This week’s Top Ten Tuesday post is about places on your bucket list, but since I don’t have a bucket list and I read books heavy on the fantasy or that skip around the world a bunch… I thought I’d go rogue. I don’t rate a lot of books five-stars (“loved it”, in the scale I use) — but the books that make the cut deserve to be talked about more, I’d say!

So let’s dig in! Some of these don’t have reviews up yet, but those that do, I’ll link my review. I’ll go backwards through time, starting with the most recent. 2026 has started out pretty well, with five out of the ninety-seven books I’ve read this year so far gaining five whole stars!

1. Ramesses the Great, by Toby Wilkinson. (Finished 30th March 2026.)
   I tore through this one! It helps that Ramesses is a very compelling figure, but Wilkinson presents his evidence well and without speculating too much on stuff we can’t really know for sure about Ramesses II’s inner thoughts, he gives us a good idea of the man all the same. Not always likeable, inasfar as we can make that judgement from this distance of time and from a different culture, but certainly fascinating.
2. Blue Horses and Felicity, by Mary Oliver. (Finished 26th March 2026.)
   It’s cheating a little to bundle these together, but I did read them at the same time! These two poetry collections are both lovely: I find Oliver’s poetry really accessible to read, without being too simplistic.
3. The Library of Ancient Wisdom, by Selena Wisnom. (Finished 28th February 2026.)
   I liked this one a lot: I’ve read a couple of other books on ancient Mesopotamia, but don’t feel like I have the same grasp of it as I do ancient Egypt. This gave me some of that, through focus on the library of Ashurbanipal. It’s necessarily limited and doesn’t really touch on the lives of common people, but it was still pretty interesting.
4. A History of England in 25 Poems, by Catherine Clarke. (Finished 9th February 2026.)
   I thought this one was great: the choice of poems sometimes surprised me, but was always illuminating, and Clarke has a pretty good grasp of the problems between England and the other countries it shares an island with. There were things I’d have liked to see more of, but I was still really happy with this one.
5. Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail — The Art of Succession -Relics of Heritage-. (Finished 25th December 2025.)
   I suppose I could skip this one as it sort of feels like it doesn’t count as a book read, but on the other hand I find the game’s artbooks really interesting, because they give you a glimpse at the original designs of familiar bosses, characters and in-world assets. It might be a quick read (since it’s almost all images), but a picture’s worth a thousand words and all that.
6. Strangers and Intimates, by Tiffany Jenkins. (Finished 13th November 2025.)
   This one actually stuck with me less than I’d expected given the high rating, but it did raise interesting questions for me about why the value people place on privacy changes, and the differences between generations. There were some fascinating reflections on the scandal with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and how that has changed politics.
7. You Should Be So Lucky, by Cat Sebastian. (Finished 28th September 2025.)
   This is a lovely romance, with some grumpy/sunshine dynamics, but it’s more than just a list of tropes. There’s a lot of healing from grief, and a lot of hope (even in times that weren’t so great for queer people). Also, there’s a dog!
8. Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo. (Finished 2nd and 5th June 2025.)
   These were rereads, so perhaps it’s no surprise that they got such a high rating! They’re the first two books in the Singing Hills series, at least in publication order — I do think they’re also a good place to start in getting to learn about where Chih is from and what they do, and they have my favourite formats for the series too, being focused mostly on stories told to Chih. Some of the later books are more about Chih themself, which is also fun, but I like these best.
9. Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher. (Finished 25th May 2025.)
   2025 and 2026 have been the years of T. Kingfisher for me, it seems. This one just grabbed me at the right time, I think, and I thought the ideas and the way of retelling the Snow White and Rose Red story were just so fun. Also the mirror monsters were a work of horrible genius.
10. Cold Night Lullaby, by Colin Mackay. (Finished 22nd May 2025.)
    This was another reread. I’m not sure I ever expected to reread this one, because Mackay went through horrors and he certainly paints them vividly in his poetry, but… something made me feel like it was the right time to read it. It’s a poetic working-through of the things he witnessed in Bosnia when he went there as an aid worker — including the mutilation and murder of the woman he loved.

Sorry for going off-piste, but I look forward to seeing everyone else’s TTT posts this week! Maybe you’ll inspire me to create a bucket list.

Today’s theme for Top Ten Tuesday iiiis “buzzwords or phrases that would make you read (or avoid) a book”. I immediately thought about tropes, especially since a lot of people seem to use trope style stuff for marketing, soooooo… let’s hit TV tropes and look for my catnip.

I’ve done that partly by looking at novels I already love, lest I end up with more on my TBR.

1. Intimate Hair Brushing. Just… just hear me out here. I am a complete sucker for non-sexual intimacy in general, and I think it’s often underused but a great way of showing genuine closeness between two characters. This one shows up in The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, in one of the extras: post-canon, Shen Qingqiu is trying to soothe Luo Binghe when he thinks he’s angry and upset, and one of the things he does (after cuddling to sleep) is brush his hair. It’s actually a version of Luo Binghe from another world, who actually starts considering trying to get Shen Qingqiu to come away with him afterwards… but the point is that it’s a sign of how intimate Shen Qingqiu has become with his former disciple, and a solid sign of the change from the master/disciple relationship into something romantic. It also shows up in Heaven Official’s Blessing, though it’s also a way there for Xie Lian to check whether Hua Cheng is a ghost/his power level as a ghost (as low-level ghosts can’t form details like hair and fingerprints).
2. Red String of Fate. This refers to the idea of people who are fated to be bound together, visualised as a red string. Mostly I love this when it’s played with a bit: fate in and of itself isn’t that interesting, but avoiding fate or forging your own fate… yep, catnip. In Heaven Official’s Blessing, there’s is an actual magic string that Hua Cheng gives to Xie Lian so they won’t be separated — and it works as a symbol of their bond, because Hua Cheng has repeatedly chosen to bind his fate to that of Xie Lian. It’s also played with in Tied to You: Jigeon is in love with Wooseo even before it’s revealed they’re joined together by what’s basically a red string of fate, but there’s no guarantee they’ll end up together, because bonds can be broken. Jigeon acts deeply manipulatively to try to ensure he gets Wooseo in the end… but ultimately he has to reveal what he’s been doing to Wooseo and be accepted by him in spite of it, or their bond will never be complete.
3. What You Are In the Dark. I found this on the page about Gawain, and yeees. The moments where a character will not be witnessed by anyone else, no one will ever know, and they will choose good over what’s convenient. Think Frodo refusing to kill Gollum, for example.
4. Addictive Magic. Or really many kinds of magic system that make magic complicated and have a cost; I ran across this one on the page for The Lord of the Rings, but I’m sure I’ve run into it elsewhere too!
5. Genre Savvy. I love a bit of meta, where a character seems to be aware of the genre they’re in… or misread the genre. We’re back on Scum Villain here, where Shen Qingqiu thinks he’s still in a harem novel, but Luo Binghe has fallen in love with him, changing the genre. It’s also played straight in a lot of ways, because Luo Binghe is “The Protagonist” and has plot armour that protects him from stuff going wrong, because he has to be supreme within his own story. Shen Qingqiu even uses that to get out of trouble, knowing that the story won’t allow any harm to come to Luo Binghe, and banking on it to save them both at one point by persuading someone to attack Luo Binghe (they get knocked out by a random falling beam!).
6. Rivalry as Courtship. The very first example of this I can think of in my life was Anne and Gilbert in Anne of Green Gables (and the later books, which develop it a lot more). All those charged feelings make things more explosive and give a real sense of chemistry. That said, I usually dislike it when it’s more enemies than rivals, if there are atrocities involved or something like that — it’s weird when people try to sweep that under the rug. In that case you also need a hefty dollop of atonement in order to get the whole thing to work.
7. Aw Look! They Really Do Love Each Other! This one came up on The Goblin Emperor’s page, and yeeees. The example given is when Maia’s guard Beshelar, who has been quite aloof and disapproving, gets angry on his behalf when he learns that Setheris abused him. I love that moment, because it shows how much he really cares!
8. Badass Bureaucrat. The example given is Cliopher Mdang in The Hands of the Emperor, and yes, absolutely! Also Csevet in The Goblin Emperor, in slightly different ways.
9. Family of Choice. Also known as the found family trope, or at least, I think these are pretty much the same. For people to choose each other… yep! Thank you, that’s lovely, let’s have some more! Think of the crew of Wayfarer in The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, for instance.
10. Hidden Badass. They don’t look like a badass, they don’t seem like they can kick your ass, but oh boy howdy you’d better not cross them. Happens quite a lot in danmei, since characters don’t need to be physically ripped to be extremely strong.

This has taken me long enough, so I’m gonna hit post with just these — even though there are probably plenty of other tropes contending for my top ten!