Top Ten Tuesday #360

Hi everyone! It’s been another quiet week here, but I have my first in person book event in THREE YEARS on Friday, and I’m so excited. I’m going to VE Schwab’s London event for Gallant, and it feels very right that my first in person book event since 2019 would be one for my favourite author. I will probably be even more awkward and weird speaking to her than I was pre-pandemic because it’s been so long since I’ve been to any author events but I’m very excited that in-person book events are making their return.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday so that means another Top Ten Tuesday (my 360th!) courtesy of Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. This week we’re talking Top Ten Books With An Adjective In The Title, suggested by Nicole @ How To Train A Dragon. I’ll admit I thought this one would be fairly tricky when I first saw it, as not many titles came to my head, but looking at my Goodreads shelves, it turns out I have quite a few, so here we go:

1. The Hazel Wood-Melissa Albert

I will admit that this book kind of disappointed me, I really like dark fairytales so I was expecting to love it but it was too slow paced and confusing for me. However, if you like dark fairytales and don’t mind a slower pace, it might be worth a try!

2. Dangerous Remedy-Kat Dunn

I was so disappointed in this one! French Revolution and magic, it should have been right up my street, but I found the characters flat and the book incredibly slow paced. It did pique my interest more towards the end but by that time it was too late for me to even consider picking up any of the sequels.

3. Dark Places-Gillian Flynn

This is an intriguing mystery, but it was incredibly slow to get going. It was also far too dark for my tastes (I know the title should have given me a hint), there’s still a scene from this that haunts my nightmares! If you’re wanting to read Gillian Flynn, I would definitely recommend Gone Girl before this one, it was a better mystery and far less creepy!

4. Dangerous Girls-Abigail Haas

Ah my favourite YA thriller of all time! It’s about three friends who go on Spring break in Aruba and one of them ends up getting murdered. It cleverly interweaves past and present to give you a picture of what happened that night, and the ENDING. OMG THE ENDING. It actually ruined a lot of thrillers for me for a long time, because I’ve not been as shocked by an ending as I was by that one since.

5. Dark Days-Derek Landy

This is the fourth instalment of the Skulduggery Pleasant series and one of my favourites of the whole series. All long running series have a book when the stakes get higher and the books get darker and this one is that book for Skulduggery. Waiting for the next book after the ending of this one was PAINFUL.

6. The Last Bookshop In London-Madeline Martin

This was one of my favourite books of last year, it sounds weird to say that I found a story set in WWII heart-warming and don’t get me wrong, it definitely does include the horrors of war too, but it’s so much more about community and resilience and coming together in difficult times which made it a really lovely book to read after the year that we’d just had with the pandemic. Also there’s books, which pretty much guarantees that I will love anything.

7. A Marvellous Light-Freya Marske

My most recent read, you can find my more detailed thoughts on it in my review, but basically it came down to this: I loved the characters and the magic system, but it was overly slow and though I actually liked the relationship between the main couple, it did feel like their romance was too much the focus of the book, and it detracted from the main plot.

8. Little Fires Everywhere-Celeste Ng

Little Fires Everywhere is a rare example of me enjoying the TV adaptation of a novel more than the novel itself. Don’t get me wrong, the book touched on some really interesting points regarding racism and white privilege but the characters felt like they were kept at a distance due to the narrative style and the plot was kind of all over the place. The TV series streamlined the plot a lot, and it definitely felt like we got a deeper dive into the characters’ minds.

9. Things A Bright Girl Can Do-Sally Nicholls

I read a lot of WWII historical fiction so it was nice to read something that was centred on the time before and during WWI for a change. It was a nice, easy book about the suffrage movement and Britain during WWI, I definitely would have preferred something more in depth but for the target audience who may just be learning about the movement, it’s a good introduction through a fictional story. I was kind of disappointed that it ended up being more about the British war effort in WWI and less about the suffragettes though, as that wasn’t what I went into it expecting.

10. The Bad Beginning-Lemony Snicket

I could have chosen pretty much any of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books for this, since nearly all of them have an adjective in the title but I decided to start at the beginning (*pardon the pun*). I was so obsessed with these books when I was a pre-teen, I used to borrow them from the library every single week and practically flew through them because they were so fun and easy to read.

So there we go, those are some books with adjectives in their titles. Have you read any of these? What did you think of them? What books did you have on your list this week? Let me know in the comments!

I’ll be back with another Top Ten Tuesday next week, we’re talking about 21st Century Books We Think Will Become Classics, and to be honest, it seems like a kind of tricky one, I will see if I can come up with any but to be honest, there’s a very good chance that I’ll probably end up changing the topic!