This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is all about reading plans for the spring, which is always fun. I don’t really theme my reading with the seasons, or with anything beyond my own whim, and my approach to having a reading plan is a bit like Douglas Adams’ approach to deadlines (“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”) — but I find it fun to set them up, all the same.

So what would a good spring reading list look like for me? I’d like to clear some of the partly-read books out of my list, so I’ll start with those.

1. The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. I’ve made a start on this one! But then I got distracted and haven’t picked it up in a week. I’m really enthusiastic about the premise, though, so it’s time to dig in.
2. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon. I had this one as an ARC before it came out, so I really must get back to this one. I was finding it fascinating, just dense with information — and a bit overly blessed with footnotes, to be honest. It keeps fragmenting my attention and sending me bouncing around the page, and I didn’t have the focus for a bit. Soon I’ll hand my essays in, though, and then I hope to dig into it more.
3. Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe, by Emma Törzs. I’m at the point of being intrigued by this without being fully sucked in. Which is maybe worrying since I’m already 100 pages in. Still, I’m enthusiastic enough to finish it, and I’d like to prioritise that soon!
4. The Book of Perilous Dishes, by Doina Ruști. I started on this soon after getting it, but it didn’t suit my mood at the time. I might need to start over to find my way back in, since I wasn’t very far into it, but we’ll see! I’m very curious to read more translated works in general, and I don’t think I’ve read anything by a Romanian author before, so I want to give it a proper shot and not just dislike it because I’m in a weird mood.
5. The Cleaving, by Juliet E. McKenna. I’ve meant to read McKenna’s work for sooo long, and I did enjoy the first 50 pages of this… in fact, I’ve no idea why I got distracted from this one. Maybe just my bad habit of reading a gazillion books at once.

That’s not quite all the books I’m reading at once — for example, I’ve also been neglecting A River Enchanted by Rebecca Ross for… too long. But let’s take a look at the new-to-me books I want to read and haven’t even dipped a toe into yet!

6. The Undetectables, by Courtney Smyth. With a tagline like this, who could resist? “Be gay. Solve crimes. Take naps.” It looks like fun, and it’s a recent acquisition, so I want to strike while the iron is hot.
7. The Three Dahlias, by Katy Watson. This book was chosen for my mum by Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, and is quite possibly up my street as well. It’s definitely worth a try.
8. The Book of Doors, by Gareth Brown. This was a bit of an impulse purchase, and I know very little about it. It involves books, though, so that gives it a bit of a headstart in my book!
9. Swordcrossed, by Freya Marske. I couldn’t resist requesting the eARC of this based on the description (and my previous enjoyment of Marske’s work, even if I haven’t read the whole trilogy yet). It sounds like such fun, and maybe I’ll even read it before it comes out this time if I start soon…
10. The Husky and his White Cat Shizun, by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou. Having read and loved The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu), I want to try out some other danmei! MXTX’s Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation is also on my list, but I’m curious to try other authors as well.

It was hard to narrow it down… and knowing me, I won’t read any of them. But it’s always fun to dream! Does anybody else have such trouble sticking to their intended reading lists?!

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is about books that you’re scared might not stand up to a second reading — books you originally loved, but are scared to reread. I heard about the concept of the Suck Fairy from Jo Walton, and that’s exactly the problem here: maybe the book just isn’t as good as you remember. Times have changed, or you’ve changed, or the book isn’t really what you remember… that’s the Suck Fairy!

Anyway, let’s give this a shot. Note that I’m not saying these books necessarily do or will suck now (in fact for some I’m sure they’re really good but maybe not for me). I’m just afraid that if I reread them, I won’t love them the way I did before.

1. Among Others, by Jo Walton. I don’t really think the Suck Fairy can have visited this book, surely. It meant so much to me. On the other hand, I read it in my early twenties, fresh out of being a teenager, and it meant an enormous amount to me then. Can it stand up to that weight? I think it probably can, but it’ll be a very different experience now.
2. The Magic Faraway Tree, by Enid Blyton. I have very fond memories of so many Enid Blyton books: so much so that I get tempted to revisit for the nostalgia hit. That said, everything’s coloured by what I know about Blyton now, and by having seen some of the sexism and racism lurking in her stories the last time I read them (which was in university, for a children’s literature course). I’m not sure that can be unseen.
3. Idylls of the Queen, by Phylis Ann Karr. I did this to myself: I wrote my MA dissertation about this book, in part. Mostly I was looking at character, and the use the author made of the sources. That said, I did semi-recently reread Exiled from Camelot (Cherith Baldry), which I also wrote about in that dissertation — and Idylls of the Queen was the better book. I think this’ll probably be OK to revisit.
4. Camelot’s Shadow, by Sarah Zettel. This is quite possibly where my interest in romance fiction in general really began, a little foot in the door. And again, I wrote about it in my dissertation. I keep thinking about revisiting, but are Gawain and his brothers as enchanting as I remember?
5. A Sorcerer’s Treason, by Sarah Zettel. I remember really liking the Isavalta books, and I keep wondering about a reread. I don’t remember much about them, though? Only the fact that I liked it at the time. Seems a bit worrying.
6. Under Heaven, by Guy Gavriel Kay. There was a time when I’d have dived on a new Guy Gavriel Kay book instantly, but I’ve been really lax in keeping up of late. Around about when Under Heaven came out, I think I started… going off his work? Which is a shame, because there’s much I loved about The Summer Tree, Tigana, etc. I did read Under Heaven, and I liked it, but it didn’t stick in my head in quite the same way. Maybe I’ll have to just give it another shot, though, and see.
7. Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb. Mum and I were pretty obsessed with these books, and a lot of it is probably packed into my reading self on a DNA level. But… could I stand rereading Fitz’s teenage whinging? Presumably one doesn’t need to be an adolescent to put up with it, since Mum could, but maybe also she was just in practice due to me and my sister!
8. Sabriel, by Garth Nix. I loved Sabriel and Lirael, and found so much of the world-building fascinating, and then… didn’t really like Abhorsen for a few reasons, and have barely kept up since. Something went pear-shaped for me at some point in all this. I kinda want to give it a second chance — but what if it was pear-shaped all along, and I just didn’t see it yet back then?
9. Waking Gods, by Sylvain Neuvel. The first book of the trilogy blew me away several times, and I remember liking this as well — and yet somehow I never went on to the third book. Maybe the answer to why is found in Waking Gods, and will spoil everything?
10. Spillover, by David Quammen. I give this book a lot of credit for my current path (my MSc in infectious diseases), but it’s probably getting a bit long in the tooth now. Science doesn’t stand still. Still, I have an enormous affection for it, because it’s also the book that made me a bit less scared of infectious diseases by helping me be curious about them.

Funnily enough, there are a few books that grew for me on rereads, and stuck in my head in astounding ways. Maybe someday there’ll be a topic about that, but for now, shoutout to Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons, Robin McKinley’s Chalice, Mira Grant’s Feed, and probably many others…