Top Ten Tuesday: Oldest Books on My TBR

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

This was a fun one! I don’t keep track of the release dates of all my books, and I’m sure I have some other older ones around here somewhere, but these are the ten oldest books I could find.

Full Prompt: Oldest (aka Earliest Published) Books On My TBR (submitted by Nicole @ BookWyrm Knits)

Top Ten Oldest Books on my TBR

The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier

Genre: Horror – Gothic – Classics
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
Published: January 1st, 1952

“Anyone starting this book under the impression that he may sleepily relax is in for a shock…continually provokes both pity and terror.” —The Observer (UK)

A classic of alienation and horror, The Birds was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film. The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man’s dominance over the natural world. The mountain paradise of ‘Monte Verità’ promises immortality, but at a terrible price; a neglected wife haunts her husband in the form of an apple tree; a professional photographer steps out from behind the camera and into his subject’s life; a date with a cinema usherette leads to a walk in the cemetery; and a jealous father finds a remedy when three’s a crowd …

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Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s by Kim Newman

Genre: Nonfiction – Horror
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Published: January 1st, 1984

Now over twenty years old, the original edition of Nightmare Movies has retained its place as a true classic of cult film criticism. In this new edition, Kim Newman brings his seminal work completely up-to-date, both reassessing his earlier evaluations and adding a second part that assess the last two decades of horror films with all the wit, intelligence and insight for which he is known. Since the publication of the first edition, horror has been on a gradual upswing, and taken a new and stronger hold over the film industry.

Newman negotiates his way through a vast back-catalogue of horror, charting the on-screen progress of our collective fears and bogeymen from the low budget slasher movies of the 60s, through to the slick releases of the 2000s, in a critical appraisal that doubles up as a genealogical study of contemporary horror and its forebears. Newman invokes the figures that fuel the ongoing demand for horror – the serial killer; the vampire; the werewolf; the zombie – and draws on his remarkable knowledge of the genre to give us a comprehensive overview of the modern myths that have shaped the imagination of multiple generations of cinema-goers.

Nightmare Movies is an invaluable companion that not only provides a newly updated history of the darker side of film but a truly entertaining guide with which to discover the less well-trodden paths of horror, and re-discover the classics with a newly instructed eye.

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Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Genre: Fantasy
Age: Adult
Format: ebook
Published: August 1st, 1989

This is where the dragons went. They lie… not dead, not asleep, but… dormant. And although the space they occupy isn’t like normal space, nevertheless they are packed in tightly. They could put you in mind of a can of sardines, if you thought sardines were huge and scaly. And presumably, somewhere, there’s a key…

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Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film by Harry M. Benshoff

Genre: Nonfiction – Film
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Published: October 1st, 1997

One of the few books to address the horror film from any kind of critical position.. Unique – The first history of the horror film to approach it from a queer perspective.. Written with detail and thoroughness – covers all eras of the horror film and correlates specific types of movie monsters to the historical social conditions which produced them.. Explores how popular culture encodes and demonizes queerness within the generic format of the horror film.

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London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd

Genre: Nonfiction – Travel
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Published: December 5th, 2000

London: The Biography is the pinnacle of Peter Ackroyd’s brilliant obsession with the eponymous city. In this unusual and engaging work, Ackroyd brings the reader through time into the city whose institutions and idiosyncrasies have permeated much of his works of fiction and nonfiction.

Peter Ackroyd sees London as a living, breathing organism, with its own laws of growth and change. Reveling in the city’s riches as well as its raucousness, the author traces thematically its growth from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Anecdotal, insightful, and wonderfully entertaining, London is animated by Ackroyd’s concern for the close relationship between the present and the past, as well as by what he describes as the peculiar “echoic” quality of London, whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.

London confirms Ackroyd’s status as what one critic has called “our age’s greatest London imagination.”

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Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer

Genre: Nonfiction – True Crime
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Published: July 1st, 2003

A multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. This is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.

Jon Krakauer’s literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under The Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by two Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this “divinely inspired” crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, polygamy, and unyielding faith. Along the way, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America’s fastest-growing religion, and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty-thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five “plural wives,” several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamentalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers, and preach that any day now the world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.

Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fanatical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism’s violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the most successful homegrown faith in the United States, and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior.

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Georgette Heyer’s Regency World by Jennifer Kloester

Genre: Nonfiction – History
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Published: October 6th, 2005

Georgette Heyer fans will delight in Jennifer Kloester’s definitive guide to her Regency the people, the shops, clubs and towns they frequented, the parties and seasons they celebrated, how they ate, drank, dressed, socialized, voted, shopped and drove. A fun read for any Heyer fan.

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A Hunger Like No Other by Kresley Cole

Genre: Paranormal Romance
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Published: March 28th, 2006

A fierce werewolf and a bewitching vampire become unlikely soul mates whose passion will test the boundaries of life and death.

After enduring years of torture from the vampire horde, Lachlain MacRieve, leader of the Lykae Clan, is enraged to find the predestined mate he’s waited millennia for is a vampire. Or partly one. Emmaline Troy is a small, ethereal half Valkyrie/half vampire, who somehow begins to soothe the fury burning within him.

Sheltered Emmaline finally sets out to uncover the truth about her deceased parents—until a powerful Lykae claims her as his mate and forces her back to his ancestral Scottish castle. There, her fear of the Lykae—and their notorious dark desires—ebbs as he begins a slow, wicked seduction to sate her own dark cravings.

Yet when an ancient evil from her past resurfaces, will their desire deepen into a love that can bring a proud warrior to his knees and turn a gentle beauty into the fighter she was born to be?

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The First Days by Rhiannon Frater

Genre: Horror – Post Apocalyptic
Age: Adult
Format: Paperback
Published: August 14th, 2008

Katie is driving to work one beautiful day when a dead man jumps into her car and tries to eat her.  That same morning, Jenni opens a bedroom door to find her husband devouring their toddler son.  Fate puts Jenni and Katie—total strangers—together in a pickup, fleeing the suddenly zombie-filled streets of the Texas city in which they live. Before the sun has set, they have become more than just friends and allies—they are bonded as tightly as any two people who have been to war together.  During their cross-Texas odyssey to find and rescue Jenni’s oldest son, Jenni discovers the joy of watching a zombie’s head explode when she shoots its brains out. Katie learns that she’s a terrific tactician—and a pretty good shot.  A chance encounter puts them on the road to an isolated, fortified town, besieged by zombies, where fewer than one hundred people cling to the shreds of civilization.  It looks like the end of the world. But Katie and Jenni and many others will do whatever they have to to stay alive. Run, fight, pick each other up when they stumble, fall in love…anything is possible at the end of the world.

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Shakespearean Gothic by Christy Desmet and Anne Williams

Genre: Gothic – Literary Criticism
Age: Adult
Format: Hardback
Published: September 27th, 2009

As evidenced by the vampires, werewolves, and other frights overrunning the best-seller lists, the Gothic remains immensely popular. This collection of essays traces the roots of the Gothic to an unexpected source: eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare. Through close attention to literary, cultural, and historical detail, the contributors demonstrate that even as Shakespeare was being established as the supreme British writer, he was also being cited as justification for early Gothic writers’ abandonment of literary decorum and their interest in the supernatural.

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I’d love to hear if you’ve read any of these and what you thought, and what the oldest books you have on your TBR are!