Top Ten Authors I’ve Read The Most Books From

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish!

So I haven’t done one of these in a LONG time, but since the theme worked so well into the direction I’m turning the blog in (i.e., promoting what I love, leaving the critical reviewing behind), I just had to do it. So, here we go (in no particular order)!

1. Tamora Pierce

This woman was the hero of my childhood. She was the hero of my tweens. She is the hero of my twenties. I got to learn from her for two summers in a row in high school–and THEN she came to my college freshman year–and the starry eyed wonder of her has never left me. Not to mention the fact that she has written more books than I actually know how to count and I have read them ALL.

2. Clive Cussler

There are about 20+ books in his Dirk Pitt series, PLUS however many are in the Kurt Austin adventures. He’s got a few other series now, but I’m a traditionalist and I’ve only ever read through these two favorites of mine.

3. Meg Cabot

Didn’t every girl go through this phase? I’m not just talking Princess Diaries here, either. I read her stand-alones, her All-American Girl series … everything. If Meg Cabot write it, I had to have it.

4. Philippa Gregory

I will forever be cranky about the historical leaps that she took in The Other Boleyn Girl especially, but that doesn’t stop me from lapping up every single book she writes on Tudor England. I think the only books by her that I haven’t read was that one non-Royal series she did and–strangely–her YA series. The first book of which I have lying around here … somewhere.

5. Richelle Mead

Richelle is another one of those authors that has written more books than I know how to count, but I haven’t actually read them ALL. I’m deeply obsessed with her 12 Vampire Academy and Bloodlines books but I have also read part of her Gameboard of the Gods series. I don’t know what I’ll do without more VA goodness, but she’s got me hooked enough on her to keep going with whatever she writes.

6. Cassandra Clare

Did you guys miss the time that I drove 5 hours one way mostly to see Cassie? Because I did that. I have not only read everything she’s ever written, but also own it. (Except for that middle grade series she’s doing. I’m scared of middle grade.) She’s one of my favorite authors of all time right now, and I don’t see that changing in the foreseeable future.

7. Eva Ibbotson

Did anyone else read these books as a kid? I couldn’t stop. Sometime during my childhood, the publisher did a re-release of a bunch of her stuff and I bought all of it. It’s just so much … fun. Romantic, magical fun.

8. Simone Elkeles

I read Perfect Chemistry by Simone and I was just hooked. I went back and read all the stuff I’d missed beforehand, and then the two books that followed Perfect Chemistry. I even started her new series before my love of contemporary YA romance phased out. I still love these books to death, though.

9. Rachel Hawkins

Hex Hall was absolute perfection. When her Rebel Belle series started, I wasn’t so sure I could do it. But no. I’m in love with Rachel forever and always.

10. Kiersten White

Sometimes I forget just how MUCH STUFF Kiersten has done. Her Paranormalcy series was beautiful, of course, but then there was her Egyptian God based book Chaos of Stars–which I just reread–and her Mind Games series. All of which I own, of course!

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Top Ten Books That Will Be In My Beach Bag This Summer

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish!

Hahaha, oh boy this list could be a long one. Hahaha. Hooey. Okay. Let’s try and keep this to ten, shall we?

Top Ten Books About Friendship

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish!

So something I just discovered is that there are a lot of books that just have generic friendships that I was meh about. However, there were also some books that had a bunch of GREAT friendships that made me swoon over their beautiful friendship-ness. Here the top ten of those are!

Hello Summer, Hello Blogosphere!

Well, well, what do we have here? A blog I haven’t touched since February? Oh man, that’s so sad. Apologies, guys. If I ever said things were crazy before, understand that this semester reached a whole new level. To put it plainly, I loaded up on 21 credits, three jobs and an internship and life just went bonkers the whole way. I was lucky I was getting my school work done, let alone anything else.

But lo and behold, I made it to summer. And lo and behold, I’m revamping the blog. Like the new look? Bibliomancy for Beginners is going to start up again in a week or so, and I’m actually going to be able to read. Back in January, I said that I wanted to play catch up with my have-but-need-to-read list, and I still want to do that. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Bibliomancy for Beginners will be happening every week. That’s for sure. I’m going to try to get back into Top Ten Tuesday and Waiting on Wednesday, at the very least. ARC reviews will be few and fair between, because I have too many that I never read as I promised and that’s just not fair.

It WILL be a truncated summer, because I’m leaving for my semester abroad in early August. But that’s a while away. For now, I’m just going to start reading.

Thanks for sticking around, guys. My plan is to many it worth your while!

Top Ten Books That Will Make You Swoon

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by the Broke and the Bookish!

Alright, folks, guess I got the Valentines themed one. This is amusing, because one blogger on this site is bitter about Valentines this year and one is not and GUESS WHO’S DOING THIS LIST! But no, actually, this list is still going to be really hard to put together. Gosh. Uh. Well, here’s some in no particular order!

Top Ten Books That Will Make You (Or At Least Me) Cry

Top Ten Tuesday is a feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

So, it’s actually really hard for books to make me cry.  And honestly, often I don’t read the kind of book that does.  I have to be in a very specific mood to intentionally put myself in the way of a thing that will make me THAT miserable.  So this is a very specific list of books that have made ME cry, instead of the more general ‘you’ mentioned in the meme.

1.  Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein: seriously, how do you NOT cry when reading this book?  Verity is so beautiful and so brave and Maddie is so stubborn and courageous and FRIENDSHIP and TRAGEDY and EVERYTHING IS HARD OKAY.

2.  Rose Under Fire, also by Elizabeth Wein: in case Code Name Verity didn’t make me cry hard enough, the exact same author turned around and came out with a book that was even harder to read.

3.  The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver: one of these days I’m going to get around to talking about why this is NOT the middle-aged mom book that everyone thinks it is, and why it was perfect for my fifteen-year-old angst-ridden self, and why I love it so dearly.  But in the meantime, know that her descriptions of grief and mourning, especially the numb few days after a death, are spot-on, and made me cry.

4.  Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson: this book broke my heart the first time I read it and I ended up crying in the backseat on the way home from the bookstore.  (The bookstore was an hour away, I had a while to read it.)  Then I read it again, a few years later, when I’d been much closer to similarly horrible events, and my heart broke all over again.

5.  Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes: did they make you read this one in school?  Apparently they do that, but I read it on my own.  Fun fact: losing my mental facilities is one of the deepest, most poignant fears I have.  Yeah.

6.  Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater: okay, this one’s not quite fair, but I don’t read a lot of books that make me cry!  I read it after a breakup and the genuine sweetness of the romance in this book was beautiful and hopeful and incredibly hard to take.

7.  Linger, by Maggie Stiefvater: this one IS fair.  There is a scene in this book in which Grace is sick–maybe dying–and her parents, because they don’t like or trust her boyfriend, won’t let him see her.  Hospitals have a deep sort of horror for me–I’ve spent too much time in them, not as a patient but as a loved one–and the fear of not being able to be close to someone I love when they’re dying, to lose out on what could be their last moments, is something I absolutely would have had to face, if my parents hadn’t been so understanding about my desire to stay close.  Other people’s parents made it abundantly clear to me that they wouldn’t have let me stay, and that terrified and saddened me.  The utter powerlessness of a hospital is incredibly hard to take.

So yeah that scene made me cry.

8.  Last Night I Sang To The Monster, by Benjamin Alire Saenz: wow, it’s been forever since I’ve read this book.  I don’t know if it’s as good, or as sad, as I remember it being.  But it’s another book that had me crying on the way home from the bookstore.

9.  The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman: this one made me cry IN THE FIRST FREAKING CHAPTER.  SERIOUSLY THE THING WAS NOT OKAY.  …beautiful amazing book, though, please read it?

10.  The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: I reread this recently, after my boyfriend, who gets very literary when he’s tired, read some pieces of it to me in French.   I originally read it when I was extremely little, and although I didn’t remember much of it, the feeling of it stayed with me.

I have no idea why it made me cry, but it did.  Maybe it’s the clash of childhood and adulthood, maybe it’s the simple childlike sadness.  I know the themes of regret really do me in–and I know it wouldn’t hit me so hard if it didn’t carry associations from my very, very early days of reading, when I was too little to have a barrier between my feelings and the page.  But it’s as beautiful as I remember it being, more like a poem, really, than a story.

Top Ten Characters I’d NEVER Want To Trade Places With

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and The Bookish!

So, even though I do read a lot of stuff with different worlds, I found that most of my answers for the top 10 worlds I’d never want to live in depended a lot on who I would be in that world. Given that, I decided to go with the second topic to make things a little easier on myself. So. Here we go!

Top Ten Things On My (YA Fantasy) Reading Wishlist

Top Ten Tuesday is a feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Fair warning: I am going to rant about villains at the end of this.  Other fair warning: this list is mostly focused on the realm of YA fantasy, because that’s the genre I’m best-versed in!

1.  More epic fantasy in YA.  And I DON’T mean the incredibly cliched stuff.  Was Sabriel cool?  Sabriel was cool.

2.  More nonwhite protagonists.  Or nonbeautiful ones.  Or non-heteronormative ones.  Or…yeah, you get the idea.

3. More fantasy based in places other than Medieval Europe. Nonwestern history is cool too!

4.  More positive portrayals of a variety of different female roles (not just the utterly kickass heroine with a sword in each hand and a knife in her teeth or the passive love interest type!)

5.  More long, gorgeous, ridiculously well-crafted books in YA. A lot of the time this genre moves extremely quickly, but there is something to be said for the beauty of an 800-page hardcover.

6.  More sensitive, sweet guys who aren’t secret badasses, and romances that develop based on mutual compatibility and connection, not hotness.  I was actually talking with my boyfriend (who is not a secret badass, although he is a scientist so maybe that counts?) about this one recently–how love interest guys are almost never quiet and thoughtful and emotional.  They’re confident and badass and sexy, and if they’re not, they’re hiding something.  Which I think is a shame, because other guys are awesome too!  And sweet, thoughtful types have a lot more long-term, happy relationship potential than guys who have killed six people with their bare hands, y’know?

7. More awesome platonic relationships that are not ever sexual.

8.  More functional, supportive parents in good relationships. Seriously, they all suck in YA.  Well, not all of them, some of them are okay, but most of them suck.  (I’m aware that a lot of real parents suck.  But it’s important to note that not all of them do!)

9.  SURPRISE ME. It’s really hard to surprise me. When I am surprised, I’m usually really happy about it, and I am willing to overlook about ten other kinds of errors because someone generally threw a twist at me that I didn’t expect.

10.  And the one I would write an essay about if I didn’t restrain myself: MORE PEOPLE WHO AREN’T EVIL BUT ARE DOING BAD THINGS AND AREN’T EXCUSED FROM THEIR ACTIONS.  I didn’t realize how much I wanted this until I read an example recently.  I want characters who have good potential but also some fatal flaws, and make a lot of bad decisions or fall in with the wrong people, and end up doing inexcusable things.  I want antagonists who have good friends that care about them and try to help them.  And I don’t want the redemption story.  I want the wrongness of their actions to be acknowledged.  I don’t want them let off the hook.  I want the story to own up to what they did, and follow that through.

There aren’t a lot of genuine monsters in the real world, but there are a whole lot of normal people who ended up doing bad things because of their surroundings.  Because they were desperate, or they wanted to fit in, or no one ever taught them about compassion.  If we think all bad people are monsters, then when someone who obviously ISN’T a monster does something horrible, we can’t reconcile it.  I want a story that can simultaneously acknowledge the lack of inherent evil, the potential for not-terribleness, and the horror of someone’s actions.

…-end accidental rant-

Top Ten 2014 Debuts I’m Excited For

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish!

Alright, now this is an odd list because my resolution to myself this year is to catch up on the books I already have, not the books I want to buy. However, this list of books is just too good to NOT look forward to! (Although, I’ll be honest, I got most of these off this list on Goodreads because I’ve been trying to be SO GOOD about not looking for new books…)

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Goals for 2014

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by the Broke and the Bookish!

I actually don’t normally think in terms of New Years resolutions, unless it’s really boring things (I need to eat better!) or really big things (I need to be more social!).  But now that you mention it, Top Ten Tuesday, I do have a few things I should probably be doing…and because I’m bad at resolutions, I’m including my writing goals too!  (Actually, you can blame writing for how rushed this post is.  I’m editing a story to submit to the Dells, and it’s sucking out my soul.)