Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s theme is your top ten unpopular bookish opinions, but I could only come up with two. Since it’s still Pride Month, and the next couple weeks are on “second half of 2019 releases/summer TBR list” I’m going to do the ten upcoming LGBTQIA+ releases I’m looking forward to instead! (The downside to writing this post is that I discovered several LGBTQIA+ releases from the FIRST half of 2019 that are now on my TBR list. Whoops.) If you’re looking for unpopular bookish opinions, though, Artsy Reader Girl will have a linky with everyone participating this week. On to my list!

All of Us With Wings by Michelle Ruiz Keil (June 18) – an #ownvoices YA fantasy with a bisexual Mexican/American MC.

Technically, You Started It by Lana Wood Johnson (June 25) – this YA romance has a demisexual main character (YAY!) and a bisexual love interest.

Destroy All Monsters by Sam J. Miller (July 2) – an adult magical realism tale, dealing with heavy topics like child molestation and PTSD. I got to meet Sam Miller at the Baltimore Book Fest last year, and he’s awesome. (Though I still haven’t managed to read Blackfish City – oops.)

Shatter the Sky by Rebecca Kim Wells (July 30) – a YA fantasy with dragons and rebellion. Sign me up.

Of Ice and Shadows by Audrey Coulthurst (August 13) – the sequel to Inkmistress and Of Fire and Stars.

Crier’s War by Nina Varela (October 1) – debut F/F fantasy between a human girl and a Made one. (They appear to be automatons made originally to be playthings before they rebelled?) Looks awesome.

Orpheus Girl by Brynne Rebele-Henry (October 8) – another debut, this one re-imagining the Orpheus story as an F/F love story in Texas. I’m hearing conflicting reports about it though, so I’m not sure if I’ll pick it up or not.

The Never Tilting World by Rin Chupeco (October 15) – billed as Frozen meets Mad Max, this fantasy is the next book from the author of The Bone Witch Trilogy, which I loved.

Tarnished are the Stars by Rosiee Thor (October 15) – queer sci-fi fantasy about a girl with a clockwork heart.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (September 10) – this book had me at lesbian necromancers. Lady necromancers are kind of my THING. Soooo yeah. A lady necromancer and her reluctant swordswoman? Yeah I need this book YESTERDAY. (And that cover. Hot damn.)

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s theme is the top ten books from my favorite genre. Because there aren’t any pride-themed topics this month – which is quite the oversight – I’m picking my top ten favorite LGBTQIA+ fiction books!

On Saturday I did a roundup of ALL the LGBTQIA+ books I’ve reviewed on this blog so far, but I’m going to narrow it down to my favorite ten today!

In a rough order but not an exact one:

The Merry Spinster is a collection of short fantasy stories that explore gender in interesting ways, by transgender author Mallory Ortberg. It’s a pretty trippy collection and quite fun.

The Spy with the Red Balloon is the sequel to The Girl with the Red Balloon, but I don’t think you really need to read the first one to understand the second. The plots are pretty separate. In Spy there is a demisexual character and a gay character, and it’s a lovely magical-realism exploration of World War II. (Girl explores living in East Berlin, behind the wall, after the war, and has a time-travel element. Both books are fantastic and written by a demisexual Jewish author.)

River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow are two novellas exploring an alternate history United States in which hippos were imported to the Mississippi and used like cattle. Wranglers ride hippos, it’s great. One of the main characters is non-binary, and has a romance with another character. The author is non-binary as well.

Starless, by Jacqueline Carey, is a sprawling, epic fantasy that covers a princess and her nonbinary bodyguard as they embark on an epic quest to save their world. (And possibly fall in love with each other on the way.)

The Summer of Jordi Perez (and the Best Burger in Los Angeles) is a great summer read. It’s bright and sunny and follows a teenager as she tries to determine who has the best burgers in LA while falling in love with another girl. This is also the only contemporary fiction book on the list – I mostly read fantasy, as you can tell!

The next four are all at about the same level of I LOVE THEM.

Once & Future is queer King Arthur in space. It encompasses a bunch of different identities and it’s an amazing take on King Arthur and it’s just wonderful. I cannot wait for the sequel.

Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, by Leigh Bardugo, have a pair of gay characters in the troupe of thieves, and it’s an epic heist novel followed by a revenge & rescue novel. I really need to read the rest of the Grisha-verse, because I LOVED these two.

The Wrong Stars and its sequel, The Dreaming Stars, are a pair of sci-fi novels starring an incredibly diverse spaceship crew (the captain is a bisexual demisexual!) trying to save the world from a massive alien threat. It’s a space opera with nonbinary, trans, and ace characters, as well as the bi and demi captain.

The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice & Virtue has a pair of gay characters and the asexual sister of one of the boys, who gets her one novel in The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy. Both books are really fun.

And my all-time favorite book with queer themes right now is one I keep bringing up in Top Ten lists because it’s JUST. SO. GOOD. The Priory of the Orange Tree is a beast of a book, at over 800 pages, with a F/F romance at its heart. (One of the women appears to be bisexual.) It has dragons and politics and action and big battles and assassins and magic and it’s just amazing. I will keep boosting this book because I love it so much.

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is my favorite releases in the past ten years; one for each year. (One? Well….I tried!)

2019

Hands down, my favorite release of 2019 so far is The Priory of The Orange Tree. It is an amazing epic feminist fantasy, revolving around several female characters. It has court intrigue, battle, assassins, dragons, pirates, undead – everything. It is absolutely one of my favorite books ever.

2018

These next three years were impossible to pick just one for. SO MANY GOOD BOOKS came out! The Book of Essie is probably my top pick for 2018, but also Circe and Starless and The Astonishing Color of After, The Poet X, A Spark of White Fire, Vox, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? Give the Dark My Love, Damsel, The Book of M, Invisible, Smoke Eaters…. I could go on.

2017

2017 also had an amazing list of books. City of Brass, When Dimple Met Rishi, Dear Fahrenheit 451, The Bone Witch, All’s Faire in Middle School, Into the Drowning Deep, Girls Made of Snow and Glass, and American War lead the pack.

2016

I couldn’t pick just one for 2016, either! The Power, Crooked Kingdom, The Crown’s Game, The Star-Touched Queen, The Courier, The Diabolic, and Rebel of the Sands were all amazing.

2015

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo – one of today’s masters of fantasy politics. LOVED this book and its sequel, Crooked Kingdom.

2014

The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly – think Jurassic Park, but in China, and with dragons. Action horror, not my usual fare, but pretty awesome.

2013

The Golem and The Jinni by Helene Wecker – an enthralling, atmospheric read that I reviewed back when the blog was young.

2012

Krampus the Yule Lord by Brom, a dark Christmas story, but also My Ideal Bookshelf, because I love books about books.

2011

Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life, but also Backyard Harvest, a fantastic reference book for the home gardener.

2010

The Thing Beneath the Bed – Patrick Rothfuss – an amazing “children’s” book, introduced to me by a player in our old D&D game. Amazing and hysterical. But not exactly child-appropriate. Read it yourself first!

2009

Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe by Theodore Gray – a gorgeous reference book.

I also just realized that’s eleven years, but The Elements is a gorgeous book more people should be reminded of, so I’m leaving it up!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is a little unusual – it’s my Top Ten Thought-Provoking Book Quotes. I’ll have to go through the linkup on her page to find other people’s favorite quotes!

This is actually pretty good timing for this topic, because I’m trying to find some good literary art for my reading nook! I’ll share some quotes I’ve been looking at, and then go through what other people have posted before I make a decision on what to put on my wall.

Already in my reading nook is a throw pillow from Redbubble that reads “A well-read woman is a dangerous creature” which is a great quote because it combines feminism with being a bookworm.

I’ve always loved Stephen King’s quote “Books are a uniquely portable magic” but I’m not sure it belongs in a distinctly not-portable Book Nook!

“The world was hers for the reading” from Betty Smith (author of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn) would go well, though. Maybe in script just above my chair?

Louis L’Amour’s “Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you” is rather comforting, which is the vibe I’m going for in my nook.

Malcolm X once said “My alma mater was books, a good library . . . . I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity” which is true of me, as well. I have far too much to learn about, and too little time to do it!

John Steinbeck said “I guess there are never enough books” which would be amusing to put over my shelf.

Also “Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book” from Bill Watterson, the Calvin & Hobbes cartoonist. Since I plan to spend many such rainy days in that chair with tea and a book, watching the storm through the window, that’s quite fitting.

Since my reading nook is in my bedroom, I’ve also been looking at love quotes from literature to go in the room. Something like “You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how” from Gone With The Wind.

Or maybe some Shakespeare, like “Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love” from Hamlet?

Or from my favorite play, Much Ado About Nothing, comes “I do love nothing in the world so well as you – is not that strange?” which, given how much we use “weird” as an term of endearment, would be kind of hilariously appropriate.

Or we could be really geeky and post “Do I love you? My god, if your love were a grain of sand, mine would be a universe of beaches” from The Princess Bride.

Well, that’s eleven possibilities. I’ll have to play around with art now, and make something I like to put up on the wall! I’m still waiting to find the right shelf for the space. I really want to post pictures, but it’s not done yet!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is the First Ten Books I’ve Reviewed, so it’s time to go deep into my archives! There is a linky on her page to find everyone who is participating this week.

I kicked off this blog waaaayyy back in October of 2013 with Brandon Sanderson’s Alloy of Law. We actually just had that book from the library again recently, because my husband never read it!

Three days later I reviewed John Green’s Looking For Alaska, which is still one of my favorite John Green books. (I’ve also reviewed Paper Towns and Turtles All The Way Down. I read four more of his books before I started the blog. I’ve also read his brother’s An Absolutely Remarkable Thing but never could put my thoughts on it together into a cohesive review. It was really good though! I love the Green brothers.)

After that comes my first multi-book review, of First Grave on the Right and Second Grave on the Left by Darynda Jones, an urban fantasy series.

My fourth review was The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch – originally written in German, it’s the first book in a series of mysteries and they’re fantastic. (It’s also currently free today on Amazon’s Kindle Store, as part of their World Book Day promotion. It’s totally worth grabbing!) I went on to review the next three books in the series later.

I was apparently doing a lot of joint reviews to begin with, because both of the next two reviews cover two books each – Fated and Cursed by Benedict Jacka and Femme and Kinsmen by Bill Pronzini. The first set is urban fantasy, the second set is a kind of nameless-detective mystery series.

Seventh is a children’s classic that my husband grew up loving and I had not read until starting the blog – Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. I’m glad I finally read it, I see why everyone loved it so, even if it didn’t have the same impact on adult me as it seems to have had on most kids.

My eighth review reminds me that I never did read more of this author’s work and I may have to rectify that! Dark Angels is a historical fiction novel that reminded me of Philippa Gregory. “But more vibrant” according to my review. And I love Philippa Gregory, soooo I need to look up more by Karleen Koen!

Ninth is another urban fantasy, Hellbent by Cherie Priest. Tenth is a steampunk romance called Her Sky Cowboy, by another author I need to look up more of, Beth Ciotta. There was at least one more book in the series published at the time I wrote the review, hopefully there’s more by now!

This was a great topic, and reminded me to go look at some authors I read years ago. I can’t wait to see everyone else’s posts!

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. She has a linky on her page for everyone participating in this week’s topic, Outrageous Things I’ve Done For The Love of Books!

I don’t actually think I’ve done too many outrageous things for the love of books. I mean, yes, I read over 200 books last year, in my goal of posting to the blog every single day, which was getting better at doing in the second half of the year. Is the fact that I have a book blog at all one of those outrageous things? I guess it could be. Other than that, hmmm.

Well, I have purposefully moved into houses with slightly too many rooms so that we could have a dedicated library. On that same note, I have moved literally over a ton of books. Repeatedly. On one move we had all the same size boxes; we weighed a few of them, averaged that, and then multiplied it by the number of book boxes. Come to think of it, trying to figure out how much our books weighed might qualify as a weird thing!

Some of those moves were from the west coast to the east coast (and east to west, and west to east again, yay military…) and on both of the west to east trips, I definitely scouted out locations of notable book stores to hit. (The east-to-west trip was my father and me while my husband was deployed, and Dad’s not a bibliophile like my husband and I are.) On that note, Half Price Books is an AMAZING book chain, and I wish we had one around here! Powell’s I have been to more than once, and is fantastic, and Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene, Oregon, is also awesome. *cough* where was I? Oh Right. Things I’ve done for the love of books.

I can’t actually think of anything else. So that’s – seven things I’ve done for the love of books. Maybe other people’s posts will remind me of more!