Top 10 Tuesday 10th September

Welcome to another edition of Top 10 Tuesday! Originally created and hosted by The Broke & the Bookish, Top 10 Tuesday now lives with Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. There’s a different bookish related topic each week and today we are talking:

10 Books On My TBR I’m Avoiding & Why

1. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson. Okay, this one has probably been on my TBR the longest! The first two books are amazing and when the author died, I just wasn’t ready to let this series go at all. I know it’s since gone on with someone else writing it but for me, that’s different. I’ve just never been ready for the last book the original creator was able to write.
2. War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Haha, it’s a billion pages. Okay, like 1400 or something. But it’s also a billion pages of Russian tangents and suffering. I find it quite intimidating even though I read and really liked Anna Karenina. It’s probably been sitting on my shelf about 8 or 9 years! Along with a whole bunch of other classics that I bought with great intentions and never got around to.
3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Okay I’ve actually tried to read this twice. Both times I never got further than about page 50. It has so many amazing reviews and so many people sing its praises, I’ve kept it because one day I’ll push through that section and I’m sure it’ll be amazing. Eventually.
4. City Of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. I’m not avoiding this as such, but it’s just been so long since I read the first couple of books that I feel like my memory of what happened is pretty poor now. I really feel like I should read them again before reading this one…..but it’s not something I have time for right now. So this one sits on the shelf until I feel like I can tackle all three of them again together.
5. The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett. I actually only picked up a copy of this one this year – free on iBooks. But it’s about a thousand pages and a) that’s not something I kind of have time for right now especially if I then find I want to go on with the series, as there’s a couple more books that are probably also 1000 pages and b) I actually can’t really read huge books on my iPad. I can read a normalish sized paperback, 250-300p but anything longer than that and I start to get a headache. So I either have to read it in chunks or forget about the eBook version and pick up a paperback copy somewhere.
6. Obsidio by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff. Yup, this book again! I feel as though it makes my list every week! I loved the first two in this series and I’ve owned the third since it was released. And yet I cannot pick it up yet. It’s partially the fact that I’m not ready for it to end. I have this real reluctance when it’s the final book. Some of it is the size too, although I know that the format means the size is a little misleading.
7. The Thornbirds by Collette McCulloch. This is relatively new to my TBR pile as well, I think I bought it about 2 years ago when I had this idea that I was going to read more Australian classics that I felt had passed me by. I am still yet to pick it up (or any other Australian classics tbh) and I think again, it’s the size. It’s just intimidating when I have so many other books to read, even though I know that is basically a rubbish excuse.
8. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Like Obsidio this book seems to make it onto my list every other week. I think it’s the subject matter that makes me baulk with this one now, because I know that it’s supposed to be quite traumatic. And I have to wait for a time when I know I can mentally cope with that sort of thing. I avoid a lot of books about grief and/or cancer for the same reasons.
9. Fallen & Torment by Lauren Kate. I bought these so many years ago, from some bargain place for 5 bucks each. I have culled books a couple of times since then and last time I actually had these on the list to get rid of and then removed them at the last moment. I’m not sure why, because mostly everything I’ve heard suggests these are not going to be my sort of thing. But there’s a curiosity there as well, I think. I like the covers and one is a really beautiful hardback, which is not common here. So they sit on my shelf and wait to see if I decide to finally read them or finally cull them.
10. Armada by Ernest Cline. I actually really loved Ready Player One even though I didn’t really expect to. I was surprised just how entertaining I found it. I ended up with this book but I haven’t read it yet…..I’m not sure I will like it as much as I liked RPO and so I haven’t been able to pick it up. I know every book is different and I can’t expect to like every book an author puts out the same. But I just don’t feel like tackling this one just yet.

What a fun topic this was. I think that it’s fun to examine the TBR sometimes and why we choose what we choose – and why we don’t choose things. For me, it does seem like a lot of it is about length and a lot of it is about not wanting to let things go! I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone is has been avoiding!

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