Tag: The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi

Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023

The Book Lover's Sanctuary12 Comments

Is it my imagination or are the days starting to stretch out a little bit again? It's still pitch dark on my morning runs but I don't feel that I am both driving to and home from work in the darkness! And this week's theme is a lovely one, a celebration of the books I have read in 2023 - which already seems a very long time ago and we have not yet finished January! - from authors I have not come across before. We all have those familiar favourite authors, don't we? Those writers who we just know we will feel welcome and comfortable and familiar with, even in a new book - and that is a wonderful thing! And alongside that, it is a joy to uncover a new author whom we might also fall in love with, possibly with a weighty backlist to enjoy, potentially with a future of more books to come. It is also a feature that I track on my reading spreadsheet - I am such a geek! - so I can easily share my full list of books by new-to-me authors, of which there were 22.

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: 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.