I always enjoy the seasonal topics posted by That Artsy Reader Girl as part of Top Ten Tuesdays. Here are ten titles I’m hoping to get to this summer (even if tradition dictates I’ll maybe finish only 20% of this list before fall:

1. The Year of Second Chances by Lara Avery
2. Elizabeth Acevedo’s Family Lore
3. The Wager by David Grann
4. Jana Goes Wild by Farah Heron
5. Brian Selznick’s Big Tree
6. Tell Me How It Ends by Quinton Li
7. Susannah Hoffs’ This Bird Has Flown
8. Enter the Body by Joy McCullough
9. The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
10. Jami Attenberg’s I Came All This Way to Meet You

How about you? What books are you looking forward to reading this summer?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share Books That Feel like Summer.

To me, summers include vacations, road trips, times at the beach or pool, camp, and high school jobs. Here are some books, five of which I recommend and five of which I hope to read, that include those items:

Read and Recommended:

1. Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright
2. Summerland by Michael Chabon
3. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell
4. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
5. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

On My Radar:

1. I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back by Ben Blatt
2. Beach Read by Emily Henry
3. The Rest of the Story by Sarah Dessen
4. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
5. Mrs. Nash’s Ashes by Sarah Adler

How about you? Are there books that just scream summer that you’re hoping to read or that you’ve finished and recommend?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesdays at That Artsy Reader Girl follows up our must-read quirks by asking about the Things That Make Me Instantly NOT Want to Read a Book. Here are ten of my literary turn-offs:

1. A description of “thriller.” Almost always too dark and intense for me.
2. Overly flowery language. Particularly irksome in audiobooks, because apparently I’ve trained my eyes just to skip over lengthy lists of adjectives in print.
3. Repetitive phrasing. Again, an audiobook peeve. My parents love the Spenser books by Robert Parker, who never met a conversation where it was not necessary to include “he said,” and “she said,” after every line of dialogue, but it drives me to distraction. Did he need them to hit a word count for each book?
4. Solving the mystery in the first chapter. If I can figure it out in your first ten pages, there’s no point to my reading the other 250.
5. Books set during war. We know beloved characters aren’t making it to the end of the story, and that’s already real life. I don’t want that in my books.
6. Unlikeable main characters. Again, I have to interact with people I don’t like off the page. Why would I want to give them any of my reading time?
7. Ambiguous endings. If reviews talk about twists or offer up comparisons to “The Lady or the Tiger,” I’m out. I want a positive, conclusive end to my books. (Exceptions will be made for the middle book of a planned trilogy, since tradition dictates those will end in an unsatisfactory way.)
8. Publisher branding. When Rudi and I visited Paris, we walked into the bookshop around the corner from our hotel only to be greeted by an entire store filled with white spines, because they were all put out by the same publishing house. I felt too overwhelmed even to try to pick something out and immediately turned around and left. (I had more luck in a general bookshop later on).
9. Books featuring animals as main (or vital secondary) characters. Like war novels, 99% of these are not going to end happily.
10. Books by authors I’ve deemed insipid. I will never read another Nicholas Sparks or Mary Higgins Clark novel again.

How about you? What makes you immediately close a book?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl focuses on the things that make me instantly want to read a particular book. Here are ten of mine:

1. It’s been recommended by someone I know who shares similar tastes in books.
2. It’s written by an author I enjoy. (These include Jasper Fforde, Sherry Thomas, Rainbow Rowell, and T.J. Klune, among others.)
3. It’s part of a series I like. (The Veronica Speedwell books come to mind.)
4. It’s on a topic I’m interested in. (This more pertains to nonfiction than fiction, obviously.)
5. It’s got a clever title. (I love me some puns.)
6. I’ve heard or read an interesting interview with the author.
7. It’s set someplace interesting.
8. It’s got a catchy opening line/paragraph/scene.
9. Or, if it’s a collection of poetry, I like whatever poem I randomly flip open to.
10. It’s got a cute cover. (You can’t judge a book by its cover, but it sometimes can make you want to pick it up and look at it more.)

How about you? What instantly draws you to certain books?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic at That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share the things that keep us from our books, whether good or bad:

1. Volleyball: Although I do keep a novella in my volleyball bag, it doesn’t get dipped into all that often.
2. Gardening: I know I could plug in my audiobook, but time in my plot is more a “listen to a baseball game or music” sort of activity.
3. Hanging out with friends: The very best reason not to read.
4. Streaming tv: Once upon a time, when nothing appealed, I’d turn off the tv. Now there always can be *some*thing on.
5. Sleeping: More napping than actually sleeping. Sleep is important, or, at least, that’s what they keep telling me.
6. Shopping: Again, another activity that could be done whilst listening to an audiobook, but I just usually don’t.
7. Riding a bike: One of the major drawbacks of this mode of transportation.
8. Thinking: My brain processes information audibly, which means it’s really hard to layer written words on top if I’m thinking about something too much.
9. Driving locally: I can listen to audiobooks on long, highway-based trips, but not if I’m driving somewhere that’s direction-intensive.
10. Playing games on my phone: This is probably my least excusable interference.

How about you? What gets in the way of your reading time?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share the first ten books we pull from our shelves.

Here are the first ten I grabbed from piles/bags near our couch (which admittedly include a good number of my library books):

1. In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune
2. Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li
3. The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise by Colleen Oakley
4. An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten
5. Check, Please!: Sticks and Scones by Ngozi Uzaku
6. Not Your Villain by C.B. Lee
7. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
8. I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg
9. Lark and Kasim Start a Revolution by Kacen Callender
10. She-Hulk: Jen, Again by Rainbow Rowell, with illustrations by Rogê Antônio & Luca Maresca

The Wind in the Willows, which I’m behind on a readalong for, is the only one of these I’ve finished. Have you read any of them and do you recommend them?