Category: Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

• Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
• Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
• Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
• Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

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This week’s topic is Books On My Winter 2023-2024 To-Read List. My list is made up of eight books for my personal Backlist Burrow reading challenge that I hope to read by the end of this month (yes, I know, fat chance) and two NetGalley eARCs that publish in January. Links from the titles will take you to the full book description on Goodreads.

1. The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller – An innocent-looking letter drops on to the doormat in Stephen Rose’s Somerset home like an unexploded bomb. 
2. Pure by Andrew Miller – Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby.
3. Back Trouble by Clare Chambers – On the brink of forty, newly single with a failed business, Philip thought he’d reached an all-time low when a topple on a London street lays him literally flat.  
4. A Dry Spell by Clare Chambers – In 1976, four students took a trip to the desert. Now the repercussions of that fateful summer are coming back to haunt them.
5. All Day at the Movies by Fiona Kidman – When war widow Irene Sandle goes to work in New Zealand’s tobacco fields in 1952, she hopes to start a new, independent life for herself and her daughter – but the tragic repercussions of her decision will resonate long after Irene has gone.
6. The Infinite Air by Fiona Kidman – Jean Batten became an international icon in 1930s. A brave, beautiful woman, she made a number of heroic solo flights across the world. The newspapers couldn’t get enough of her.
7. Himself by Jess Kidd – A charming ne’er-do-well returns to his haunted Irish hometown to uncover the truth about his mother, and turns the town – and his life – upside down.
8. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler – The 15 stories, all written in the first person, blend Vietnamese folklore, the terrible, lingering memories of war, American pop culture and family drama. 
9. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan (published 4th January by Hodder & Stoughton) Japanese-occupied Malaya, 1945. Cecily Alcantara’s children are in terrible danger. Her eldest child Jujube, who works at a tea house frequented by drunk Japanese soldiers, becomes angrier by the day. Jasmin, the youngest, lives confined in a basement for her own safety. And her son, Abel, has disappeared without a trace.
10. Munich Wolf by Rory Clements (published 18th January by Zaffre) – Munich in the 1930s is a magnet for young, rich, aristocratic Brits. They come to learn German, but also to go wild, free at last from the suffocating constraints of strait-laced England. They ski in the Alps, swim in the lakes, drink in the beer cellars and fall for the charms of dashing SS officers. What they don’t see – or choose to ignore – is the cold, brutal, underbelly of the Nazi movement which considers Munich its spiritual home.

What books are you looking forward to reading in the next few months? 

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl.

The rules are simple:

• Each Tuesday, Jana assigns a new topic. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want.
• Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to That Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.
• Add your name to the Linky widget on that day’s post so that everyone can check out other bloggers’ lists.
• Or if you don’t have a blog, just post your answers as a comment.

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This week it’s a freebie so we’re challenged to come up with our own topic. My list is all about Books That Play With Time – ‘sliding doors’, reverse chronology, time loop… If you’re reading this in the future, please don’t nick this idea.

1. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – What if you could live again and again, until you got it right?
2. The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas – A pioneer of time travel receives a newspaper article from the future about the murder of an unknown woman
3. The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett – Three possible versions of the lives of two characters
4. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig – A library in which every book provides an opportunity to live a different life
5. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton – Until someone can solve her murder, a woman will die over and over again
6. All The Missing Girls by Megan Miranda – The disappearances of two young women – a decade apart – told in reverse 
7. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld – Two parallel stories which begin from the same present moment but one runs forwards and the other backwards
8. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – A man suffering from a rare condition in which his genetic clock periodically resets finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future
9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald – Benjamin Button is born an old man and mysteriously begins aging backward
10. The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey – A historical crime mystery in which the story unfolds in reverse

What other books do you know of that play with time?