Tag: memes

#TopTenTuesday Books That Play With Time #TuesdayBookBlog

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Top Ten Tuesday new

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 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?

Top Ten Tuesday Time CLocks

 

#6Degrees of Separation From Kitchen Confidential to The Night Manager

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees.

Kitchen ConfidentialThis month’s starting book is Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. One of these days, the starting book will be one I’ve read but it ain’t happened yet and certainly hasn’t this month. Subititled ‘Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly’ the book is described as a tell all story of ‘sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine’. Unfortunately I can’t think of anything I’m less likely to choose to read.

To start I’m going to take the obvious route of foodstuffs, with an emphasis on sweetness.  Sugar in the Blood by Andrea Stuart in which the author explores her own family history starting with an ancestor who owned a sugar plantation in Barbados.

Staying in the Caribbean, Sugar Money by Jane Harris is the story of two brothers, Emile and Lucien, who are charged with travelling from Martinique to Grenada to smuggle back a group of slaves taken by English invaders.

Slavery and the campaign for its abolition is the backdrop to historical crime novel, Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson.

Blood & Sugar starts with the discovery of an unidentified body which is also the case in In Two Minds by Alis Hawkins, the second book in the ‘Teifi Valley Coroner’ historical crime series featuring Harry Probert-Lloyd whose career as a barrister has been curtailed by partial blindness.

The Great Darkness by Jim Kelly also features a protagonist with impaired vision. Inspector Eden Brooke’s experiences during World War One damaged his eyesight, leaving him extremely sensitive to light. He’s also an insomniac and in his nightly wanderings encounters other ‘nighthawks’, individuals whose job or inclination mean they inhabit the streets or buildings of Cambridge while most of the population are asleep.

Another character who works in the hours of darkness is Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager by John le Carré. Employed as the night manager of a luxury hotel in Zurich, for reasons of personal vengeance, he becomes involved in a British intelligence operation.

My chain has taken me from a restaurant kitchen to a hotel reception. Where did your chain take you this month?

#6Degrees of Separation December