#TopTenTuesday Forgotten Backlist Titles #TuesdayBookBlog

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.

Top Ten Tuesday Forgotten Books

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Forgotten Backlist Titles, the idea being to spread the love for books that people don’t talk about much anymore. I’ve focused on the first ten books I ever reviewed on my blog. They may not all fall into the category of untalked about books but in many cases they’re ones I’d forgotten I’d read! Revisiting my early attempts at reviews has been a little painful so show some compassion to the newbie blogger that was me in 2016. 

The Hour of Daydreams by Renee M Rutledge 
World’s End by Upton Sinclair 
Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar
Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars by Miranda Emmerson
The Fortunate Brother by Donna Morrissey
Operation Finisterre by Graham Hurley Thomas Hoover
Stay With Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Legacy of the Lynx by Clio Gray
Hell’s Gate by Laurent Gaudé
The Ashes of Berlin by Luke McCallin

Having compiled my list, I was interested to see how many (if any) books the authors have written since the ones I reviewed, and if I’ve read any of them. Here’s what I found:

Renee M Rutledge has written children’s books but no further adult novels
Upton Sinclair died in 1968 but, amongst others, wrote ten further books in the series that started with World’s End
Jaroslav Kalfar has written one further novel, A Brief History of Living Forever, which I read and reviewed recently
Miranda Emmerson‘s next novel was A Little London Scandal which I read and reviewed in 2020
Donna Morrissey has a new novel, Rage the Night, which is due to be published in August 2023 and is available to request on NetGalley
Graham Hurley is a prolific author and since Operation Finisterre I’ve read and reviewed four more of his books – Last Flight to Stalingrad, Kyiv, Katastrophe and his latest, The Blood of Others. He has also written at least two crime series
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀‘s latest novel, A Spell of Good Things, was published earlier this year
Clio Gray‘s latest book, Stumblestone, was published in 2022
Laurent Gaudé has written further novels but none appear to have been published in English
Luke McCallin wrote a fourth novel in his Gregor Reinhardt series, Where Gods Does Not Walk, which I read and reviewed in 2021

#TopTenTuesday Unfinished Books by Famous Authors #TuesdayBookBlog

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.

TTT Blank book pagThis week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Ten Most Recent Books I Did Not Finish. I rarely set aside a book unfinished and on the occasions I do, it’s because I’m not enjoying it or think it’s poorly written. I choose not to publicise widely my dislike of a book so I’ve decided to focus on books their authors did not finish, mostly because they died before they could. (Compiled and annotated based on information from Wikipedia.)

  1. The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens – only six of the planned twelve instalments had been written at the time of his death in 1870
  2. The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov – despite the author’s request that it be destroyed upon his death in 1977, it was published by his son in 2009
  3. Sanditon by Jane Austen – only eleven chapters had been completed before she set it aside a few months before her death in 1817 
  4. Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy L Sayers – a Lord Peter Wimsey & Harriet Vane murder mystery novel the author began writing but abandoned. It was completed by Jill Paton-Walsh, based on notes and fragments, and published in 1998.
  5. Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson – set during the Napoleonic Wars, it was unfinished at the time of his death in 1894
  6. The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald – published posthumously in 1941 by Edmund Wilson, a writer, critic and friend of the author
  7. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace – a novel the author had been working on for over a decade, it was published in 2011 pieced together from manuscript notes and computer files
  8. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) by Herman Melville – published posthumously in various versions before what is considered the ‘authoritative’ version in 1962
  9. The First Man by Albert Camus – the incomplete manuscript of this autobiographical novel was found at the site of the car accident that killed him in 1960
  10. Silverview by John le Carré – completed by the author’s son and published posthumously in 2021.

Have you read any of these? Would you read an unfinished novel, or a novel completed by someone other than the original author?