Top Ten Tuesday

Well, who can resist a Top Ten Tuesday freebie? I know I can't. I'm using this as an opportunity to try and raise my own excitement levels about alllll the challenges I've committed to (totally willingly, I should add) and so I'm picking out the books I'm the most excited to read for the challenges. As an added thing that I just thought of, I'm also going to state which challenge the books belong to- the more challenges a book applies to, the more excited I am to read it, I guess (this is absolutely not true. Just so you know.)

Top Ten Challenge Books I'm Most Excited To Read


1. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (Fuck the Patriarchy readathon)- I can't even tell you how excited I am to even have a Murakami book in a reading challenge, because honestly, reading his books is too exciting for me to even describe! So, not at all a challenge then, but still exciting (also, I feel like challenges shouldn't feel like a punishment. Just a thought.)

2. The Wind Through The Keyhole by Stephen King (Reading all the Stephen King thing)- What can I say? Another Dark Tower adventure that totally backtracks but still involves all the characters that I love? I'm kind of dying to read this book, and waiting, like, 33 (?) books for that to happen feels like an impossible task. And yet. I shall, because delayed gratification is awesome!

3. Middlemarch by George Eliot (The Classics Club)- Yeah, I've just been hearing many many good things about this at the moment, and my copy is SO PRETTY and I'm just really excited to read more Eliot (I've only read The Mill on the Floss so far, and it sounds like this is probably even better, so, exciting!)

4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Back to the Classics/The Classics Club)- It feels kind of wrong to be excited by this, and yet I kind of really am, based only on the fact that I read Anna Karenina last year, and am now permanently like 'Russian Literature... yessssssss!' This is probably foolish, but still leads to Crime and Punishment excitement (also, I know I wrote about Crime and Punishment in my dissertation, although I can't remember in what context... so I should probably read it and see if I used it right or not!)

5. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (The Classics Club)- I'm not sure if I'm so much excited about this as much as I want to see if it's as pretentious as I think it might be. Only I hope it's not because if it's not then it kind of sounds like it could be life-changing. Hence the excitement in spite of the size of the freaking thing!

6. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (The Classics Club/Fuck the Patriarchy readathon)- I started reading this years ago at university, but if you've been you'll probably remember that downtime reading = very little, and downtime reading of non-fiction that's all feministy and shiz = basically non-existent. So yeah, I read like 50 pages, but had it out of the library SO long that I started to feel bad in case someone actually needed it and then I took it back. So, now I have my own copy, it really feels like it needs to be read!

7. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (TBR Challenge)- Um... I've seen the movie and it was insane (mostly in a good way... I think...) and from what I can tell the book is really similar which could either be very good or very bad. We shall see. Either way, I'm kind of excited to find out.

8. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller (Fuck the Patriarchy readathon)- I'm excited about this because it means that I'll finally be able to see the film, although I can't remember exactly what it was about the film that excited me... Hang on. *toddles over to Wikipedia* Ok, so I think that I thought there was a kind of United States of Tara/Sybil thing going on in this, but actually it seems like that's not the case. But it still sounds pretty good? We shall see.

9. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Back to the Classics/The Classics Club)- Ok, so this is a re-read and I really shouldn't be as excited about it as I am, but I really am because Steinbeck! I do love him so! Also because I'm going to be hosting my first readalong (in October, put it in your diaries people!) and it's going to be my first book for that, and SO that's totally exciting too!

10. Bag of Bones by Stephen King (Reading all the Stephen King thing)- This is also a re-read, but I'm always excited about reading Bag of Bones because it's one of my favourite King novels. For no real reason, I guess, other than that I really like the way it feels to read. And also because it seems to be one people have never heard of, so I enjoy being like 'oh yeah, that's one of my favourites' and feeling all obscure Stephen King knowledgeable. Because that's what makes a person really really cool, you know?!

So. These may be the books I'm most excited by right now, but that's liable to change with the wind, and also the books I'm least excited about sometimes turn out to be the best (I'm looking at you, Vanity Fair). But still. These all sound like fun, so I should get to reading them!