Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Wish List Additions

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is whatever I want! I’ve blogged before about how I manage my reading life. I used to have a problem with impulse-buying books. I solved that problem by using a wish list. Whenever I come across an interesting book, I write it on the list and leave it there for weeks (or months, or years). Every few months, I go through the list and delete the books that no longer appeal to me. Here are ten books that I recently added to my wish list. I may or may not ever read them. 

Recent Wish List Additions

Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church – Lauren Drain

Lauren spent her early years enjoying a normal life with her family in Florida. But when her formerly liberal and secular father set out to produce a documentary about the WBC, his detached interest gradually evolved into fascination, and he moved the entire family to Kansas to join the church and live on their compound. Over the next seven years, Lauren fully assimilated their extreme beliefs, and became a member of the church and an active and vocal picketer. But as she matured and began to challenge some of the church's tenets, she was unceremoniously cast out from the church and permanently cut off from her family and from everyone else she knew and loved.

A History of Women in 100 Objects – Maggie Andrews & Janis Lomas

The history of the world has been told in objects. But what about the objects that tell the history of women? What are the items that symbolize the journey of women from second-class citizens with no legal rights, no vote and no official status to the powerful people they are today? And what are the objects that still oppress women, even now? From the corset to the contraceptive pill, the bones of the first woman to Rosa Parks's mugshot and the iconic Mary Quant cape, A History of Women in 100 Objects documents the developing role of women in society through the lens of the inanimate objects that touched women's lives, were created by women or that at some time—perhaps even still—oppressed them.

The Loneliest Girl in the Universe – Lauren James

Romy Silvers is the only surviving crew-member of a spaceship traveling to a new planet, on a mission to establish a second home for humanity amongst the stars. Alone in space, she is the loneliest girl in the universe until she hears about a new ship which has launched from Earth—with a single passenger on board. A boy called J.

Their only communication with each other is via email—and due to the distance between them, their messages take months to transmit across space. And yet Romy finds herself falling in love.

But what does Romy really know about J? And what do the mysterious messages which have started arriving from Earth really mean?

Sometimes, there’s something worse than being alone . . .

Medieval Bodies: Life, Death, and Art in the Middle Ages – Jack Hartnell

In Medieval Bodies, art historian Jack Hartnell uncovers the complex and fascinating ways in which the people of the Middle Ages thought about, explored and experienced their physical selves. In paintings and reliquaries that celebrated the—sometimes bizarre—martyrdoms of saints, the sacred dimension of the physical left its mark on their environment. In literature and politics, hearts and heads became powerful metaphors that shaped governance and society in ways that are still visible today. And doctors and natural philosophers were at the center of a collision between centuries of sophisticated medical knowledge, and an ignorance of physiology as profound as its results were gruesome.

Motherhood: A Novel – Sheila Heti

In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.

Never That Far – Carol Lynch Williams

After her Grampa dies, the last place Libby expects to see him is sitting on the edge of her bed. But that’s what happens the night after the funeral.

Even more surprising is that Grampa has three important things to tell her: first, that she isn’t alone or forgotten—“The dead ain’t never that far from the liv­ing,” he says; second, that she has “the Sight”—the ability to see family members who have died; and third, that there is something special just for her in the lake. Something that could help her and her father—if she can find it.

Libby and Grampa try to help her father heal from his grief, but it will take all of Libby’s courage and her gift of Sight to convince her father that the dead are never truly gone.

Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay

It was a cloudless summer day in the year nineteen hundred.

Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a group of three girls climbed into the blaze of the afternoon sun, pressing on through the scrub into the shadows of Hanging Rock. Further, higher, till at last they disappeared.

They never returned.

Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey – Jackie Kay

Once, as a small child, she realizes that her skin is a different color from that of her beloved parents, Jackie Kay embarks on a complicated and humorous journey to treasure the adoptive family that chose her, track down her birth parents—her Scottish Highland mother and Nigerian father—and embrace her unexpected and remarkable life.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid

Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now?

Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband, David, has left her, and her career has stagnated. Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s Upper East Side apartment, Monique listens as Evelyn unfurls her story: from making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the late 80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way. As Evelyn’s life unfolds through the decades—revealing a ruthless ambition, an unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love—Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the actress. But as Evelyn’s story catches up with the present, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail – Bill Bryson

Back in America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson decided to reacquaint himself with his native country by walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Georgia to Maine. The AT offers an astonishing landscape of silent forests and sparkling lakes—and to a writer with the comic genius of Bill Bryson, it also provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings.

For a start there's the gloriously out-of-shape Stephen Katz, a buddy from Iowa along for the walk. Despite Katz's overwhelming desire to find cozy restaurants, he and Bryson eventually settle into their stride, and while on the trail they meet a bizarre assortment of hilarious characters. But A Walk in the Woods is more than just a laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson's acute eye is a wise witness to this beautiful but fragile trail, and as he tells its fascinating history, he makes a moving plea for the conservation of America's last great wilderness.

Have you read any of these? What did you think?