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.
I really do like when a Bookish Wishes post appears – it’s a nice excuse to look over my Bookish Wishes wish list, check what I might have picked up since, make some rearrangements, etc. I use wish lists to keep track of almost everything, especially books, and as strange as it is, I like the chance to do some ‘admin’ on them!
Bookish Wishes
The Vesuvius Club
Mark Gatiss
Genre: Historical Crime
Age: Adult
Published: November 1st, 2004
Meet Lucifer Lucifer has a charming countenance and rapier wit that make him the guest all hostesses must have. And most do. But few of his conquests know that Lucifer is also His Majesty’s most daring secret agent, at home in both London’s Imperial grandeur and in its underworld of despicable vice.So when Britain’s most prominent scientists begin turning up dead, there is only one man his country can turn to for help. Following a dinnertime assassination, Lucifer is dispatched to uncover the whereabouts of missing agent Jocelyn Poop. Along the way he will give art lessons, be attacked by a poisonous centipede, bed a few choice specimens, and travel to Italy on business and pleasure.Aided by his henchwoman Delilah; the beautiful, mysterious, and Dutch Miss Bella Pok; his boss, a dwarf who takes meetings in a lavatory; grizzled vulcanologist Emmanuel Quibble; and the impertinent, delicious, right-hand-boy Charlie Jackpot, Lucifer Box deduces and seduces his way from his elegant townhouse at Number 9 Downing Street (somebody has to live there) to the ruined city of Pompeii, to infiltrate a highly dangerous secret society that may hold the fate of the world in its clawlike grip.
Act Your Age, Eve Brown
Talia Hibbert
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Age: Adult
Published: March 9th, 2021
Eve Brown is a certified hot mess. No matter how hard she strives to do right, her life always goes horribly wrong—so she’s given up trying. But when her personal brand of chaos ruins an expensive wedding (someone had to liberate those poor doves), her parents draw the line. It’s time for Eve to grow up and prove herself—even though she’s not entirely sure how…
Jacob Wayne is in control. Always. The bed and breakfast owner’s on a mission to dominate the hospitality industry—and he expects nothing less than perfection. So when a purple-haired tornado of a woman turns up out of the blue to interview for his open chef position, he tells her the brutal truth: not a chance in hell. Then she hits him with her car—supposedly by accident. Yeah, right.
Now his arm is broken, his B&B is understaffed, and the dangerously unpredictable Eve is fluttering around, trying to help. Before long, she’s infiltrated his work, his kitchen—and his spare bedroom. Jacob hates everything about it. Or rather, he should. Sunny, chaotic Eve is his natural-born nemesis, but the longer these two enemies spend in close quarters, the more their animosity turns into something else. Like Eve, the heat between them is impossible to ignore—and it’s melting Jacob’s frosty exterior.
Flirting with Disaster
Naina Kumar
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Age: Adult
Published: January 14th, 2025
She needs a divorce from her husband—but a hurricane threatens to dredge up their stormy, passionate past in this sizzling reimagining of Sweet Home Alabama from the bestselling author of Say You’ll Be Mine.
It’s been years since Meena has seen her husband, Nikhil . . . years since they first laid eyes on each other back home in Texas, years since they eloped in Las Vegas and she felt true happiness. A high-powered lawyer on Capitol Hill, ready to move on (or at least, she thinks so) with another successful lawyer, Shake, Meena has returned home. This time, finally, to obtain a divorce.
But there’s one thing Meena couldn’t have accounted for: a hurricane forming in the Gulf, veering right toward them, giving them no choice but to hunker down in the home they had built together. Suddenly, she finds herself trapped amid gale-force winds and pelting rain with the man she once loved.
As they spend more time together, Meena begins to remember everything that drew her to Nikhil: His small-town charm, his thoughtful nature. . . his absurdly good looks. But things make sense with Shake. He’s steady and ambitious and wants exactly what she wants. She’ll stick to her plan, come hell or high water. But will her windswept heart make the right choice, when the storm settles and the eye passes over?
With sharp observations about second chances at love, ambition and Indian American identity, and with characters who share an undeniable chemistry, Flirting with Disaster is a modern romance with the sensibility of a classic.
The Burning Girls
C.J. Tudor
Genre: Horror – Thriller
Age: Adult
Published: January 21st, 2021
An unconventional vicar moves to a remote corner of the English countryside, only to discover a community haunted by death and disappearances both past and present–and intent on keeping its dark secrets–in this explosive, unsettling thriller from acclaimed author C. J. Tudor.
Welcome to Chapel Croft. Five hundred years ago, eight protestant martyrs were burned at the stake here. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And two months ago, the vicar of the local parish killed himself.
Reverend Jack Brooks, a single parent with a fourteen-year-old daughter and a heavy conscience, arrives in the village hoping to make a fresh start and find some peace. Instead, Jack finds a town mired in secrecy and a strange welcome package: an old exorcism kit and a note quoting scripture. “But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known.”
The more Jack and her daughter Flo get acquainted with the town and its strange denizens, the deeper they are drawn into their rifts, mysteries, and suspicions. And when Flo is troubled by strange sightings in the old chapel, it becomes apparent that there are ghosts here that refuse to be laid to rest.
But uncovering the truth can be deadly in a village where everyone has something to protect, everyone has links with the village’s bloody past, and no one trusts an outsider.
The Moon-Eyed People: Folk Tales from Welsh America by Peter Stevenson
Genre: Folklore
Age: Adult
Published: July 8th, 2019
A lone man wanders from swamp to swamp searching for himself, a wolf-girl visits Wales and eats the sheep, a Welsh criminal marries an ‘Indian Princess’, Lakota men re-enact the Wounded Knee Massacre in Cardiff and, all the while, mountain women practise Appalachian hoodoo, native healing and Welsh witchcraft.These stories are a mixture of true tales, tall tales and folk tales, that tell of the lives of migrants who left Wales and settled in America, of the native and enslaved people who had long been living there, and those curious travellers who returned to find their roots in the old country. They were explorers, miners, dreamers, hobos, tourists, farmers, radicals, showmen, sailors, soldiers, witches, warriors, poets, preachers, prospectors, political dissidents, social reformers, and wayfaring strangers. The Cherokee called Moon-Eyed People.’
Sleep Like Death by Kalynn Bayron
Genre: Fantasy
Age: Young Adult
Published: June 25th, 2024
New York Times bestselling author and TikTok sensation Kalynn Bayron returns to fairytales with a lush, thrilling and original YA Snow White retelling that brings a new and exciting voice to this familiar tale. Perfect for fans of Cinderella Is Dead.
Only the truly desperate – and foolish – seek out the Knight, an ancient monster who twists wishes into curses. Eve knows this first-hand: one of her mothers was cursed by the Knight and trapped in the body of a songbird. With the unique abilities to communicate with animals and conjure weapons from nature, Eve has trained all her life to defeat him.
With more and more villagers harmed by the Knight’s corrupt deals, Eve believes she’s finally ready to face him. But when Queen Regina begins acting strangely – talking to seemingly no one, isolating herself, and lashing out at the slightest provocation – Eve must question if her powers are enough to save her family and her kingdom.
Forging Silver into Stars
Brigid Kemmerer
Genre: Fantasy Romance
Age: Young Adult
Published: June 7th, 2022
Forbidden magic. Secret romance. Dangerous alliances. Enter the world of New York Times bestselling author Brigid Kemmerer’s electrifying series.
When nineteen-year-old Tycho, the King’s Courier, arrives in the remote village of Briarlock, he hopes to escape the demands of his new life in the royal court, where magic reigns for the first time in ages. He doesn’t expect to fall for a handsome blacksmith with a bruised heart.
After years of cruelty in his father’s forge, Jax never dared to dream of a better life — until a magic-wielding young lord shows him an enticing alternative. But when rumors of a rebellion reach Briarlock, Jax wonders who he can trust — and if he’ll even survive.
Jax’s best friend, Callyn, doesn’t trust anyone — especially not a handsome stranger with magic, which killed her parents years ago. When another royal emissary arrives, seeing a co-conspirator, Callyn finds herself embroiled in a plot that could lead them all to ruin. . .
As tensions flare throughout the kingdom, it won’t be long before everyone must choose a side.
War is brewing. Passions are building. And magic may doom — or save — them all . . .
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Carmen Maria Machado
Genre: Horror
Age: Adult
Published: October 3rd, 2017
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way
Bill Bryson
Genre: Non-Fiction – History – Language
Age: Adult
Published: January 1st, 1990
Only Bill Bryson could make a book about the English language so entertaining. With his boundless enthusiasm and restless eye for the absurd, this is his astonishing tour of English.
From its mongrel origins to its status as the world’s most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation; Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use.
Bill Bryson’s classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world’s language.
Horror Needs No Passport: 20th Century Horror Fiction Outside the U.S. and U.K.
Jess Nevins
Genre: Non-Fiction – Horror
Age: Adult
Published: August 12th, 2018
The first book to cover global horror fiction during the twentieth century, the decades in which the horror genre matured and came of age, HORROR NEEDS NO PASSPORT covers hundreds of authors and stories and novels from 72 countries. The great majority of these works have never been translated into English and are mentioned only slightly, if at all, in the standard horror genre reference books. Yet these stories and novels contain a wealth of high quality horror, whether written by Angolan authors or Uruguayan authors. It’s a shame that nearly all of these horror stories and novels are unknown to readers in the United States and the United Kingdom, as they would enjoy these works greatly if they could read them.
The book does not contain an over-arching narrative; the horror literatures of the world are far too varied for any one narrative to fit. Instead, each author gets their own one or two paragraph entry, placing them in the context of their time and place and describing what their horror fiction is about, why their horror fiction matters, and whether or not their horror fiction is worth reading.
Have you read any of these? If so, I’d love to hear what you thought of them! And let me know if you have any of these on your TBR, too.
Unwrapping Words 