This week’s theme for Top Ten Tuesday is picking authors you would like to see write together. I’ve taken a somewhat random approach, just throwing favourite authors together in some cases. Also, I’ve kept dead authors in the equation, because you never know. If anyone could find a way to talk to a dead author, it’d probably be another living author.

1. N.K. Jemisin and Kameron Hurley. I can only imagine what evils they would create… it’d be amazing.
2. Gail Simone and Kelly Sue DeConnick. A sudden thought: imagine Batgirl vs Captain Marvel. Or Captain Marvel vs Red Sonja.
3. Jo Walton and Steven Brust. I like their work, Jo admires Brust’s books, and I know Brust at least has collaborated before…
4. Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie. Mind you, it’d end with all the characters dead.
5. Cherie Priest and Kelley Sue DeConnick. Maybe they could adapt Bloodshot and Hellbent into a comic, using Kelly Sue’s knowledge of how to script?
6. Jo Walton and Dorothy L. Sayers. Farthing is a pastiche of Golden Age crime fiction. I’d love to see what Wimsey would do in Walton’s alternate Britain… or what Carmichael would do, face to face with Wimsey. I feel like he’d probably get along better with Parker.
7. J.R.R. Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay. The Fionavar books were influenced by Tolkien, undoubtedly, and Kay worked with Tolkien’s son on preparing The Silmarillion. The two together would surely do some fascinating things with mythology.
8. Ursula Le Guin and Jo Walton. Because what better way to short out my fannish circuits?
9. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Because Good Omens was genius.
10. Robin McKinley and Neil Gaiman. Might be a bit of a mismatch, but they both deal in fairytales…

This was actually a really hard one to come up with. I’ll be interesting to see what other people have thought up!

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is ‘Ten Bookish Things I Want to Quit’. Wait, there’s things about books that people might want to quit?!

Kidding, kidding, I totally have a list too.

1. Getting caught up in my latest shiny. It’d be so nice if I could manage to keep my attention on one book or series at a time. Or maybe a couple at a time.
2. Buying something and then not getting round to it. I’m sorry.
3. My ridiculous backlist of ARCs. I’m actually behaving myself better now, so maybe this is an ‘I Have Quit’ one.
4. Carrying like fifty books around the country when I travel. I have an ereader! I have no need to do this! Which leads to…
5. …Wanting to read every book but the ones I’ve got with me. Just no, brain. Just no. Behave yourself.
6. Being cranky about ebooks. I actually love my ereader! It is adorable and it can carry a lot of books. But lately, I don’t know, I’ve been cranky about reading in ebook and I’ve wanted to have something in my hands. (Except with my Kindle Voyage, because new shiny.)
7. Skipping bedtime reading. What’s with that? Come on, brain, you know that reading before bed is good for you.
8. Feeling guilty about ‘guilty pleasures’. You know what sort of book I’m talking about, probably. If you know me. But my guilty pleasure is another’s favourite book, and it’s silly to feel guilty about something that makes you happy, even if it’s a brief pleasure. (I actually wrote a whole post about this.)
9. Rebuying books to reread. Somewhere, I have a copy. Patience, self. You can wait.
10. Planning ridiculous reading lists… and consequently getting nothing read. Pressure works, sometimes, but not when I try and plan months ahead. Maybe plan the next book ahead, singular. But be flexible. Reading is meant to be fun, right?

Anyone else resemble these remarks? Heh.

This week’s theme is “Top Ten Books on my Fall TBR”. Well, my TBRs are generally a mess and I schedule these posts in advance, so as usual, this one is more guesswork than anything.

1. The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson. I actually just got this as an ARC. I probably shouldn’t have requested it, because I’m trying to reduce my NG ratio, but it was so tempting…
2. Queen of Shadows, Sarah J. Maas. Granted, I need to finish Heir of Fire first…
3. The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch. I feel due a reread!
4. The Dark Arts of Blood, Freda Warrington. Definitely time for some more deliciously gothic and ambiguous vampires.
5. The Girl With All The Gifts, M.R. Carey. Because it’s high time, darn it.
6. Permanent Present Tense, Suzanne Corkin. The next read for Habitica’s book club, and one I’ve been meaning to get to for a while.
7. Sparrow Hill Road, Seanan McGuire. Just got this one, but I’ve been meaning to read it for a while.
8. Santa Olivia and Saints Astray, Jacqueline Carey. Reread for the first one, first read for the second. I’ve also an urge to reread Phèdre’s trilogy, at least. We’ll see if I get chance.
9. Assassin’s Apprentice, Robin Hobb. I’m way behind with reading Hobb’s latest releases, and I feel like starting from the beginning and having a good old wallow.
10. The Salt Roads, Nalo Hopkinson. I just recently saw a glowing review of this, and it’s high time I got round to reading it, so it’s definitely high on my priority list.

What’s everyone else making grabby hands at? Special mention for me to Carry On, by Rainbow Rowell, and Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie, both of which are preordered.

This week’s theme from The Broke and the Bookish is… a freebie! So I’ve decided to tell you about my ten weird bookish habits/facts.

1. If I’m going to stop reading mid chapter, it has to be at a scene break, or the end of the first paragraph on a page.
2. The first paragraph on the page is not the right place to stop if it fills more than half the page.
3. I don’t like stopping on odd-numbered chapters.
4. I mark two chapters ahead with a bookmark. Sometimes there are five or six bookmarks in the book, all of them for points I haven’t reached yet.
5. I like to whisper the words to myself. I’m synaesthetic, so it adds an extra layer for me. The mouth-feel/taste of some words is just great — like “steps” and “stepped” and “crept” and “slipped” and…
6. I like reading statistics. But if I can’t have ’em accurate, I get sulky and won’t collect them anymore. So if I’m reading a book that I have in dead tree and ebook, I have to read one copy or the other. For the statistics.
7. I have the Kobo Reading Life badges for literally every time of day, which requires reading five times in each time period. I have literally read around the clock five times minimum with my Kobo.
8. I fidget while I read. Favourite fidget point, ever since I was tiny, has always been my stuffed hippo’s ears. She is on her second or third set of replacement ears… And she is a very well-read hippo.
9. I read standing up sometimes. I have a standing desk, and I’m also allowed to read during my volunteering shift, sooooo…
10. My teddies have a hammock above my bunk bed, at my parents’ house. They share it with books every night, just in case I wake up and need to read.

Anyone? Just me?

This week’s theme is all about what you’d put on a syllabus if you were teaching a 101 class. Being me, I’m going to pick fantasy work, because if I could get away with teaching a 101 class on this somewhere, I would.

1. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The quest adventure is a big staple of fantasy literature, and Sir Gawain is a good early example that demonstrates some of the later tropes. I’d possibly add Chrétien de Troyes, The Mabinogion, Malory, some other Arthurian stuff, because that was a huge influence on later fantasy fiction.
2. A Norse saga. I’d have to do some thought on which one, but the Norse stories were such a big influence, it needs to be considered.
3. William Morris. I haven’t read any of his books yet, which I know is a grave lapse, but I know that his work was important in the development of fantastical novels.
4. Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword. This one is probably my favourite, and it would amply demonstrate the way fantasy pulls from Celtic and Nordic mythologies.
5. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. Of course. Hugely influential. The Hobbit was first, but it’s the scale of The Lord of the Rings that later fantasy has tended to emulate.
6. C.S. Lewis. For a Christian-inspired fantasy, also common.
7. Ursula Le Guin, all the Earthsea books. My students would cuss at me, but it’s for their own good. Here fantasy starts engaging with those older, sexist tropes. Less explicitly, also with racial tropes — and we’d have to discuss the cover issues, where many covers have portrayed Ged as white.
8. N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. We’ve got the background. Now let’s start looking at stuff that’s by more diverse authors: we’ve had enough dudes on this syllabus, for sure, and Jemisin is also a person of colour.
9. Patricia Briggs, Moon Called. It’s also worth getting a look at the urban fantasy that’s emerged in the last couple of decades. It’s often dismissed into the genre of paranormal romance; would we be doing that if the author was male? (Glance at Jim Butcher: no. No, we wouldn’t.)
10. Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death. As I recall, this is post-apocalyptic and shows where fantasy and science can converge. It also discusses gender, sexuality and race issues, and it’s by a person of colour.

Oh, man, I would so like to teach this as a real curriculum. What’s everyone else been coming up with?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is Top Ten Authors we’ve read the most books from. It’s hard to tell on this one — Goodreads will only show me the authors I own the most books by, but let’s have a wild stab at it…

1. Jacqueline Carey. I own and have read almost all her books, which makes at least… 13 in total. That’s a good number!
2. Guy Gavriel Kay. I’ve only got one book by him I haven’t read yet, River of Stars.
3. Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm. I’ve read books by her under both identities, and there’s at least 13 on my shelves that I know I’ve read, so she’s probably high on the list.
4. J.R.R. Tolkien. I think I’ve read everything put out by either him or by his son after his death. I’m not sure how much that is, but I’ve read his academic work as well, so we’ll say he counts.
5. Jo Walton. I’ve read all but her most recent book, so she definitely counts.
6. Garth Nix. I haven’t even read all his books, but there were the seven Keys to the Kingdom books, the Old Kingdom series, another series… Yep, probably the most read author.
7. Tad Williams. I’ve read two quartets by this guy, he’s got to qualify.
8. Brian Michael Bendis. Ultimate Spider-man and some other comics.
9. Alistair Reynolds. Long due a reread, but yeaaaah, I read most of his books at one point.
10. Brian Jacques. I used to read the Redwall books exhaustively. I haven’t touched them in a long time, but there were at least a dozen. This one has to count! Tempted to do a nostalgia reread, too.

What about everyone else? This was surprisingly hard to think of…