Top Ten Tuesday

TTT – Books Older Than The Internet, Mostly

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Top Ten Tuesday used to be a weekly post hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, but was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl. “It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.” This is definitely something I can understand and want to participate in.

Happy Tuesday! There has been a wave of snowstorms across so much of the US this week, and I hope you’re all safe and warm! I spent the weekend staying inside with my mother and our dogs. This week, I managed to get a bunch of chores done that I’ve been putting off forever, and it feels really good. And now that I’m more caught up, hopefully I can work on consistently scheduling posts again. 

This week’s topic is books I never reviewed, and it’s going to involve reaching way back before my blogging days. I mean, wayyyyyyy back before there was internet. Today I’m going to talk about my favorite books that I haven’t reviewed on any site. Here we go:

  1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I had to read this book for school and I hated it so much that it wound up being my first time DNFing a book. While I know that many people enjoy the book, I just couldn’t get into it.
  2. Crime and Punishment; The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I read both of these in high school, as voluntary reading. Despite my distaste for most types of classic literature, I can’t seem to get enough of Russian classics. These two were top notch, and I’m so overdue for a reread. Maybe with all the snow I’ll check it out?
  3. White Oleander by Janet Fitch. I remember reading this book shortly after it had come out, and just having this book rock my world. It was so good and so completely different from anything I had ever read before, and this is one of the rare times that I like a movie as much as I like a book.
  4. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Another book I read in high school, this was a shocking expose about the meatpacking industry, which led to massive reforms in the way food is processed in America. It doesn’t shy away from anything, and it gets a little gross, which led me to becoming vegetarian for a pretty decent length of time. While we learned about the muckraker movement in school, I read this one independently.
  5. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. This book has been on my shelf for decades, and in that time, I’ve tried to read it over and over and haven’t been able to get past more than a few chapters. I’m not even sure why I’ve held on to it all this time.
  6. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I had to read this one for school, and I really don’t remember much about it other than that it was the strangest book I have ever read. After looking at the summary, I kind of think that I had read this when I was too young to appreciate it, and will have to revisit the book which I have sitting on my shelf.
  7. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. I first encountered this book as an assigned reading for a graduate school class in mental health counseling that focused on death, dying, and bereavement. Like my father, the author was a Holocaust survivor, and he was somehow able to divorce himself from the inhumane genocide that was happening all around him and to him, and developed a new form of therapy out of it. It’s an amazing and incredibly moving book.
  8. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. When we were given senior term papers to write for our English class in senior year, I chose to do mine by examining the role of women in this book. I didn’t realize this was part of a series, and I’m going to have to revisit this. 
  9. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I read this book multiple times as a kid, and I really loved the story. It was one of the first books with chapters that I recall reading.
  10. The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel. Normally I try to avoid putting a book in the center of a series on my list, but this was my favorite book of the series (but you should read them in order to be able to follow the story). I read it for the first time in high school, and have read it multiple times since then.

Have you read any of these? What books haven’t you reviewed?

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33 replies »

  1. I think it’s so cool that most of your books this week are classics! I wish I’d read a few more although I’m sure some I’d have zero interest in. Still, there’d be Austen and Montgomery (I think I’ve read one each by them) and I’d probably want to try one or more of the books by Frances Hodgson Burnett too. 🙂

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    • Thank you! It’s ironic, because I really tend to stay away from classics (except the Russian ones, apparently). I’ve never read anything by Austen or the Brontes or any of that, but I highly recommend the FHB books. At least my childhood self recommends them, I haven’t read them as an adult.

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    • Thank you! Last year was the first one where I reviewed all of the books I read, although I’m trying to be a bit less rigid and post some of my reviews to GR, especially if I don’t have a lot to say about a book.

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      • I was in that habit, but now my whole routine is all messed up! I’ve also been staying off social media for the most part for my own mental health. But when I had my life more together, I would post to the blog, Goodreads, and Instagram. I even started playing around on TikTok, but I’m feeling my age because I don’t know how to work any of the features!

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      • Social media is a bit of a nightmare. I post in book groups and I have had a couple of snarky comments that annoyed me but I ignored them. It was tough not to snark back but I took the high road 😂 what makes it worse is the fact that they obviously didn’t really read the review!

        Ergh I’m on TikTok and don’t understand it. I can’t find any interesting videos and struggle with followers. I get over 700 views on most of my posts there but have only 28 followers 🤷🏼

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      • I kind of feel like I missed the cutoff to learn how to use new technology, and while I have a TikTok, I don’t do anything with it anymore. That app is especially a bad one for me, so I stick to Instagram when I do venture in the shark-infested water.

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      • I just don’t know where people learn how to use it. I don’t think that I was at the cut off (born in 1990) just don’t know how people seem to automatically know how to use it. Instagram is my fave and even then I don’t know how to do half the things that everyone else does 🤷🏼 if I’m specifically told then I’m fine 😂

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      • 😂 that’s not too big a gap. My 20 month old tries to talk to our Alexa (it’s so cute because he isn’t really talking yet so it’s just noise but aimed towards Alexa)

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      • To be honest it rarely responds to me. It gets on my nerves. I can never turn the lights on or off so go to the switch and get told off because it ruins the connection…

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      • Awww, that’s the worst! But you can also have her recognize your voice, I’m just not sure how. My brother did it when he got one for my mom, so it would also recognize his voice.

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    • I did review every book I’ve read for the last year or so. I read a lot of ARCs, but I try to sneak in some fun reads and non-fiction whenever I can.

      As for tips? I try to review it as quickly as I can after finishing the book, ideally within a day or two, before my impressions fade. I maintain a spreadsheet with all my ARCs and the day they publish, which I try my best to publish a review before publishing day. Also, I read multiple books at once – usually an audiobook, ebook, and print book, but it only works well if all of the genres are vastly different.

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    • I loved Ayla’s inner strength, resilience, and the creative way her mind works throughout the entire series, but this was my favorite book in the series. I can usually tell my generational peers through their nostalgia for the Earth’s Children series.

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    • You absolutely should start reviewing classics. I never realized how many people love English classics, and it was a wake up call to see how many people love classics like Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion or Jane Eyre. I wonder what I’d think of A Little Princess now – I think it might veer into the realm of classics that would be seen as problematic if they were written nowadays, but it was a treasured part of my childhood!

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    • That’s what happened to us during the week – we had like 3 snow storms in one week and still didn’t leave off with a lot of piled up snow.

      Thank you about the list! These are definitely on my reread list, since it’s been a really long time since I had originally read them. It might even be like reading it for the first time if I don’t remember the events. That, and giving up the idea of things I *ought* to be doing, and focusing on the things I enjoy, are my favorite parts of getting older. Maybe the only positives of getting older 🤣

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    • It’s funny how you’re the second person who commented not being big on classics, and I’m normally one of those people too! I was surprised to see how many of of the books I listed fall into the genre of classics when it’s my least read genre!

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  10. I’ve read a couple of these most notably The Valley of the Horses. Loved the early books in that series. I also read The Good Earth with Oprah’s book club back in the day. I think I read White Oleander but if I have it was before I started keeping a list of everything I have read.

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    • I loved the early books in the Earth’s Children series especially! White Oleander was a great read, and I loved some lesser-known and underhyped books by her as well – it’s a duology that takes place during the Russian Revolution and follows a girl as she turns her back on her privileged upbringing and becomes part of the proletariat. I really like books that take place in Russia, particularly around the times of ancient Rus and the Russian Revolution.

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