I put this together by going through Goodreads lists. The purpose is just to look back at what books came out ten years ago that I've read or want to read. I love a little memory trip :)
Books I've read:
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
The Magician King by Lev Grossman
It's kind of embarrassing that my "read" list is full of fantasy/action popular books, and my "to read" list is full of important Grown-up Books. But not surprising.
I do have The Song of Achilles and My Brilliant Friend on my "read" list. I liked them both, but I didn't like Achilles as much as Miller's Circe, which is one of my all-time faves. My Brilliant Friend was hard to read sometimes- any historical literature about girls seems to be hard to read- and I only made it a few chapters into the sequel, but I may take another pass at that, or at least watch the movie.
I liked The Weird Sisters. It has a whole family of bookworms, but it said that they would pick up any book and start reading it- so if you put your book down, someone would pick it up and walk off, and I found that upsetting. Otherwise, I liked it.
I've already written about The Magician King, and I wrote a bit about Ready Player One when I wrote about the sequel. (It's weird that I wrote both of those posts in the same month.)
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children freaked me out. The pictures in it were disturbing. I kept thinking about a creepy Santa picture when I was trying to sleep. I haven't read the sequels, but it was an interesting book.
I recommend Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) as an audiobook. It's fun.
A Discovery of Witches was pretty entertaining. It's more of a romance than what I usually go for, but I liked it. I haven't read the sequels, but I may watch the tv show.
I liked Divergent, but I thought that the franchise didn't hold up, and the last one should have been two books. Maybe three. It felt so spotty. But it's an interesting idea- a society sorted out by personality types, basically.
Want to read:
The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
For the "Want to Read" books, I think I actually have a copy of The Art of Fielding from a library book sale. I don't know how well it has held up- it seemed to be a fantastically popular book that everyone soured on after a few years- but I'm going to try it. All the others seem to be pretty popular.
Please leave a comment below, let me know if you've read any of these or have one to suggest for my want to read list.
Comments