Top Ten Tuesday - Chronologically speaking!

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week the theme is Book Titles Featuring Ordinal Numbers (Ordinal numbers are numbers that define an item’s place in a series. For example: first, second, third, fourth, tenth, fourteenth, thirty-third, one hundredth, etc.) (submitted by Joanne @ Portobello Book Blog)

I have chosen to twist the topic a bit. I am going to do books that are the number in the series by which I mean the title might be the fifth book in the series for example. At least one of them will be ordinal! 

1. An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister - Last year I read and adored this book. The second book in the Love Notes series is due to be released in July! I am so looking forward to it!

2. Us Against You by Fredrik Backman - This is the second book in the Beartown trilogy. I am hoping to read the third one soon! (my review)

3. The Deadly Dispute by Amanda Hampson - I read and loved all three books in this series last year, of which this is the third. The fourth book is out next month! (my review)

4. Everyone in This Bank is a Thief by Benjamin Stevenson - This is the fourth book in the Ernest Cunningham series. I have only read and loved the first two but I do know that I will read this one eventually

5. Safe Harbour in Pelican Crossing by Maggie Christensen - I do really enjoy Maggie Christensen's books. This is the fifth book in the Pelican Crossing series. The eighth book in the series is out early next month (my review)

6. The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters - This is the sixth book in the excellent Amelia Peabody series. I unintentionally stopped reading this series at book number 14. It has been more than 15 years since I read that book but I do have such fond memories of it, and I feel as though I could pick the next book without too much difficulty.  (my review)

7. The Missing Sister by Lucinda Riley - This is the seventh book in the Seven Sisters series. It feels a little bit ironic that there was an eight book released!

8. Written in My Own Heart's Blood by Diana Gabaldon - This is the last book I read in the Outlander series. I don't know if I have the energy to pick up the next book in the series at the moment.

9. To the Nines by Janet Evanovich - I continued to read up to book 19 before I deliberately stopped reading this series. This book was the last one that I rated as a 5 star read. It was all downhill from here.

10. Witness in Death by JD Robb - I read up to book 17 in the series before I unintentionally stopped reading them. Book 62 in the series was recently published so I don't see myself ever catching up on this series. (my review)

Spell the Month in Books: November

 

Reviews From the Stacks

For 2025 I have decided to have a go at Spell the Month in Books which is hosted at Reviews From the Stacks. The link party opens on the first Saturday of the month, but I won't be posting until after that as I already have other things scheduled every Saturday and for the first two Sundays of the month. I will be sharing this post with Sunday Salon hosted at Readerbuzz.

The idea is that you use the titles of books to spell the month name. The theme for November is Nostalgia so I am going to use books that I read more than 10 years ago. Quite a few of them have brought back memories for me. Let's get started!

N - Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss - I don't read much fantasy these days, but I adored this book when I first read it! And then I was super eager for the second book which I liked, and super eager for the third book.....which has never arrived and I don't think it ever will.

O - One for the Money by Janet Evanovich - I thought the early books of the Stephanie Plum series were absolutely hilarious. I remember laughing until I cried in the middle of the night at the antics. Then, as the series went on, they were less hilarious and more silly. I finally gave up reading them at book 19. 

V - Virgin River by Robyn Carr - I loved the series so much I read the series, which at the time was 18 books long, and then reread half the series again. I can't think of another author I have done that with. Despite that, I still haven't read the last book in the series which came out 8 years later. (My post about the series)

E - Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell - I loved this book so much!(My review)

M - Me Before You by Jojo Moyes - I used to cry a lot at books, but this is one that I remember ugly, ugly crying at it. It was so good! There's supposed to be a movie coming out of the follow up book soon too! (My joint review)

B - Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant - I used to read a lot more Medieval and Renaissance books than I do these days. This was a good one!

E - Emma (Vol 1) by Kaoru Mori - Influenced by other bloggers at the time, I was reading two graphic novels series, although I guess this one is more technically manga. One was the Fables series by Bill Willingham and this was the other series. (My review)

R - The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - My review of this book was one of the first I ever wrote.

The theme for December is Giftable!

Spell the Month in Books: September

 

Reviews From the Stacks

For 2025 I have decided to have a go at Spell the Month in Books which is hosted at Reviews From the Stacks. The link party opens on the first Saturday of the month, but I won't be posting until after that as I already have other things scheduled every Saturday and for the first two Sundays of the month. I will be sharing this post with Sunday Salon hosted at Readerbuzz.

The idea is that you use the titles of books to spell the month name. The theme for September is Something to Savor – longer books (define as you will) OR ones that have been on your TBR for a long time. I am going to do something a bit different from the theme this month. My twist is that I am going to use the concept of long in a few different ways

Let's get started!

S - Song of the Sun God by Shankari Chandran - I chose this one because we are about to visit Sri Lanka. It is a destination that has been on my bucket list for a long time and I am really looking for

E - Emma by Jane Austen - Written so long ago but I still haven't read it

P - Persuasion by Jane Austen - Although I have read both Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice

T - Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich - I have been keeping a spreadsheet of all of the books I have read for the last 21 years which is a long time! This is the first title that is on my list of books read that starts with T (not counting the ones that begin with the word The)

E - The Endless Forest by Sara Donati - This is the final book in the Into the Wilderness series, which are all long books!

M - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - I listened to this so long ago it was on cassette tapes. Funnily enough I got to the last cassette, and it was damaged, so I ended up having to go to the library to read the last few chapters!

B - Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth - Part historical fiction but also part retelling of Rapunzel fairy tale where she has to let down her long hair

E - The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde - I loved the Jasper Fforde books especially the Thursday Next books, but it has been a long time since I read this author

R - The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - one of the first books I ever reviewed around 20 years ago which is so long ago

October's theme is Trick or Treat – Books that you feel strongly about whether positively or negatively. Should be a bit easier month with the only challenge being two O books that meet the prompt!

Top Ten Tuesday: Fancy fonts

 

 

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This 

week the theme is

Typographic Book Covers (Book covers with a design that is all or mostly all words. You can also choose to do books with nice typography if that’s easier!) (Submitted by Mareli @ Elza Reads)


It is interesting when you look at trends in covers. If we look at historical romance as an example. Not too long ago most covers were clinch covers with women in gorgeous dresses but these days it isn't as standard. Now, there are font covers or cartoonny in amongst the big dresses.


I haven't focussed on just one genre, but here is my Top Ten Tuesday post featuring typographic book covers.

One for the Money by Janet Evanovich - The reality is that you could have picked any one of the Stephanie Plum books as they are pretty much all typographic covers!

Love Stories by Trent Dalton - Given that this is a selection of very short stories, this cover makes sense as there isn't one single story to tell

Someone I Used to Know by Paige Toon - Plenty of rom-coms have wordy covers!

The Year the Maps Changed by Danielle Binks - This cover is very eye catching.

The Great Passage by Shion Miura - This book is all about the words, inside and out!



The People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry - All of Emily Henry's covers have been wordy so far.

Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston - Such a fun cover and book!

Normal People by Sally Rooney - Quite a few of the covers for this book have bold typography on the cover.

Don't You Forget About Me - Another author who has a lot of these style of covers.

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes - This cover does not convey the emotional nature of this book at all!

Do you like typographic covers?

Top Ten Tuesday: From draft to published

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week's theme is Spring Cleaning Freebie (for example, books you’re planning to get rid of for whatever reason, book’s you’d like to clean off your TBR by either reading them or deciding you’re not interested, books that feel fresh and clean to you after winter is over, etc.).

My choice is to clean out a draft blog post from a few weeks ago. The theme on February 23 was books which made you laugh and I had created a list of potential choices but I was too busy with work to put any words in place or pictures or anything else and so it was still sitting in draft unpublished.

Pratchett, Pratchett, Pratchett  - doesn't really matter which book really..

Jasper Fforde - I was a big fan of the Thursday Next books.

Beach Read by Emily Henry - My romance reading has completely changed over the years. Once upon a time I read mainly historicals, with some paranormal and the occasional contemporary romance. Now I read a lot of contemporary romance, with some historical and no paranormal at all. This was a fun, read in one sitting contemporary

Jenny Colgan is great at the funny story with a lot of depth. I have really enjoyed a couple of her series!

Marian Keyes -another author that makes me laugh, especially her early books. The later ones not so much!

The Amelia Peabody mysteries by Elizabeth Peters  - an eccentric archeologist family gallivanting around Egypt, stumbling onto mystery after mystery! So much fun.

The Prenup by Lauren Layne - a recent fun contemporary read

Chocolate Cake for Breakfast by Danielle Hawkins - So many contemporary women's fictions novels have the balance  between romance, issues and humour just right! This author gives us a great Kiwi spin on the genre!

The early books in the Stephanie Plum series were makes you cry you are laughing so hard. The later ones make me roll my eyes in exasperation, but I had to include her because of those early books.

I mentioned contemporary romance novels earlier in this post, so it's only right that I includes a historical novelist as well. Tessa Dare makes me laugh every time I read one of her books!

Six Degrees of Separation: Phosphorescence to Hot Six

 Welcome to this month's edition of Six Degrees of Separation, which is a monthly meme hosted by Kate from Books Are My Favourite and Best.  The idea is to start with a specific book and make a series of links from one book to the next using whatever link you can find and see where you end up after six links.  I am also linking this post up with The Sunday Salon, hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz.

This month the starting point is a book called Phosphoresence by Julia Baird. Actually it's full title is Phosphorence: On Awe, Wonder and Thing That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark. It does sound interesting, even if it isn't my normal type of book. It was, however, quite a tricky title to start a chain with.

In the end I started thinking about what does the word phosphoresence mean, which lead me to the word glow. I was sure that years ago I had a book by a YA author that was called that but I couldn't find any reference to it anywhere so maybe I was misremembering. Instead I continued to ponder those two words and that lead me to think about things that glow (or at least they are represented that way in cartoons and movies). This is turn led me to the idea of nuclear power which uses uranium which in one form is known as yellowcake which leads me to the book of the same name by Margo Lanagan! Phew! That was quite a lot of thinking to get me to that first link.

Margo Lanagan also wrote a book about selkies, creatures from Scottish myth, called either Sea Hearts or The Brides of Roll Rock Island depending on where it was published. This is a book I have used before in Six Degrees and the book I was thinking of linking too next is the same one I used last time, so I had to take a different turn.

One of my favourite  fairy tale retellers in Kate Forsyth and I have picked her book The Beast's Garden which is a fairytale retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in Nazi Germany. 

A book that I read last year, set in the immediate aftermath of WWII in Germany was Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees. Obviously there was plenty of food mentioned in this one!

The book I am currently reading is called A New York Secret by Ella Carey which features a young woman who is vyiing to become a chef in a New York restaurant during WWII, and again features lots of food. My review of this book will be up later this week.

From here I took an unexpected turn!  One of the characters in A New York Secret is called Tom Morelli, and so I couldn't go past the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich. One of the two main male characters in this series is a cop called Joe Morelli. Now the Stephanie Plum books start with a book called One for the Money and continued through to Twisted Twenty-Six before she stopped using the numbers to name the books.  I stopped reading at Notorious Nineteen. It seems only right to choose Hot Six for this meme.

Next month's starting point is going to be Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I Have Read the Most Book By

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

I am soooo excited! I have been keeping a spreadsheet of the books that I have read since 2014. For a long time I would also use it to keep track of when and where I acquired books, what series I was reading and what the new books were in each series, for my reading challenges and more. These days though, it really is just my log of what I have read. But for a question like this, it really comes into it's own! Hello, pivot tables!

The question for this week's TTT is which authors have you read the most books by. I therefore have 14 years of worth of data to analyse. Sounds like fun right!

Nora Roberts/J D Robb - with a whopping 59 titles read published under either the name Nora Roberts or J D Robb, this is the author that I have read the most over the last 14 years. The interesting thing is that over the last 4 years I have only read three Nora Roberts books, and I haven't actually read a J D Robb novel since 2009. I am up to book number 17 in the In Death series. Given that book number 50 just came out I don't think I will be catching up any time soon. This cover is from Sea Swept, the first book I ever read by Nora Roberts

Janet Evanovich - This is another case of a reader who I have read a lot of books by that I don't really read at all any more. I have read 45 books which includes her standalone romances and a copy of the shortlived series. I did read 19 of the Stephanie Plum books, but I couldn't take it any more. I was a Morelli cupcake from the beginning, but I would be okay with Stephanie choose Ranger if it just meant that she was picking one of them!

Robyn Carr - This author comes in third place, mainly due to the fact that I have reread the entire Virgin River series more than once, and I would again. As much as I love the VR series, I haven't really been that impressed by the standalone books or other series.

Lisa Kleypas - I have read 34 books by this author. At one stage I was pretty much up to date but then I haven't read that much for the last few years and so got a bit behind. This book is one of the rare standalone books. You don't hear a lot about this book but it is one of my favourites.

Mary Balogh - This one surprised me in some ways, because I wouldn't have thought I had read so many books but according to my handy spreadsheet I have read 24 books by her. The interesting thing on this author is that I haven't rated any of these books at more than a 4/5 so her books are of a pretty consistent standard.

Jill Shalvis - This is another author I have read 24 books by. I read one earlier this year for the first time but it didn't blow my mind so not sure if that was just that book! I do have fond memories of several series so it isn't time to give up just yet.

Elizabeth Chadwick - Oh, I do enjoy Elizabeth Chadwick's medieval historical fiction. I loved her William Marshall books. Really I don't think there are any books I haven't enjoyed. It is therefore surprising that I am a few books behind. Need to get back to her books.

Alexander McCall Smith - AMS's books are always very soothing reads, so I don't think it is surprising that I have read so many of his books - at last count 21. Most of those are the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books although I have read other books by him as well. I will say that these are still my favourite style of covers for this series.

Elizabeth Peters - This was another that surprised me, and then I was reminded that it has been many years since I read any of the books in the Amelia Peabody series and I haven't finished it yet. I don't really know why because I did love this series.

Julia Quinn - Another surprise entry in the list as I wouldn't have thought I would have read 20 books from this author, and there are still plenty more available, although it has been quite some time since I read any of her books. I am wondering if the upcoming Bridgerton series on Netflix may inspire me to get back to reading her books.

My most read Aussie authors were just outside this top 10 and they were for Kelly Hunter and Rachael Johns. I have a Rachael Johns book on my bedside table right now so her numbers are still on the rise.

I do find it a bit curious that there are so many romance authors on this list, but I think it is because they often write series or linked books, and they publish regularly.

Which authors made your list!

Sunday Salon: Stuck in a series vortex

This morning I finished reading Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich, part of the long-running Stephanie Plum series. I find myself in a pensive mood thinking about why it is that I keep reading series beyond the point of pure enjoyment. Whilst this post is not going to be a review of the book as such, it may contain thoughts about this book, the Stephanie Plum series as a whole, and reading series in general.

I have a tendency to have a really hard time to make a conscious decision to let a series go, in much the same way as I struggle with DNF'ing a book. There are tons of series that I have let drop off, but that was never actually a conscious decision because I wasn't enjoying the series anymore. It is more likely to be that I just didn't request the next book in the series from the library, or I borrowed it and didn't get to read it so had to be returned unread.

The idea of saying 'that's it, no more' to a series like Stephanie Plum is difficult because there was a time when I loved this series. I used to buy the books as they came out, and did this up to book 12, which is about when I decided that I didn't want to buy the books anymore but I was still happy to keep borrowing them from the library. Notorious Nineteen was marginally better than the last couple of books, but I still hadn't gotten to the point yet where I couldn't add my name to the request list once it was added to the library catalogue.

When I think about this series in particular, there are a few things that I think about.

I wonder if someone picked up this book as their introduction to the Stephanie Plum series if they would find it hysterically funny in the same way as I found the first few books in the series. Is it just not laugh out loud funny anymore because there are so many familiar scenes that seem to play out in each book: the cars that blow up, the whole Babe vs Cupcake thing with Ranger and Morelli, the fact that Stephanie couldn't apprehend a fly most of the time, Grandma Mazur's quips and Lula's constant state of hunger. The only element that is normally present that was missing this time was the animal humour - thank goodness! There's only so many times that a monkey giving someone the finger is funny - and for me that number was zero.

As an aside, I can't imagine ever picking up book 19 in a series without having read the previous ones, but apparently it happens!

I also wonder what impact if any the movie has had for readers of the series. In my imagination, I think I do see Katherine Heigl as Stephanie but the same isn't true for the characters who play Ranger and Joe. I still have my own image of what it is that they both look like.

I have contemplated rereading the few books of the series to see if they are actually as funny as I remember them being. The first time around, I would be laying in bed reading the books literally crying with laughter. And that wasn't just once, it was multiple times per book. I encouraged people I knew to read them and I know that they passed them onto their friends too.

I guess I am a little reluctant to try the reread in case it really does turn out that either they aren't as good as I remember them being, or that as a long time reader of the series I am now a little jaded by all the repetitive shenanigans. Whichever way it is, I don't want to spoil the memories that I currently associate with the earlier books.

Perhaps if I knew there was an end in sight for the series it would make it easier to go back to the beginning with a less pessimistic attitude, but as far as I can see the plan is for this series to keep going and going. All good books have a beginning, a middle and the ending. Perhaps the issue with this series in particular (but there are some other series where the same can be said to be true) is that the middle has been going for so long now that it is sagging badly, and the fight to get to the end is just going to be too uphill to make it.

What about you? Do you find yourself getting sucked into the series vortex where you just can't quite let go? 


Currently Reading

The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty, A Lady by Midnight by Tessa Dare and listening to A Taste for It by Monica McInerney.

Up Next

Taking chances by Deborah Burrows, The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion