Top Ten Tuesday - Freebie Week

Top Ten Tuesdays is a blog meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This is a free week, where we're allowed to chose our own topic. Since I, as per usual, was late to this bandwagon, I decided to pick a topic from the Top Ten Tuesday vault, because looking at that list always makes me a bit wistful. I love quotes, so I chose the topic of my top ten favorite book quotes. This is going to be hard. To make it easier on me, these are in no particular order.

1. Calcifer, Howl's Moving Castle: "That's magic I admire, using something that already exists anyway and turning it round into a curse." Howl's Moving Castle makes many interesting points about magic that are about more than magic, but this is one of my favorites.

2. Annabel Lee: "And neither the angels in heaven above, Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee." It doesn't come up quite enough just how much I love Edgar Allen Poe. Annabel Lee is my favorite poem.

3. The Motorcycle Boy, Rumble Fish: "It would be great, if I could think of somewhere to go." I really love this book. What can I say?

4. Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray: "The reason we like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid of ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror." Lord Henry's often ridiculous rants were amazing and hilarious. Not to mention amusingly scewed.

5. Finny and Gene, A Separate Peace: "'...when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.' I didn't think that was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every other thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true. So I didn't argue."

6. Kerry and Ethan, Companions of the Night: "'In the movies,' she pointed out to him, 'a vampire could have turned into a bat or mist and followed me.' 'In the movies,' Ethan countered, 'Lassie never peed on the rug.'"

7. The Silver Chair: "She felt frightened only for a second. For one thing, the world beneath her was so very far away that it seemed to have nothing to do with her." I probably could've pulled sixteen excellent quotes from Screwtape or Mere Christianity, but I have a soft spot for this quote.

8. Sunshine: "I didn't know you could go on finding out you'd had stuff by losing it. This didn't seem like a very good method to me." There are a few for this book, of course, but I had to pick one.

9. Louis, Interview with the Vampire: "An artist, stealing paint from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but immoral decision, and then he sees himself as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered by one act." So many underlines... so hard to choose...

10. The Psalms: "You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy." Part of my favorite psalm.

I could go on. I could go on and on and on. I love quote darn it. Probably would've had a Good Omens quote, but I've lent out my copy. That concludes my favorite quotes. According to John Green, they say more about me than they do about the books. Comment with your favorites, or link to your posts! Happy Tuesday.

Top Ten Tuesdays - Underrated

Today's Top Ten Tuesday (a blog meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish)is underrated books... I might have a little trouble deciding what constitutes underrated. But I do honestly love all the books I've chosen and feel like more people should read them. Even if I couldn't come up with a complete ten.


Sunshine - It doesn't seem to get as much attention as Robin McKinley's other books, which is basically a travesty in my mind. I love love love this book to pieces.

Girl, Stolen - It's just good, darn it. I love it when everything goes to hell really quickly. I love heroines who are brave and resourceful. Concept to execution, there's little not to love.

Hawkes Harbor - Same with Sunshine, this book doesn't get much mention, possibly because when people talk S. E. Hinton they're thinking young adult, not adult fantasy. But it's really very good.

Invincible Summer - hannah moskowitz has awesome hair. Also, she can write amazing books.

Almost Perfect - Though it kind of irritated me on a few levels, it is, in the end, a good love story. The bittersweet character and realistic complications of a trans-gender relationship were really interesting and something I don't read every day.

Dark Sons - Just a very good story about a kid with a real-life problem sympathizing, convincingly and heart-warmingly, with a largely ignored figures of my religion. It hit close to home, but in general it's a wonderful example of a verse novel, not to mention a great male YA narrator.

Companions of the Night - Despite its quite odd packaging and title, this book was pretty much everything I ask from a paranormal. Good characters, engaging, and with some interesting twists. It's also short and stands alone, which I always love. It's better than some big vampire series I've read.

The Shadow of the Sun - If you have an interest in the complicated and unique history and culture of Africa, or maybe you sometimes forget that there are actually individual countries in it and they aren't covered with savanna and elephants, this is a great book to read. Granted, it's a little dated, but it really brought a part of the world that I'd always glossed over to life. And it inspired my internet handle.

The Man Who was Poe - Compared to Avi's other work, you could consider this neglected. I loved it, but then, there are few literary figures I find more interesting than Poe.

What are your underrated favorites? Please link to your posts and remember to visit the blog hosters.

Top Ten Tuesdays - Trends

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme from The Broke and the Bookish. Today's TTT is on trends: ones we like and ones we don't.

This was a little tough, but I wanted to see if I could name five trends I'd like to see more of, five trends I'd like to see less of.


Yay: Racial Diversity, especially in couples/families - The only character I can think of who is half-anything, yet with race not being a major factor, is Jake from DragonHaven. Seriously, I love mixed-race characters. I just do. There need to be more. And I have a Hispanic friends who really wants to date a black guy - sounds awesome, right? Diversity is cool. **After School Special Over**

Yay: Sub-genre fantasy - vampire detectives, comedic ghosts, etc. It annoys me when fantasy/supernatural characters are shoved into the dramatic/romantic/horror roles: the base characteristic of being such-and-such a creature doesn't have to restrain the roles a character can play. Mostly, I see this subverted in kidlit, sometimes YA. But there's always room for more in this fantasy-lover's book.

Yay: Fairytale Adaptions - They have to be good, of course, but in my mind there can never ever ever be too many. Not so sure how I feel about things like the Jane Eyre modernizations, but then I haven't really explored that yet. Also, I'd love to see people adapting Biblical or other religious stories.

Yay: Local diversity - especially for hauntings. I want to see someone whose apartment is haunted, instead of the big old house way out in nowhere. I feel like a lot of genres make use of out-of-the-way locals too much. I don't get to the city much, I want to read about cities!

Yay: Boys being kidnapped - Like, not trying to hate on boys or anything, but it is always the girl that gets kidnapped. I really like the complexity of the kidnapping trope, whether it's a the whole plot or a sub-plot. But I can't think of one example where it's a boy being kidnapped, or a woman doing the kidnapping. I can think of real examples, but not in fiction. Isn't anyone curious about how that dynamic plays out? Or, say, Stockholm syndrome between homosexuals? I mean, so many options. Explore, people. (Although, from what I myself have written, I have very little room to talk.)

Nay: The one-thing-that-changed-everything - because it is not events that change people so much as their reaction to those events. I feel like this isn't explained enough. Bella did not become a zombie because Edward left: she became a zombie because, once Edward was gone, she focused on his absence instead of the other things life had to offer her. This was not dealt with in a satisfactory way, for me. (I will make an effort not to use more Twilight in my bad examples.)

Nay: Stock Christians - So, you need to a stock unpopular for someone to bully. He could be the science geek, the band geek, the theatre kid, the alternative, the quiet one, the socially awkward. Or he could be the Christian. There is nothing wrong with having Christian side characters be bullied, but, to say they're a Christian at all, you're going to talk about religion. If that's not going to tie in somehow, then it's probably just going to get people mad and not add anything. Like that quote about not mentioning the gun on the wall if it's not going to go off. (I'm looking at you, Watching Alice.) And, is it just me, or are these characters always boys?

Nay: Non Co-dependent Relationships - as in, guy always protecting girl, never really needing help even when she's trying. Or girl is staking her whole identity on boy, and he's, well, not. Or one party is always bending to the other party's will, and when it goes the underdog's way, it's because the alpha is placating. Now, these are great examples of bad relationships, but I don't find this kind of thing appealing or romantic. A good relationship is two people meshing, each offering something, bending to each other.

Nay: Chatrooms/texting - Not a fan of textual communication, really, unless it's short and really important/interesting. That thing in Beastly? That was okay. Could've lived without it.

Nay: Bad good friends - it's one thing to have bad friends and know it. It's another to have bad friends and pretend everything's okay. It seems like, especially in romance, the main character's friends sometimes aren't very friendly. Or their relationship is so underdeveloped it's hard to tell what's going on. I mean, not everything has to be Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but really.


What trends do you love, and what are you sick of? Link to your posts, and remember to visit the original post at The Broke and the Bookish.