#TopTenTuesday Books Featuring Handwritten Documents #TuesdayBookBlog

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.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Books with Handwriting on the Cover. I’m pretty bad at topics featuring covers because I can never remember what’s on them without picking what seems like a hundred books off the shelf one by one. So I’ve taken a slight detour with a list of books that feature handwritten documents. Links from each title will take you to the book description on Goodreads.

  1. ‘The Red-Headed League’ in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Jabez Wilson is hired to copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica by the mysterious Red-Headed League
  2. The Lost Letters of William Woolf by Helen Cullen – Set in the Dead Letters Depot where ‘letter detectives’ work to reunite letters with their intended recipients
  3. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova – A young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters in her father’s library recording a quest
  4. The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie – A series of vicious poison-pen letters destroys the calm of the village of Lymstock
  5. The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – Most mornings Sybil Van Antwerp takes up her pen to write letters to a variety of recipients
  6. Dear Mrs Bird by A J Pearce – Emmy Lake takes it upon herself to respond to letters sent to advice columnist Mrs Henrietta Bird
  7. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows – A young writer begins a correspondence with a man on the island of Guernsey
  8. The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain – A man finds an abandoned woman’s handbag on a Parisian street containing a red notebook with haphazard jottings
  9. The Letter Reader by Jan Casey – Connie Allinson joins the WRNS and is assigned the task of reading and altering correspondence to ensure no sensitive information crosses enemy lines.
  10. The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan – Richard Hannay comes into possession of a coded notebook containing clues to a conspiracy

#TopTenTuesday Books I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Read #TuesdayBookBlog

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.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Books I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Read. For this one I’m taking inspiration from last week’s topic – My Favourite Books By My Favourite Authors – and picking books from their backlists I really should have read by now, often their debut or prize-winning books. In some cases, I even own copies of the books so there’s really no excuse…

Links from each title will take you to the book description on Goodreads.

  1. Learning to Swim by Clare Chambers
  2. Any Human Heart by William Boyd
  3. The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason
  4. Invitation from a Dictator by Rory Clements (This is a bit of a cheat because it’s not published until August but I’ve read all his others!)
  5. Conclave by Robert Harris
  6. The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
  7. Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks
  8. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne
  9. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
  10. Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

Have you read any of these? Which books would be on your list?