Top Ten Tuesday: Books For People Who Liked Harry Potter

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

I've wanted to make a list like this ever since I saw one in a library somewhere as a kid -- "If You Liked Harry Potter" or something -- with a whole bunch of books on it that I had read and hated, and others that I had already read a million times (Chronicles of Narnia, I'm looking at you). I wanted a better one so much. Well, here's mine!

1. The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander

2. Fablehaven by Brandon Mull

3. Monster Blood Tattoo / The Foundling's Tale by D. M. Cornish

4. Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine

5. Gregor the Overlander (and following series) by Suzanne Collins (Better than Hunger Games, imho.)

6. Howl's Moving Castle and sequels by Diana Wynne Jones

7. Finding Angel by Kat Heckenbach

8. On The Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness by Andrew Peterson. Don't let the title fool you, it's actually really good. And the following books in the series are even better.

9. Dragonspell by Donita K. Paul (The third book of this series is the best one.)

10. By Darkness Hid by Jill Williamson

Top Ten Tuesday: Rewind

 

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Top Ten Favorite Places To Read

Oh, am I going to have fun with this one! :)

1. Sitting on a fallen log, a nice, tall, fat one. It's lovely atmosphere. Unfortunately in the east the experience is quickly ruined when you're bitten all over by chiggers and ticks and mosquitoes and biting flies. Best to do it out west, where it's drier. It doesn't rain much at all in the summer in the Northwest, contrary to popular belief, and the trees are bigger.

2. I used to like to read in the car much more than I do now (I'd usually rather look at the scenery, honestly). But if there's nothing to look at but cornfields, then reading in the car is awesome! (While someone else drives. . . er, duh!) If the other people in the car are introverts and happy to be quiet, the car is a great place to read. The only other thing you could be doing is looking out the window or listening to the radio, neither of which stands out as especially useful, so no one can scold you to stop wasting your time, and spoil all your fun.

3. Reading while you wait for your laundry to finish is also good, for the same reason.

4. Under a weeping willow. They're so beautiful, and shady, and quietly breezy, and you feel as if you've already one foot in Faerie before you even sit down.

5. Inside a tent on a rainy day. The somber, cool light, the lulling patter of rain, and the cozy feeling of being outdoors in the wet and still staying dry I love.

6. In the desert, in the shade under the palms near a river or spring, while you wait for the heat of the day to pass. Pour water over your head if you like, only try not to get your book wet.

7. Sprawled on the floor. I don't know why reading on the floor is so much more fun than sitting in a chair, but it is.

8. In bed, in the dark, while everyone else is sleeping and no one knows what you're doing. If they're blissfully asleep, they have no reason to disturb you.

9. At a shady picnic table in a quiet corner of a public botanic garden, like the one in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

10. I've never had a window seat, or a tower-shaped room, but I think it would be really cool to combine them. It would be a really romantic place to read.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books You'd Like To See Made Into A Movie

 

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Everyone knows that books are (almost) always better than the movies made from them. Just the same, it's  fun to see them acted out or animated on the screen.

1. Replication: The Jason Experiment by Jill Williamson. It would have to be animated. 55 clones of varying ages? Hard for an actor to pull off. . . even with motion capture, I bet. The voice acting would even be tough. I don't know. It really wouldn't work, but if it could, it would be amazing.

2. The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien. They're making the Hobbit. I wish they could make this one too!

3. Fablehaven by Brandon Mull. This would be SO COOL as a movie. Everything about it is right -- it's straightforward, fast-paced, and fun. If they could do well with it, more in the fashion of the first two HP movies and less in the fashion of the Spiderwick Chronicles, I think lots of people would want to see it.

4. The Door Within by Wayne Thomas Batson. I hope this happens eventually. And that they can let the story stand on its own. Christian movies always seem to require some kind of added-in didactic message that ruins the whole thing. No one goes to the movie theater for a sermon. They go for an awesome story! Not everything has to be "useful."

5. The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. YES PLEASE. I'd say Forest Born, but I think it's too introverted to translate well as a movie.

6. The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett. (Unless it's already a movie, and I don't know.) Basically, just because Susan is in it, and she's awesome.

7. Warrior Cats: Into the Wild by Erin Hunter. This would be animated. Maybe anime. It would be unusual, because so many movies with cats portray them as evil (so unfair).

8. Foundling, Lamplighter, and Factotum by D. M. Cornish. One movie for each, and they would have to be made in Australia because that would be really neat. (And have Alan Rickman as Sebastipole! Though he's maybe a bit old.) They would also have to forget the stupid audience-pandering that seems to ruin every movie made nowadays and just do a decent job for once! (Case in point: the Prince Caspian movie. SUSAN DOES NOT KISS CASPIAN, okay? They only put that in because they thought it would make teenage girls more excited and thus rake in more money.{In MBT, what would they do to add a love interest? Make Rossamünd kiss Threnody? *makes face*}  And they also added more battles for the boys. {There's already plenty of violence in MBT so that shouldn't be an issue, but you know, it probably would be anyway. They might take a leaf filmstrip out of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and slim down battle scenes that are in the book to make room for nonsensical added scenes that they made up.} Just, come on. I get that books and movies are different. So make adaptations, not fanfics! /end rant)

9. Auralia's Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet. It would be so beautiful.

10. Matched by Ally Condie. Romance. Forbidden poetry. I'm not usually into dystopian or romance, but I liked this one. :)

What about you? What books would you like to see made into movies?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Were Totally Deceiving

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

1. The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien. When I was 14, everyone I knew was talking about it, and I had no idea what it was so I (foolishly) asked my father about it. (This was before Wikipedia.) Confused by the title, he (I only found this out much later) thought I was talking about the Lord of the Flies (HORRORS) and told me he'd read it in school and that it was the worst book ever written.  I believed him, at first, but what other people were saying did not match up. At all. And then the movie came on TV. I was hooked. So, so, so unbearably, marvelously hooked. The Lord of the Rings became my favorite book ever, in triumph over its misunderstood title. Peter Jackson's movies may have flaws (of which poor Faramir is the most wronged victim), but because they're what brought me to the books, they are pure epic win as far as I'm concerned.

2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling. The back cover of my paperback copy says Harry blows up Aunt Petunia. WRONG. It's Aunt Marge. Gur.

3. The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander. I picked up this book a couple times and thought it was childish, and Taran was irritating. It took a third time for me to finally read far enough in to see that it actually gets pretty good later (once Eilonwy and Fflewddur show up). I love Fflewddur, and I can totally sympathize with him over the constantly bursting strings on his harp. If I had one like his, the strings would probably bust a lot too. . . It's just so easy to make a story I'm telling someone more interesting, that sometimes I don't even realize I'm adding to it until it's too late. :P

4. The Door Within, by Wayne Thomas Batson. I thought this book would be an allegory or something so I shied away from reading it. But, it isn't an allegory, and is actually pretty amazing.

5. The Clockwork Three, by Matthew Kirby. The back cover makes this book sound a bit boring, but the cover art is pretty enough that I decided to check it out anyway. It turned out to be pretty interesting and well-thought-out -- a great steampunk story. (I know, that doesn't tell much, but it's been awhile since I read it and I can't get my copy back.)

6. The Guernsey Literary And Potato-Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. The back cover and the decidedly peculiar acquaintance who gave me this book led me to believe it would be a really interesting story about World War II. It was boring. I couldn't get into it at all. So I skipped through to see if it got better, and encountered a graphic depiction of someone killing a cat. Anyone who knows me, knows this is the last straw. I slammed it shut.

7. Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. Everyone was raving about this book one way or another. They all seemed to love it or hate it. I expected it to at least be interesting. After 200 pages struggling not to fall asleep, occasionally enlivened by some irritating negative comment or exasperating misinformation about my favorite place ever, I started flipping through, looking for the funny parts. IMO, Twilight would have been much better if it didn't take itself so seriously. There's so much potential for comedy in the idea that it's no wonder everyone makes fun of it.

8. Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. The back cover doesn't describe this story well at all! It describes Wizard Howl as "lecherous". I mean, what?

9. Monster Blood Tattoo Trilogy, by D. M. Cornish. (Why is this on every single list I write? Write about different books already, you say? Nope. These are just Too. Insanely. Awesome.) It was the title that confused me here. They were always on the shelf in the library, beckoning, but the name sounded alarmingly creepy, so I ignored them. In light of that, switching the name used for the U.S. versions was a fairly good idea, even though the new name ("The Foundling's Tale") isn't as interesting.

10. Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Did anyone else picture CDs when they first heard of it? :P

Top Ten Tuesday: Childhood Favorites

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

It was hard limiting this to just ten. :P

1. Animorphs. I LOVED this series of books. It was the first "sci-fi" I'd ever read that wasn't intolerably stupid. (It was ridiculous, oh yes, but it was the fun kind, not the stupid kind!)

2. Wayside School Stories, by Louis Sachar. I think there were three books like this, and I loved all of them, especially the stories about the missing 19th story.

3. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. My favorite was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, especially the part where Eustace becomes a dragon, and is saved by Aslan.

4. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, by J. K. Rowling. This one was the only one I had. I was banned from reading Harry Potter at one point, which I obeyed for awhile, since I only had one book anyway, but it didn't last. I was never exactly the most blindly obedient child. . .

5. The Babysitters' Club. I read lots of these, and I liked how funny they often were.

6. Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I was always on the lookout for more of these, I only had two of them and read them till they practically fell apart.

7. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This was the first really long book (well, I thought it was long) that I read, and I still remember finishing it, sitting in my favorite pine tree. I SO wanted a secret garden of my own, so I went out in the woods and pretended I had one.

8. Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo.

9. The Magic Treehouse books. (These were when I was younger, most of the list has been coming from when I was 11 or so.)

10. My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George. I wanted to go out in the woods and make my own tree house, like the boy in the story did.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On forestmaiden's TBR List For Winter

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Most of these I already have, or else hope to get on Kindle. E-books have won me over -- they're not exactly properly REAL, but you can have as many as you like without taking up any space, which is absolutely brilliant.

1. Replication: The Jason Experiment by Jill Williamson. I watched the book trailers for this and I'm totally excited, can't wait to read it!
2. The Fiddler's Gun by Pete Peterson. Again, this sounds too awesome -- the plot sounds like something by Lloyd Alexander, one of my favorite authors. And the Kindle version is only 99 cents. *jumps up and down* Do want!
3. Heartless by Anne Elizabeth Stengl. I'm very curious about this one, it sounds like a beautiful fairy tale.
4. North! Or Be Eaten by Andrew Peterson. I've already started reading this one. A cool thing about books by Andrew Peterson is that, when he includes a song in the story, it reads like a true song and not just a regular poem, because he's a musician as well as a writer. Lots of fun wordplay here too.
5. From Darkness Won by Jill Williamson. I loved the first two books and I can't wait to see where she takes the characters next.
6. The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan.
7. Arrow by R. J. Anderson.
8. The Monster In The Hollows by Andrew Peterson. Obviously, after I finish N!OBE, I'll have to read this one. :)
9. Blaggard's Moon by George Bryan Polivka. Pirates! I just got this book, but my brother has it right now, and he'll probably finish before I even start (when does that ever happen? LOL).
10. Starfire: The Mending by Stuart Vaughn Stockton. Not sure what to say about this one. It sounds really interesting, though.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books To Read During Halloween

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Happy Halloween!

1. Lamplighter, by D.M. Cornish. I read this for the first time around Halloween, and it's very Gothic and eerie. Perfect! The first and third of the series are very good as well -- lots of monsters and fascinating characters. Factotum even has a masquerade ball.
2. Any Harry Potter, of course!
3. Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen. I love the scene where Catherine scares herself finding the mysterious note, only to discover it's a laundry receipt. It's the kind of thing I might do. ;)
4. Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones.
5. On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness, by Andrew Peterson.
6. Rapunzel's Revenge and Calamity Jack, by Shannon Hale. After reading these and seeing all the beautiful art, I wanted to go out costumed as Rapunzel -- she's awesome.

That's all I can think of -- I didn't sleep much last night, and my brain won't cooperate.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Top Ten Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time

1. The Lord of the Rings: the first fantasy I ever read and my favorite book of all time. The first time reading it was jaw-dropping amazing, and I wish I could experience the story with such fierce intensity over and over again.

2. Lamplighter, by D.M. Cornish: the first time I read this it drove me wild and scared me silly. (Shouldn't have been reading it so late at night, lol. :P) And the cliffhanger is a killer.

3. The High King, by Lloyd Alexander -- The surprises in this story were so beautiful.

4. Harry Potter. 'Nuff said. :)

5. Isle of Swords, by Wayne Thomas Batson -- I guessed the secret long before story's end, but it was (and is) still an awesome ride.

6. The Hunger Games -- I'm not sure I ever want to read it again. I don't think it's possible for me to enjoy a reread of this, and I really don't want to try. But it was very good the first time. :)

7. Curse of the Spider King, by Wayne Thomas Batson. This was loads of fun to read the first time, but for some reason, just isn't as interesting to read again. :(

8. Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie Tolan

9. Wings, by Aprilynne Pike: I like this one a lot, even though I don't usually like paranormal romance. But I've lived in Crescent City, and on my second read the occasional little inaccuracies in the setting stuck out and bugged me.

10. The entire Fablehaven series, particularly Secrets of the Dragon Sanctuary, which has a twist so shocking it left me with my mouth hanging open for a full five minutes before I could go on reading. Very cool books, these. :D