Best MG/YA of 2017 So Far! (Top Ten Tuesday)

It’s about that time for a mid-year check in! Of course, its almost the end of June and it’s unbelievable how fast the year has gone already. But doesn’t everyone say that? Isn’t it really funny how we are always just so shocked and betrayed at how time passes… It's also funny how often I find this gif appropriate for a post. 

But I digress.

So, this post is going to be about the best books I’ve read so far in 2017. By coincidence, that’s the topic for Top Ten Tuesday (link to host's page) so I’ll see if I can get to ten of them and that will be two proverbial dead birds!

I was going to do a combined Adult/YA list, but I had 10 YA favorites. I’ll do a short list of adult fiction/ nonfiction for tomorrow. (update: I didn't do an adult post.)

Top Ten Tuesday - Books I Loved Less Than I Thought I Would

So, if I have an opinion about a book before I read it, I will almost always like it less than I think I will. I try to avoid as much information about a book as possible, except for possibly a brief summary (like on the book jacket). This is why I get so pissed when the story turns out to be nothing like the summary! But, anyhoo…

Here are 10 books that failed to live up to my own mental – hype. Note: Book cover pics were found on the internet and link to the book's goodreads page.)

Top Ten Tuesday - Books I Read Because My Book Club Said To

Top Ten Tuesday - October 11:  All About Books You Read Because of Recommendation -- Ten Books I've Read Because Of Another  Blogger (Or Book Person) or Ten Books I Read On Recommendation From People Outside Of This Community or you could talk about recommendations of books you read from other sources -- a magazine, a podcast, a "because you read this" algorithm.

So you know I rarely just follow the prompt because 1. I’m noncompliant, and 2. I’m always completely overwhelmed by the idea of compliance. I bet those two things are related… anyhooo! I’m doing… :::drumroll::

Ten Books I Read Only Because a Book Club Made Me Do I

Turns out, I didn’t read all of these, because sometimes people in book clubs pick books that are awful. Really, truly awful… but if I only talked about books I loved, that would make a boring list, now wouldn’t it?

Here’sthe post where I make a case for having more than one book club. Please note, I’ve really only been going to the one with my friends. I have every intention of jumping back in with the Book Theives, but my other activities (theatre, voice lessons, tap class!) have really been interfering with my people time. Without further Ado!

Top Ten Tuesday - Audiobook-a-palooza!!

September 20: All About Audio freebie --  aka top ten audiobooks you should listen to, 10 books I want to listen to on audio,10 bands you should check out, 10 podcasts you should be listening to, 10 of my all time favorite albums, 10 songs I love, really whatever you can come up with (hosted by Broke and Bookish).

 Audiobooks! I love them, although it took me a while to really understand how awesome they are. (Here’s a post about that.)

I read about a third of the books that I read via audiobook, mostly in the car and on my walks into work from the parking lot. This also justifies my constantly being on the look out for headphones that will become THE ONES.

So, here’s what I did. I went to my audiobook shelf on Goodreads and looked to see which books I gave 5 starts to.

Top Ten Tuesday: Historical Fiction

August 30: Back To School Freebie -- anything "back to school" related like 10 favorite books I read in school, books I think should be required reading, Required Reading For All Fantasy Fans, required reading for every college freshman, Books to Pair With Classics or Books To Complement A History Lesson, books that would be on my classroom shelf if I were a teacher.

Okey dokey. How about 10 Historical Fiction Books I would rather read than actual history. This isn’t really fair, because I have never read a book about history that would trump a historical fiction novel. Even though I lie to my patients and tell them that history is “just like reading stories,” it SO IS NOT.

I would also like to note that I don’t know what historical fiction is. I am going to define it as a work of fiction set in some random past with a real landmark, event, or person in it. My inclusion criteria may even slip a little bit below as I get closer to giving up on thinking of ten books! Feel free to enlighten me below in the comments, but recognize that I will learn nothing. Please also note that because I do not like history, I have no way of commenting on the accuracy of historical fiction.

Before you get started though, someone explain this cartoon to me! Is it funny!?

Top Ten Tuesday - Still on my TBR

As always, this is a feature of Broke and Bookish.

August 23: Ten Books That Have Been On Your Shelf (Or TBR) From Before You Started Blogging That You STILL Haven't Read Yet (this is going to be sad considering how many of those I have unread six years later...)

This is an interesting idea. The problem for me is that I started adding books to my TBR list on Goodreads (2009) the year AFTER I started blogging (2008). Technically. I mean, if you look at my blog between 2008 and 2010, it’s pretty sad. But I didn’t really start reviewing books for real until about a year and a half ago. Also, I have hundreds of books on my TBR between 2009 and 2015…I think I've mentioned before how farcical my TBR list is. I'm even doing a couple of challenges for the year, and a specific challenge this month to get through some things. I should say, I'm failing a challenge this month, but never mind that!

I’m thinking about this too much, I think.

Top Ten Tuesday: Take My Money - Books

So, this Top Ten Tuesday should be pretty easy… The topic is Ten Books You'd Buy Right This Second If Someone Handed You A Fully Loaded Gift Card. I mean, how full is fully loaded, amIRight? The hard part is narrowing it down to 10.

I actually buy far too many books. I don’t usually go to the book store with the intention of buying any particular book. I’m just a sucker for a Buy 2 Get 1 Free sale and Barnes and Nobles. However, desipte the fact that I love to purchase books, I mostly read books from the library. Once I own a book, the likelihood of my reading it goes way down. Hence my #ClearAShelf challenge for this month (JOIN IT!).

I buy books purposefully for two reasons: I’ve already read it and I want a copy for myself or I’m trying to support an author or event. (I know that once again I am sort of cheating here because these are actually series, not single books… but it’s my blog and I’ll cheat if I want to!)

Books I’ve Read but Would Want My Own Special Precious Copies Of:

1. The Illustrated Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling) Obviously.

2. The Raven Boys series (Maggie Stiefvater)

3. The Inkheart Trilogy (Cornelia Funke)

4. The Strangers in Paradise Harcover collection (Terry Moore)

5. The Locke and Key Hardcover collection (Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez)

6. The Unwind Series (Neal Shusterman)

7. The complete collection of The Wizard of Oz books (F.L.Baum)

Possible books I might buy because I anticipate liking them very much, and/or love their covers.

New to Me Books:

8. Cinder (Marissa Meyer)

9. The Paper Magician (Charlie Holmberg)

10. Love in the Time of Global Warming (Francesca Lia Block)

  

 Oh. I'd also like a complete set of the Roald Dahl books... Now that I think about it, I might start collecting those right now.

Related Posts: 

Top Ten Tuesday: Underrated Books

Here’s the prompt for Top Ten Tuesday this week:

Top Ten Books We Enjoyed That Have Under 2000 Ratings on Goodreads (we've done underrated books a bunch of times in the past 6 years but thanks to Lenore at Celebrity Readers for suggesting this topic as a new way to talk about underrated books especially when underrated is subjective. An easy way to find this -- go to Goodreads, your read list, at the top of your read list where it says settings you can add a column for # of ratings, then you can sort by that. If you aren't a Goodreads user you can look up books you think are underrated and see what their # of reviews is on Goodreads? Or if that's too hard you can spin it some other way!)

So, following the directions, there are only 8 books that make the cut! Apparently, I read a lot of popular books. Maybe I should go off the beaten path every now and then. Interestingly, eight of the nine are on my Must Reads shelf: 

Book Buzzwords: I’m reading THAT (Top Ten Tuesday)

I saw this topic on a blog that was really cute and interesting and made a note to myself to write about it. I would love to credit that blog but I haven’t the foggiest idea what/ where/ who, nothing! Whoever you are, mysterious stranger, thanks for the topic idea!

I’m going to try for 10 words for a Freebie Top Ten Tuesday post.

Obviously, some of these are Buzz phrases, but let’s not get too technical, okay?

I think you’ll recognize the pattern pretty quickly:

Top Ten Tuesday- Favorite 2016 Releases

I don’t think I’ve read 10 books that were released in 2016…

June 21: Top Ten Favorite 2016 Releases So Far This Year (hosted by Broke and Bookish)

When I read the topic I thought I was totally screwed. I didn't think I had read 10 new releases this year.... but almost!

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Feel Differently About Now

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by Broke and Bookish

May 24:  Ten Books I Feel Differently About After Time Has Passed (less love, more love, complicated feelings, indifference, thought it was great in a genre until you became more well read in that genre etc.)

I love this topic!! But once again I am going to split it up a little bit because I’m not sure I can think of ten things.

For me, because I read so much, I lose details of books pretty quickly so I’m mostly left with how I FEEL about a book: good or yuck?

Top Ten Tuesday: 10 (-ish) Characters to Visit at Different Ages

I am so impressed with myself right now! This will be my fourth Top Ten Tuesday post!

May 3: Ten Childhood Characters You'd Love To Revisit As Adults (ie a novella or something to see what they grew up to be) -- you could always just pick YA characters you've read recently you wouldn't mind revisiting in 10 years or so. Or you could pick 10 characters and guess what you think they'd be doing in 10 years or 20 years. OR you could go the other way and wish for coming of age stories for adult characters you love.

This one is tough! Who am I kidding? They are all tough. But this one requires some speculation into a different time in the lives of characters. I think I am going to do a mix of the suggested options. So basically, I am going to take favorite characters and think about what point in their lives I would want to know more about them. #CHEATING

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish People to Social Media Stalk

YAY! I'm pre- posting a Top Ten Tuesday! I can tell that this is the start of a whole new life of organization and planning for me... 

These top tens are hard for me because 10 things is a lot of things!! I'm going to shoot for 5 and see how it goes. I've decided to try and do one of these a month to take the pressure off of myself! 

This week's Top Ten Tuesday is (drum roll would be useless given the title of the post, huh? Drum roll, anyway, naysayer!): 

Another Wednesday Top Ten Tuesday - Books on my Spring TBR

Welp. Once again, my Top Ten Tuesday is late. Which is totally fine because if I start doing things on time, then people will come to expect that level of togetherness... and then, where would we be?

This week's Broke and Bookish #TTT prompt is (WAS) Top Ten Books on my Spring TBR. This is hard for me mostly because I suck at planning my reading. I'm also not totally sure that I know when Spring is... but here's a go at it, anyway. Here are some upcoming reads that I'm excited about... or, at least, that I plan to read.

1. The Winner's Kiss by Marie Rutkoski is the final book in a trilogy that consistently floored me. See my babblings about book one [here]. They are changing the covers of the books and I am going to be so pissed if I can't get the cover that matches my other ones. It's due to be published at the end of this month... Add looky, looky. I just ran across a sweepstakes to win things! Entered!

Top Ten Tuesday (Popped!) - Songs for 10 Must Reads

Wouldn't it be awesome if I could get my blog-stuff together enough to do a regular weekly theme thing? Oh, yeah. That would be awesome. Unlikely, but awesome... especially because I rarely like all the prompts on any of those things.

The Broke and the Bookish Top Ten Tuesday is a popular one that I have thought about jumping on board with. First, who can't relate to the blog name, amIRight? But also, all of the prompts are bookish, which I like better than random things about my grocery list or whatever. So... I'm going to give this week's a try... even though it's hard as hell. Here's the original prompt with the original embedded links.

"February 16: This week is all about music & books. We previously did books we'd give theme songs to so feel free to do that! Or 10 songs I wish that were books (check out my love songs I wish were books for an example of what I mean) -- Thanks to the couple people who suggested making this one an official topic. I don't know why I hadn't...I think I thought my post WAS for TTT in my head when I thought back to it."