top ten tuesday – Books For Becca

Top Ten Tuesday – What Makes Me Pick Up A Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. There is a new topic each Tuesday, so check out her blog for information and weekly prompts!

1. Dragons

I realised recently that I just really really wanted to read a book about/including dragons because it was the main reason I tried Game of Thrones but there’s too much other stuff in that (violence, rape, just generally being awful to women) and not enough dragons.

2. Horror Movie tropes

I’m specifically thinking of Riley Sager’s Final Girls here because the horror movie tropes she used in that and appears to use in her other books are what made me check it out. Directly using a movie trope like final girls or slasher plots which are some of my favourite movie things ever really intrigued me and I’m interested to see if I can find more like that.

3. Familiar settings

Do you ever read a book and it mentions a place and you go I KNOW THAT PLACE THATS MY PLACE! I love that feeling. For me this happened specifically with The Possession of Mr Cave by Matt Haig and James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes by James Acaster (not fiction but very enjoyable).

4. Dystopia

I was a victim of the YA Dystopia boom. I still find that dystopian fiction is one of the best genres and it makes me so happy to read even after spending a year on my dissertation on totalitarianism and rebellion in dystopian literature, something that can really kill your love of a genre. Some of my favourites are Anthem by Ayn Rand (I know but Anthem is perfection, separate the artist for the sake of the art on this one), Vox by Christina Dalcher and The Bees by Laline Paull.

5. BookTube

BookTube made me get so many books based on a few recommendations and try new genres. One of these books is Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I started watching more BookTube in recent months and I’ve added so much to my TBR (eventually) list. Not quite picking up the books yet but I’m finding more to read there!

6. Classics pressure

I’ve studied literature, I’ve been surrounded by book nerds…of course I’ve caved in to peer pressure or the expectation that you’ve read certain classics. I do this knowing full well that I’m not interested in the plot but that I’m reading it because I’m meant to have read it.

7. Vampires

Twilight happened to me as a teenager. I’m still a sucker for vampires.

8. GREEK/ROMAN MYTHOLOGY

OH MY GOODNESS CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN BOOKS YES. Adaptations, retellings, straight up boring non-fiction, whatever it is I’m ready and here for it. Circe, The Silence of the Girls, literally anything.

9. Specific non-fiction about things I know very little about

The evolution of the octopus and cephalopods, the Philadelphia chromosome, the current state of the English Legal System. I love it.

10. Women solving crimes

This might be a side effect of watching Murder She Wrote with my grandma but women solving crimes just feels nice and right and I enjoy it.

Top Ten Tuesday: Christmas Edition!!

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. You can find the list of prompts/challenges here if you want to check it out 🙂

Merry Christmas one and all!! This week the prompt is: Books I Hope I Find Under My Christmas Tree This Morning!

1. I’m starting with a book that I do know I’ll be opening, this is Educated by Tara Westover. I have been seeing this book EVERYWHERE and was listening to an episode of Reading Glasses where the ladies were talking to a bookseller and she mentioned that they’re expecting this to be a popular gift this year. I didn’t recognise it when I saw it in the shop because it was the UK paperback and I hadn’t seen that cover anywhere (a photograph rather than the pencil graphic). Anyway! Super excited to read this!

2. Another one we picked out while shopping the other day was The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada. This is a Japanese science fiction novel about an elderly man in a future Japan that has been cut off after a natural disaster and his great grandson’s generation that may not survive. I want to read more translated fiction in 2019 and want to read more broadly which is why I’m doing the Read Harder challenge as well. This sounds great, I love a bit of dystopia/speculative fiction so this is right up my alley.

3. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker because my auntie got it for my birthday and I haven’t seen her yet but I will at Christmas and I will make it the first book I read in 2019.

(The rest of this post will be a wish list now, I’m not expecting any other books tbh)

4. If I could with for an unreleased book to magically make its way under my tree, it would be Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston which is a New Adult contemporary about the First Son of America falling in love with the Prince of Wales (not Charles) and it sounds like fun and it looks really good and early reviews have raved about it – BRING ON THIS JUNE RELEASE!!

5. This one shows how boring I am. The Philadelphia Chromosome by Jessica Wapner. This is a book about the discovery and analysis of the Philadelphia chromosome which is mutated in patients with Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia and how this has affected cancer research since its discovery. I work in haematology and have spent a lot of time dealing with CML patients and data, this really sounds interesting.

6. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green. Everyone had a favourite vlogbrother didn’t they? Hank’s videos were always my favourites when I watched their channel and now he’s written a novel!

7. Abbi Jacobsen released I Might Regret This, her collection of essays and writing from her cross-country road trip and I. Want. To. Read. It.

8. The sequel to Caraval, Legendary by Stephanie Garber because the third is due to come out soon and I wanted to really get into this trilogy but haven’t picked up the second book which makes no sense.

9. Any Agatha Christie book. Since reading The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (review here) and seeing him speak at Waterstones with Laura Purcell, I really wanted to try a good old intricate crime novel and she’s the best.

10. Speaking of seven Evelyn’s. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins-Reid because ev.er.y.one. has been raving about it and it sounds like a great book with substance and that’s what all books need to be. Well not all. But I’d like to read this one.

Top Ten Tuesday! Longest Books!

This week the topic for Top Ten Tuesday is………..the longest books that you’ve read! Since I logged a few of my uni textbooks on Goodreads I discounted those and just went for novels or things I wanted to read (no Norton anthologies), so, on with the list!

1. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix/Deathly Hallows/Goblet of Fire – I’m grouping these all together for obvious reasons. I’m a big fan of Harry Potter and I think I’ve written about it before on here. I didn’t read the books until I was about 15, because why not wait until you’re doing your GCSE’s to read a big series that include three of the biggest non-academic page counts on my Goodreads shelf? Of these three, the Goblet of Fire is my favourite, Order of the Phoenix and then Deathly Hallows – in that order for Fred/Hermione related content if you squint.

2.The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen – This fucking book. 653 pages and no excuse. It could have been 200 for all the worthwhile content it had in it. If you like books about middle aged middle class white men who ramble on about nothing of substance, I’ve got a doorstop for you right here. Bain of my life for 6 weeks here since we had to do a presentation on it then I used it for an essay as well.

3.The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen – I feel a bit weird about including this since I listened to an audiobook but it’s 643 pages and it’s 14 and a half hours on audiobook (the Invasion of the Tearling was over 17 hours). I only recently read this and found it fascinating and really engaging, in giving myself a bit of a break before moving onto the third book in the trilogy though, not too long as I don’t want to forget everything, I just want to try something else first.

4.The Fifth Wave by Rick Yancey – this was around the time I stopped posting as much on YouTube and started actually working full time while studying full time so I wasn’t reading as much after this. The summer after graduating undergrad was quite peaceful and I was enjoying reading and catching up on things while job hunting and panicking every day. Dystopia was still huge and I LOVED IT and as a result, loved this book but then never carried on with the series! Maybe one day!

5.Capital by John Lanchester– a uni book about an anonymous artist and the financial crisis, it was for uni and I didn’t like it very much.

6.The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan – this was the book that showed me that I might have outgrown Rick Riordan books and that devastated me.

7.Inkheart by Cornelia Fünke – I still haven’t seen the film version of this even though I really wanted to. I totally loved this whole series when I read it but I think I donated them a long time ago.

8.The Odyssey by Homer – I loved this. I studied Classics at A Level and we spent so long reading this. The stories from this have been retold recently in books like The Penelopiad or Circe which I’ve also really loved and written about here (Circe) and here (Penelopiad).

9.Bitter Blood by Rachel Caine – couldn’t tell you a thing about this instalment of the Morganville Vampires series other than I probably enjoyed it and read it quickly.

10.Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L.James – this was for university, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. It wasn’t actually that bad to read, mainly because of how ridiculous it is because it’s completely absurd. It was a fun it of crap to read because even if you write an essay about it (which I did) you still don’t have to think too much about it, there’s not much going on under the surface (don’t tell my lecturers that). If you read it seriously then you’ve got to be prepared to read a depiction of a romanticised abusive relationship and please please please no justifications of anyone’s behaviour in that book. Everyone is dumb in it. I also posted a review that you can read here.

So those are my longest books! I liked most of them but some were HARD work with NO PAY OFF (thank you, Franzen).

Top Ten Tuesday! Authors You’d Love To Meet!

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is ‘Authors You’d Like To Meet’ and given that I’m anxious enough as it is and the author events I’ve been to (even ones that I’ve WORKED at to a certain extent) made me so nervous at the thought of TALKING to them…this is more a list of authors I admire and would like to meet if I knew what to say 😊

1. Matt Haig – I went to an event for Notes On A Nervous Planet a couple of months ago and it was such a lovely event and (mostly) everyone was very vulnerable with sharing their stories (I say mostly because someone behind me whispered that someone else that was asking a question overdosed ‘because she’s stupid’ – this made me so mad it ruined the night a bit for me, why go to an event about something so serious without any empathy or sympathy for others?).

2. Margaret Atwood – I adore her books and I’m very grateful that her works have introduced me to my favourite genre of fiction and popularised it so that people keep writing it (I know she’s not the sole reason for this obviously). Really this is because she seems fun. At the Ilkley Literature Festival opening talk a couple of years ago, someone was making shadow puppets on the big screen then they found her in front of the projector looking cheeky. Love her.

3. Grady Hendrix – His books are so weird and I want to meet the person who thought them up. Also his Goodreads photo is a mirror selfie. Please read Horrorstor if you want to feel uncomfortable in IKEA for the rest of your life.

4. J.K.Rowling – Just to ask her to please leave it alone now.

5. Anne Fine – She was the first author that made me cry. I was 8 years old reading Madame Doubtfire and it was TOO MUCH and TOO RELATABLE (I’m not a divorced father dressing as the nanny but I am a child of divorce and I related to the kids a bit too much).

6. Madeline Miller – To thank her. I’ve gushed quite a bit about her work on here and still haven’t read The Song of Achilles yet but it’s on my kindle. She’s been writing from discarded female perspectives in classical mythology and I’m HERE. FOR. IT.

7. Emily St. John Mandel – Station Eleven is fantastic and her other works are beautifully written (it won the Arthur C Clarke award and ACTUALLY DESERVED IT – previous winners include the worst book I’ve ever had the misfortune to have read), she seems really lovely as well.

8. Stephanie Meyer – Can you tell I’m struggling at the end of this list? For teenage me, I’d like to meet Stephanie Meyer. I also want to ask how and why and what on earth the gender-swappedTwilight was about.

9. Rachel Caine – Another one for teenage vampire-fiction obsessed me. The Morganville Vampires series is one that I really enjoyed and can still look back at fondly (for the most part).

10. Erika Johansen – Because she’s who I’m reading at the moment. Right now I’m listening to The Invasion of the Tearling on audiobook and I’m really enjoying it although I’m also massively confused with the jumps through time and all of it is dystopian and also fantasy when I thought I was just signing up for a series about a Queen! I just want to meet her for a bit of ‘Tell me! No don’t tell me!’

You can find me on social media @beccaggray on Twitter, Goodreads and Instagram 😍

Top Ten Tuesday: Bingeworthy Tv Shows/Amazing Movies

I’m aware that it’s Wednesday (my dudes), but I liked the tag and want to get back into posting it! As I write this, I’m listening to the audiobook of Circe by Madeleine Miller and I can’t express right now how much I’m enjoying it. I’ll post a full review once I’ve finished it but I love Classical mythology and did my Masters dissertation on Miller’s short story Galatea and have The Song of Achilles on my TBR and my kindle waiting for me but Circe has been taunting me from bookshop windows and when I saw this on my library app I couldn’t resist.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine – My go to, my love, my favourite. Nothing really needs to be said about this show which is why I put it first. I go back to this show again and again and the same jokes make me laugh every time. Captain Raymond Holt is my hero.
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – Similar to B99 but all the people in this are horrible. Sometimes when I’m having a bad day, I just have to watch ‘The World Series Defence’ (S5 Ep6) and it fixes things for a bit (please watch it).
White Collar – This is the show I’m currently watching from the start but I’ve never made it all the way to the end of the show (because of people – Mum – watching without me). I’m determined to make my way through it now because it’s actually finished and I want to see what happens to everyone, it’s a lovely show that’s centred around an art thief – what’s not to love? Anyway, I love things about heists or cons and this is a show FULL OF THAT so I love it.
Love Island – This one is not my fault, I swear. It’s quite nice to have a show that you don’t have to think about at all, it’s just drama and shenanigans and people copping off with each other in a villa while Iain Stirling cracks jokes.
Manhunt: Unabomber – This show is fantastic. I was speechless a few times while watching this and teared up a couple of times too. It follows the hunt for the Unabomber and has glimpses of his life alongside the FBI which makes you feel uncomfortably sympathetic towards a mass murdering criminal. Paul Bettany plays Kaczynski which I think is the main reason for that sympathy for him because he’s just amazing. I’d highly recommend this to anyone, it’s well worth watching and I hope that Netflix to more ‘Manhunt’ style shows.
Mindhunter – Because talking about Manhunt: Unabomber made me want to rewatch Mindhunter. This series has a few more cringey moments (at least I find them cringey) but the subject matter is so interesting. It centres around the creation of the FBI’s Behavioural Analysis Unit so if you’re a fan of Criminal Minds then I’d give this a go.
The Great British Bake Off – I’m British, this show unites our office and the whole hospital because when the new season started there was a Bake Off at both hospitals and there have been numerous email updates about it already. This is a low stakes, high stress baking competition about nice people making cakes and biscuits and it’s easy to get very invested in whether or not someone can get enough layers incorporated into their pastry dough. I was off sick from work a couple of weeks ago and went through two seasons of this show, it’s very VERY comforting.
University Challenge – Not typical binge material but I love this show. I like gameshows and this is my favourite one because most of it goes over my head and if I get a question right then I feel so proud of myself, even if it’s a round on Hamilton songs. It helps that they’re all on Youtube even if they shouldn’t be but it’s nice to have a quiz night at home even if it descends into arguments over ‘Can I have the starter for 10 even if I didn’t have the right King Henry?’
Get Shorty – Based on the film (that I haven’t seen) this is about Chris O’Dowd working as a Reno mob henchman trying to make it in Hollywood as a movie producer alongside Ray Romano. It’s really funny, not just because of the premise but Chris O’Dowd is just great and the scenes with his family are adorable which leads me into my next pick…
Moone Boy – Chris O’Dowd plays the imaginary friend of Martin Moone, a boy growing up in Ireland in the late 1980’s. It’s such a funny show and there are 3 seasons and it made me really miss my grandma (Irish) but in a nice way, not a sad way. There are a few cameos through the series including one from Paul Rudd? Anyway, it’s lovely and I didn’t watch it while it was on because I’m silly but now I’m less silly and I’d like to recommend you watch this show where a pet donkey gets abducted by aliens.

I hope you all accept my late offering to the TTTag, please please please let me know if I’m not the only one that binges University Challenge!

Top Ten Tuesday: Series I’ve Given Up On

This week’s prompt for Top Ten Tuesday is Series I’ve Given Up On, most of the ones that I’ve picked are series that I started when I was younger and can’t continue with anymore for various reasons. I might revisit some of these at some point because I really did enjoy reading them at the time but here is my list! Have you read/dropped any of these too?

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Harry Potter – J.K.Rowling. I’m starting with this to get it out of the way. I wasn’t on the Harry Potter wagon until I was 16, before that I enjoyed the films but I only really got into it when I tried reading them again around the time that the film for The Order of the Phoenix came out and started to love them. That being said, everything the J.K.Rowling has tried to add since the last book has been ignored by me. I don’t want The Cursed Child, or any of the screenplays, any of the additional ‘by the way, Dumbledore was gay even though I forgot to mention it in the books’, none of it. If it isn’t in the seven books in the main series, I don’t want it near my shelves.
Twilight – Stephanie Meyer. I’m digging deep with this list if you can’t tell. Similar to the Harry Potter reason to be honest but Meyer is less likely to annoy since she doesn’t seem prone to inventing backstories for characters in interviews. I didn’t read the Bree Tanner book or the gender-swapped anniversary Life After Death, I would maybe consider Midnight Sun at a push if it was ever released. Twilight was Harry Potter for me before Harry Potter became my Harry Potter, so I appreciate what it did for me in terms of making me into a reader of ANYTHING as it did when I was 14/15.
The Morganville Vampires – Rachel Caine. Back when it was all vampires all the time, Morganville was there for me. Recently I recommended this to a friend who loves vampire fiction and gothic and young adult because it’s the best mix of all three in a crazy series that, for me, went on for too long. I dropped out at book 10 but I think there are at least 15. The series was about Claire who was a genius that attended college in a town secretly (to students) overrun by vampires. Oliver Cromwell ran the coffee shop. It was crazy and enjoyable and I loved it but vampire series fatigue was real and I couldn’t continue.
Rick Riordan. This is a blanket one for the various series that Rick Riordan has written about Greek/Roman/Norse/Egyptian mythology. This one makes me feel sad and old. I loved the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, even though I was too old for it at the time, then I started Jason’s series and only got one or two in before I was much older than the target audience and it was just a bit difficult to read. I’d still recommend these books to people and think that they’re wonderful, they’re just not for me anymore because I am now an old woman.
The Wolves of Mercy Falls – Maggie Stiefvater. This one was unintentional. I didn’t know that Shiver was the first in a trilogy and then when I found out, I neglected to pick up the next one even though I really liked Shiver.
The Princess Diaries – Meg Cabot. I didn’t even realise there had been an 11th book in this series until Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s wedding. I felt that the 10th book tied up the series in a perfect way for my 16 year old self and I don’t really want to pick up a story that I finished happily 10 years ago.
Marked – PC and Kristen Cast. Another vampire series. This one was dropped because it just became ridiculous even for a teenage vampire series and I couldn’t bring myself to care about the plot.
Pretty Little Liars – Sara Shepard. Same reasons as above but no vampires. Just endless drama and actually, both series include inappropriate and stupid teacher-student relationships.
The Vampire Diaries – L.J.Smith. This is another one that makes me sad but only because of the drama behind the scenes of this series. I was initially a fan of the books when the series was being hyped up, then when it started I enjoyed both. Then I stopped watching the series but continued with the books because they went in different directions, the books were more magical with the snowglobe one and the hell dimension storyline. Then the rights to publish were taken away from the original author and the series was ghostwritten for a while. I’m not sure when this happened but when Elena went to college (Moonsong maybe?) I lost interest. L.J.Smith still writes her stories as Kindle books.
Gossip Girl – Cecily von Zeisegar. This is a perfect series of beach reads which is what I used it for one summer but unless you love the series, it’s a bit of a pain to keep up with. I’m not sure if the TV show stayed true to the books with regards to Gossip Girl’s identity though….

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Top Ten Tuesday: Books to Read By the Pool

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The prompt for Top Ten Tuesday this week is ‘Books to Read By the Pool/At the Beach’, BUT since I’m not going to be by a pool or a beach anytime soon I’ll use this prompt to think about my TBR for this summer 🙂

Circe – Madeline Miller: This is Madeline Miller’s latest release, based on Circe the Greek goddess and looks at her life and involvement in other Greek myths with appearances from all the top stars! I love Ancient mythology, I studied Classics at A Level and used a Madeline Miller short story based on Pygmalion (from Ovid’s Metamorphosis) for my Masters dissertation and so I really want to get to this soon since I keep seeing it in bookshops!
The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller: This is because when I did my dissertation on Miller’s book, I also got this one as it was recommended by a friend and it is still on my Kindle, lonely and unread so it’s time to rectify that.
The Psychology of Time Travel – Kate Mascarenhas: A time travel murder mystery. Yes please. I LOVED The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton so when I read the description for this, I knew that I needed to give this a whirl. Unlike The Seven Deaths, this story does not loop (I think) but is instead set in a world where time travel has become hugely popular, maybe for holidays? Not sure. My copy of this came from NetGalley and is published 8th August 2018 so I’ll post a review soon!
The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store – Cait Flanders: This is a non-fiction book about…living with less and saving money and appreciating what you have? I saw it on Refinery29 or a similar site and enjoyed her article about the book so I thought I would download it (if you’re not allowed to spend money but to learn how not to spend money you have to spend money on a Kindle book because I think she’d be proud of me for saving £5 on the paperback version is that ok?).
This Is Going To Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor – Adam Kay: This has been recommended by so many people and there are posters around town, in bookshops, in the train station, EVERYWHERE and I got it back when it came out so I probably should read it. I even work with junior doctors so should have done this sooner.
Jurassic Park – Michael Crichton: DINOSAURS.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August – Claire North: I have had this book for almost 3 years and still not cracked the spine. WHY?
Yes Please – Amy Poehler: She’s Amy Poehler. That’s why I need to read it.
The Devotion of Suspect X – Keigo Higashino: I started this book about 5 months ago, then I put it down, then I moved house, then I started reading books again so I should find it.
Simon vs the Homosapiens Agenda – Becky Albertalli: Another one that I picked up a while ago when in a good reading mood and then fell out of the good reading mood.