Top Ten Tuesday: Books with One Word Titles

 

 

Welcome to this week's edition of Top Ten Tuesday which is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week is the theme is books with one word titles!

Hogfather by Terry Pratchett - I have reread this book at Christmas time for the last couple of years. Chances are I will reread it again at the end of this year.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell - My first and, so far, only Maggie O'Farrell. I do need to read more!

Sweetheart by Sarah Mayberry - I love Sarah Mayberry's books and this was a fun read.

Jilted by Rachael Johns - Another favourite Aussie author!

Circe by Madeleine Miller - Second week in a row that I have had Circe in my TTT

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi - I will always remember reading this while I was in South Africa.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld - Feels like a long time since I read this book.

Eyrie by Tim Winton - I haven't read that many Tim Winton books. I feel like I should read more but I haven't loved the ones that I have read.

Bellagrand by Paullina Simons - I loved The Bronze Horseman. This book is the second prequel. Unfortunately, I didn't love it anywhere near as much.

Floodtide by Judy Nunn - Another Aussie author, and another one I have only read one book by.

Have you read any of these books with one word titles?

Bookish Quotes: The school library

When I listened to this passage from Breath by Tim Winton, I was reminded of my own adventures in the school library, although I never found a boyfriend there (my lack of success with men started early!). For me, the stories I read taught me about the lives of people in times gone by. I remember devouring as many Jean Plaidy novels I could, learning all about queens of England. How about you? What do you remember learning about from the books in your school library?

The quote comes from pages 77-79.

I did my share of whining when the new school year began, but in truth I didn't really mind going back. There was no more swell that summer, no opportunity to test myself any further, and the days began to hang heavy. Within a week of the term commencing, I rediscovered the aisles and recesses of the Angelus school library. There was nothing like it in Sawyer and the only other collection of books I'd seen was out at Sando's. During my first year of high school I'd turned to reading as a kind of refuge, but that second year it became a pleasure in its own right.

I started with Jack London because I recognized the name from Sando's shelves. After I saw Gregory Peck gimping across the poop deck on telly I tried Moby Dick, though I can't say I got far. I found books on Mawson and Shackleton and Scott. I read accounts of Amundsen's race south against the English and the ruthlessness that made all the difference. I tried to imagine the Norwegian eating the very dogs that hauled him to the Pole - something harsh and bracing about the idea appealed to me. I read about British commandos, the French Resistance, about the specialized task of bomb disposal. I found Cousteau and then mariner-authors who recreated the voyages of the ancients in craft of leather and bamboo. I read about Houdini and men who had themselves shot from cannons or tipped in barrels over Niagara Falls. I fed on lives that were not at all ordinary, about men who in normal domestic circumstances might be viewed as strange, reckless, unbalanced. When I failed to get more than sixteen pages into the Seven Pillars of Wisdom I thought the failure was mine.

It was there in the stacks that I met the girl who decided without consultation that I was her boyfriend. She was a farm girl from further out east and she boarded at the dreaded hostel. Like me, she came to the library to escape, but she was already bookish. Her name was Queenie. She was handsome and wheat-haired, with the slightly intimidating shoulders of a competitive swimmer, and there was plenty about her to like, yet I suspect I only really liked her because she liked me first. Although I did very little to encourage such baffling interest, I somehow got used to it, and even came to expect it. She slagged off my books of manly derring-do while I razzed her for her taste in stories about crippled girls overcoming cruel odds with the aid of improbably gifted animals.