Of the options for this week, the theme is “Top Ten Debut Authors Who Have Me Looking Forward To Their Sophomore Novel” or “Top Ten Sophomore Novels That I Loved Just As Much If Not More As The Author’s Debut”. Because I’m fickle, I’m going to do this one somewhat randomly based on both prompts.

1. Pacific Fire, Greg van Eekhout. I wasn’t sure about California Bones, but Pacific Fire won me over and I just had to get Dragon Coast.
2. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien. I mean, The Hobbit was okay, but I think it’s The Lord of the Rings that really cemented Tolkien’s reputation.
3. Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch. Every subsequent book has made me more of a fan of the series.
4. Crown of Midnight, Sarah J. Maas. I wasn’t sure if I was into the series until I read Crown of Midnight.
5. Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch. I loved The Lies of Locke Lamora, and I wasn’t sure if Lynch could keep it up. He could.
6. The Wrong Goodbye, Chris F. Holm. I was worried the second book would be too much like the first, that the fun wouldn’t hold out. It did!
7. Huntress, Malinda Lo. I liked this waaaay more than Ash.
8. The Blasted Lands, James A. Moore. This is a second book that I’m looking forward to. I know it’s out and has been a while. Shush. I’m behind.
9. Jacqueline Koyanagi. There’s gonna be more after Ascension, right? Right??
10. Seth Dickinson. Gimme more Baru!

I’m really bad at keeping track of debut authors and so on, so I’m gonna be interested to see what other people have come up with this week. Maybe I’d better keep some paper at the ready for taking notes…

This week’s prompt from Top Ten Tuesdays is a seasonal one — a Hallowe’en themed freebie. So here’s some things that scare me in books… perhaps not all traditionally scary.

1. When you just know a character is going to make the wrong decision. You know better than them, or you’re just smarter than them, and you can see them about to make a big mistake…
2. Tense moments in books in third person/multiple first person. You know the character can actually die, because they haven’t had to survive to tell you the story!
3. Knowing something a character doesn’t. Especially when there’s miscommunication going on. This one ranges from heartbreaking to embarrassing…
4. Temptation. You know, like Frodo with the One Ring. Gaaah. You can’t help them because they’re allegedly not real. You just have to watch.
5. Atmospheric moments. Suddenly, you’re getting a description of the weather, the atmosphere, the darkness pooling between the street lights…
6. When you know an author is not afraid to kill characters. Scott Lynch, I can’t trust you.
7. When a character betrays principles for a dubious higher cause. Aka the entirety of The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Gah.
8. Revelation to another character. “I accidentally killed your best friend and we fell in love and now I’m telling you that and you’re going to hate me.”
9. Misunderstandings. Like the above, only someone doesn’t stay to hear the full story, or somehow something else garbles the story.
10. That moment when you hear it’s going to be a movie. Right?

Yep, I’m a giant wuss and I’m not really into actually scary books, so a Hallowe’en theme for me was a bit of a stretch!

This week’s prompt from The Broke and the Bookish is “10 Wishes I’d Ask The Book Genie To Grant Me”.

Well.

1. Auto-approval on Netgalley for everything. Especially Tor.
2. Budget and unlimited space at local community library. Please?
3. Free publicity for the above. We need more readers.
4. A TARDIS for personal book storage. This one’s obvious if you know me at all… and hey, I could use it to travel to my partner’s and take all my stuff!
5. Digital and print copies in the same purchase. Wouldn’t bundles like this make life so much easier?
6. Time spent reading pauses “real life”. Then I could get soooo much more done.
7. More library cards. And more libraries, come to that.
8. A conversation with Mori from Among Others, when she’s 26. Seems like it might, you know, be relevant to me.
9. Ability to slap some characters and say no don’t do that. FitzChivalry Farseer, I’m looking at you.
10. The ability to read some books for the first time… again. ’nuff said, right? Some books, you just wish you could come to them fresh again.

I could probably keep going for a while on this topic…

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?