on a list of my favourite romantic pairings from recent reads.