Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s topic is Books that Lived Up to the Hype. I have reviewed almost all of these; links to the reviews are under the cover images!
The Astonishing Color of After
The Summer of Jordi Perez (and the Best Burger in Los Angeles)
The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue
So last week I didn’t realize the topic had changed until I was linking my post up to the That Artsy Reader Girl’s blog, so when most people were doing The Best of 2018 so far, I had done a throwback to an earlier topic, being my favorite bookish sites and organizations. (I failed to realize a very similar topic is on the schedule for August, so I might be posting MORE blogs and sites in August!) This week is supposed to be my top ten short stories and novellas, but I really don’t read many short stories! So I’m doing last week’s topic a week late instead. I’ve linked to my review of each book, as well.
In no particular order:
The Astonishing Color of After
Queens of Geek
Circe
Tolstoy and the Purple Chair
Little Bee
The Book of Essie
Autoboyography
City of Brass
Spinning Silver
Rebel of the Sands Trilogy
I’ve had a hectic week, and never had a chance to go look at what everyone else was posting for their favorite books of the year so far, so I’ll probably do that today!
Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl – you find a list of all the blogs participating on her page! This week’s topic was a Throwback Freebie to any topic they’ve previously done that I haven’t participated in. At some point in the last week it was changed to the best books you’ve read this year, but I’ve been busy and didn’t discover that until today, so this is what you get! After browsing the list, I saw “Favorite Bookish Sites, Groups, and Apps” and knew I’d found my topic. I spend a LOT of time online, and there are some sites and apps that take up most of my time. I’m going to move past the obvious ones like Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads, and list some you might not actually know about.
First up is Litsy. Litsy is an app-only social network; it’s described as the love child of Goodreads and Instagram, and that’s pretty appropriate. You post pictures with captions, like Instagram, but you MUST tag a book on your post. It keeps the app book-centered instead of straying to other topics. It’s also one of the most positive online communities I’ve had the pleasure of being part of. It was recently bought by the owners of Library Thing, but hasn’t seemed to change much except behind the scenes coding and server migrations to help it work better. They do have some ideas, but so far they’ve been very good about listening to consumer feedback about what we do and don’t want. Because Litsy is very good as it is! It’s available for both Android and iPhone, though the iPhone version has more features. (That’s something Library Thing is working on correcting.)
RivetedLit, by SimonTeen, is a site I was linked to last month, by the author of Autoboyography. She posted it on Twitter, because her book was free to read on the platform through the end of June. So was Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, so I got to read both. They have a selection of extended excerpts and full YA books available every month, it seems. This month their full book options are The Summer I Turned Pretty, The Museum of Heartbreak, and Alex, Approximately. I plan to read at least that last one.
Smashbomb is one of the sites I cross-post my reviews to. It’s not strictly a bookish site, it’s a review site, but books are one of their biggest categories. You can also review Music, Movies, Apps, Podcasts, Tabletop Games, Tech, TV, and Video Games. Smashbomb is still fairly new; it launched early 2017. They don’t have all possible books in their database, but it’s fairly easy to add them yourself if they’re not there yet. I like seeing what other people have said about the book I’m reviewing, and I just like the way the site is set up.
Book Riot. Oh, Book Riot. I absolutely love Book Riot, for their newsletters (separated out by genre!), bookish news columns, columns about topics like “100 books you must read about <topic>” and giveaways. I won my first one last month! Some examples of recent articles are “10 Middle Grade Books About the Pioneer Era (That Aren’t Little House on the Praire)”, “Motherhood, Meet Dystopian Fiction (I Wish You Had Never Met IRL)”, “150+ Upcoming YA Books For Your July-September 2018 Radar,” “6 Transgender Novels by Trans Writers,” “Police Officers Challenge Books on a South Carolina Summer Reading List.” As you can see, they hit all kinds of topics, and they’re irreverent, fun, and topical. I really, really love Book Riot.
Bookstr is similar to Book Riot, with articles, bookish news, and Giveaways. They also have fun Bookish Quizzes, like “Do You Know These Famous Authors’ First Languages?” and “What Your Book Storage Habits Say About You.” I think the biggest difference is that Book Riot organizes by genre – their headings at the top of the page are Children’s, Comics, Mystery/Thriller, Romance, etc – while Bookstr organizes by type of content. Lists, Galleries, Quizzes, Articles, Videos, Giveaways. Both sites have lots of amazing content, though.
Book of the Month is another one of my favorite bookish sites. It’s a subscription box, and at the beginning of every month they pick six hardcover books for you to pick one of. It’s $15 a month, and you can pick additional books for $10 each. For hardcovers, that’s a steal! You usually get them a few days to a few weeks before their release date, and they’re special Book of the Month editions. I love this box so much. So far I’ve received The Astonishing Color of After, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (which I haven’t read yet!), The Book of Essie, When Katie Met Cassidy, The Kiss Quotient, and Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. (The latter being my July book.) If you don’t like any of the books being offered, you can simply skip a month and they won’t charge you. (I skipped May.) If you use my link, you’ll get an extra book free your first month. (And I’ll get an extra book free for referring you!
The Bi Writers Association is one of my favorite organizations – they do the Bisexual Book Awards every year, and I’m always interested in diverse reads! My husband and a lot of my friends are bisexual, so I have an interest in that flavor of the rainbow in particular. Reading through their past winners list made my To-Read list EXPLODE, so, fair warning on that.
Some bookish Twitter accounts that I LOVE:
We Need Diverse Books
LGBTQReads
YA Pride (dedicated to LGBTQIA+ YA Lit)
Micro SF/F stories (Tweet-sized stories)
Author Twitters:
Franchesca Ramsey (Author of Well, That Escalated Quickly, which is sitting on my desk waiting to be read)
Ursula Vernon
S. A. Chakraborty (Author of City of Brass)
Rebecca Roanhorse (Author of Trail of Lightning, which I really, REALLY need to get my hands on)
Heidi Heilig (Author of For a Muse of Fire, upcoming)
Anna-Marie McLemore (Author of Wild Beauty and Blanca & Roja)
Meghan Maclean Weir (Author of The Book of Essie)
A few of my favorite Blogs:
The Indextrious Reader, home of the Read Canadian Challenge
Novels and Nonfiction
Just One More Pa(i)ge
Books, Books, and More Books!
A collection of other bookish sites, groups, and apps that I find interesting:
Library Thing I’ve only just started using, so haven’t formed much of an opinion on yet. Goodreads and Instagram, of course. Libby by Overdrive is an app for borrowing ebooks on your phone. I haven’t used it much because I’d prefer to read on my Kindle. I use my library website all the time, but I doubt that would be helpful to you!
I’m always on the lookout for more online bookishness, did I miss anything obvious? What are your favorites?
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, which is Independence Day here in the States. There will be red, white, and blue stuff everywhere, and flags, and fireworks. So today’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is following that theme! I will warn you, though, this is probably going to wind up being more than ten!
Some of these I’ve reviewed in the past:
Terrier
Cruel Beauty
Island of Exiles
Red Clocks
The Odyssey
On Tyranny
Fire and Fury
Notorious RBG
Reign of the Fallen
Dividing Eden
The Diabolic
Seriously… I’m Kidding
Love, Hate, and Other Filters
First Grave on the Right
A Natural History of Dragons
The Golem and the Jinni
An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth
Never Never
Radio Silence
An American Family
Wonder Woman: Warbringer
Star Wars: Ahsoka
Born A Crime
To Kill A Kingdom
Autoboyography
And one more, just because it’s so appropriate….
I have the “Teacher’s Edition” and it’s excellent.
Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl – you find a list of all the blogs participating on her page!
This week’s topic is series you’ve given up on ever finishing.
The first series I’ve given up on is Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series. Book #26 comes out this August – TWENTY-SIX. I’ve read eighteen. Even though they seem to be bending back towards what they were like in the beginning – mystery crime novels with supernaturals – I’m just done. The middle of the series was solidly werewolf and vampire porn, which I’m not exactly mad about, but it wasn’t what I expected from the series, so it felt like a bit of a bait-and-switch.
Similarly, I’ve also given up on Laurell K. Hamilton’s other series, the Meredith Gentry series. There’s only nine books in that series, and it appears that I’ve read the first eight, so perhaps I should revisit that just to finish the last book. It was published in 2014, so maybe that’s the end of the series? I don’t know.
This one’s hard for me to admit, but I think I’m giving up on The Dresden Files. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great series and I really love Jim Butcher’s writing. But to start that series again I’d need to re-read all of it, because everything that happens feeds into the rest of the story. I enjoy plotlines like that, but I’ve forgotten so many details that I can’t just pick up where I left off with that series, I wouldn’t understand what was going on. I’ve read the first – six or seven, I think. He’s up to fifteen now. I have too much other stuff to read.
I’ve stopped reading most of Christine Feehan’s series – I’d still like to keep up on the Leopards series, as that was always my favorite. But the Carpathians and the Ghostwalkers and Sea Haven – I just don’t have time.
Similarly, Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunters series. I don’t even know how many books it’s up to now – I own a bunch. (I own a lot of Feehan, too.) But it’s time to move on from that world.
Jaqueline Carey’s Kushiel series. I adored the first trilogy, but couldn’t get past the first book of the second trilogy.
Barb and J.C. Hendee’s Noble Dead saga intrigued me at first – I own the first 4 or 5 – but they just got boring. And they’re up to I don’t know how many now, but they’re divided by phases, and I saw “Series 3 Book 2” and I’m just done.
For a throwback, I’m gonna toss in The Black Stallion series. A lot of people never realized this was a series, but it was. The Island Stallion and The Black Stallion And Flame were two of my favorites, but there was also The Black Stallion’s Blood Bay Colt and The Black Stallion And The Girl and so many others. There are at least twenty Black Stallion books written by Walter Farley between 1941 and 1983, and more written by his son after Walter died. I grew up on these books.
Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series was great to start, but, like so many of these ultra long series, just started to bore me eventually. I still like Novik – Uprooted was AMAZING and I’m really looking forward to Spinning Silver.
Another series I’ve given up on is the Buffy comic series. I’ve seen all the TV shows, and I own the first season or two of comic books, but I stopped subscribing at one point and never kept up with them after that.
Honorable Mentions – These are two that I’ve given up hope on, not out of not wanting to finish them, but we’ve been waiting on the next book on each of them FOR YEEEEAAARRS and I’m starting to doubt we’ll ever GET a next book. George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, and Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles.
Happy Tuesday! The Top Ten Theme this week is “books to read at the pool or beach, or your summer TBR list.” Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and she’ll have links to a bunch of other blogs participating in the Top Ten!
Since I have no idea what kind of books other people want to read at the pool or beach, and I hate being out in the sun and heat and humidity, I’m just going with ten books I’d like to read this summer.
The Pisces by Melissa Broder – I’ve heard a lot about this book, and y’all know I love my mermaids, even if they’re predatory instead of romantic, but this is a magical realism romance about a merman. I am intrigued.
The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang stars an AS main character and is written by an autistic author, so this should be added to my autism reading list. I’m always interested in minority representation in my reading, especially when they’re autistic or bisexual, as those hit close to home for me. It came out June 5th, and was actually an option for my Book of the Month subscription this month! So I read it this past weekend, and my review went up yesterday!
Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li is set in a Chinese restaurant in Rockville, MD, which is VERY local to me! I always enjoy reading books set in the surrounding areas. It releases today!
America for Beginners by Leah Franqui looks intriguing, about an Indian woman on a road trip across America, looking for the gay son her late husband told her had died. It comes out July 24th.
A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua involves a Chinese woman secreted into the US so the son she’s pregnant with will have citizenship – but then something happens and she runs away from her son’s married father before she gives birth. Reproductive freedom and immigration issues. I’m in. On August 14th, anyway!
I don’t normally go for thrillers, but Jessica Knoll’s The Favorite Sister, which came out in May, seems interesting. It’s about the bonds of sisterhood and women tearing each other down, which is something we discussed at the Barnes & Noble book club when we read The Female Persuasion.
I might be interested in The Summer Wives, by Beatriz Williams. It doesn’t quite look like my normal kind of book, but the premise looks thought-provoking.
Always Never Yours by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka might remind me of high school, but could be fun. It came out in May.
Another thriller on my list is The Great Zoo of China. (I guess summer’s long days and short nights are a good time for thrillers?) It bills itself as a sort of Chinese Jurassic Park (which gave me nightmares when I was a kid!) but with dragons. And of course dragons make all the difference! It’s an older book; it came out in 2015.
The last book on my summer reading list, though I have no doubt I’ll be reading more books this summer than these ten, is Franchesca Ramsey‘s Well, That Escalated Quickly. Ramsey is a Youtuber who went unexpectedly viral and decided to use her platform to work for social justice. I’ve heard her book is pretty funny, so I thought it might keep me thinking about politics and the state of the world while still letting me step back from the outrage fatigue.
So, among others, that’s what I’m planning to read this summer. What are you reading?
Resident Mermaid since May 2019
The database for everyone who wants to read more New Adult but doesn't know where to start.
Contemporary Literature, book clubs, and book reviews
Find yourself in a great book!
Book reviews, recommendation posts, readathons and lots more bookish content!
YA Books Blog, Book Recommendations, Book Blogging Tips
My Life And Everything Within It
Book Reviews For Bibliophiles
Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Reviews
Home to SFF Author Nicole Evans
Pharmacy Tech by day, Fangirl by night
Life through the eyes of an autistic
Writings of An Imperfect Angel
Devouring libraries one book at a time
wrapped up in words and worlds
Queering up your shelf, one rec at a time!
too many feels. not enough words.
Your Friendly Fantasy-Themed Book Blog - Book Reviews, Recommendations, and More
an archived young adult book blog
Tas talks books
Speculative fiction book reviews and more!
Swimming Through Pages
Diary of a Backstage Bookworm
Book reviews and recommendations
If It's Not A Rant, It's A Rave
she is sunflowers & thunderstorms
What should I read next? A blog of book reviews and recommendations - with no spoilers!
Neurodivergent literature and its craft
Even if you're little you can do a lot
Poetry * Mythology * Podcast
Goddess In The Stacks 