According to Sam’s most recent post on the official Goodreads page for Top 5 Wednesdays, the meme is currently on a summer hiatus. While I fully understand that everyone has their own lives and busy schedules and that blogging, vlogging or running this kind of group can be extremely time-consuming, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when I saw that no new topics would be given for the entire summer. There seemed to be a few options of how to handle this: take a break from Wednesday posts for the summer; choose from older topics; or, find a new Wednesday meme. I’m still on the fence between the last two options.
While looking through some of the past topics that I’d never done before, the ones that stood out the most were those that focused on backlist books I haven’t read yet. I find these kinds of topics help me avoid feeling too repetitive by talking about the same books repeatedly. I’m now tentatively considering a summer mini-series showing some of the books that have been on my TBR for ages, but I haven’t decided yet if I want to do this every Wednesday, or intersperse other topics as well. If anyone has specific requests for topics or has a strong interest in seeing my backlist books, please let me know! For now, I’ve decided to following the posts I’ve made in the past about books that have been on my TBR for a very long time. I’m not including every single book since that would be a massive list, so I’m just picking a few of the highlights.
Top 5 Wednesday is a meme created by Gingerreadslainey on Youtube, and is now hosted by Sam at ThoughtsOnTomes. The official GoodReads group with the weekly topics can be found here.
1) The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson
I added this book, and actually all of the books listed here, to my TBR in December 2015. This was around the time that I started really getting into Goodreads and exploring the different features, so it was a lot of fun to try and find various recommendations on the site. This book is about a woman named Laurel, whose life is thrown off-course when a ghost appears in her room. The ghost seems to be her 14-year-old neighbour Molly, and following the ghost leads her to Molly’s body floating in her swimming pool. Convinced that this wasn’t a suicide like everyone else seems to believe, Laurel enlists the help of her sister Thalia to investigate, leading to her finding out more about her past, her marriage, and about Molly. This was the first Joshilyn Jackson book that I ever added to my TBR, and I’ve added several more over the years without even realizing that they were by the same author. I haven’t read it yet because I kept putting it aside in favour of other books that I wanted to read more, and I’ve also seen some very mixed reviews for it. It still sounds like an interesting story and I’d like to eventually give it a chance.
2) The Murderer’s Daughters by Randy Susan Meyers
I added this one to my TBR because the title sounded very intriguing. It is about two sisters, Lulu and Merry, whose father kills their mother and attempts to kill both of them. The girls spend the next 30 years of their loves trying to make sense of what happened, with one acting as if her father is dead and the other feeling compelled to help him. Their father is in prison, but both Lulu and Merry fear that his attempts to win parole might be successful. It’s another book for which I’ve seen very mixed reviews, but it sounds like such a unique premise. I love books that have a strong focus on family dynamics, so this definitely seems like something that would interest me. This book has been on my TBR so long that I had mostly forgotten about it. It wasn’t until recently when I unknowingly added another book by the same author that I remembered that I wanted to read this one too. I’m not sure how quickly I’ll be getting to this one, but at least now I remember why I wanted to read it in the first place.
3) Precious Thing by Colette McBeth
I’ve always found the covers of these three books somehow similar, and I’m not entirely sure how I managed to find all of them so close together back in 2015. It is about two friends, Rachel and Clara, who met when Rachel was new in class. They quickly became best friends and remain close, even as adults when Rachel seems to have everything and Clara’s life is spinning out of control. When Rachel’s editor assigns her to cover a police press conference, she is shocked to find out the subject — Clara has been reported missing, and no one knows what happened to her. The book is told from Rachel’s perspective, detailing their friendship over the years as well as the investigation into Clara’s disappearance. This book doesn’t seem to be very widely known on Goodreads, so I mostly forgot about it until I started looking through my TBR again. It’s also not currently available to me through my library, so it might be a tricky one to find even if I did want to read it soon. I’ll look out for it on Book Outlet at least, to see if I can grab a copy there instead.
4) Just What Kind of Mother Are You? by Paula Daly
Of all the books here, this is the one that I am most likely to read within the year. I have a copy of it and have been meaning to read it since last year. I had it incorporated into last year’s reading challenges but ran out of time, so I switched it into this year’s challenge instead. My mom also very recently finished it and really enjoyed it, which made me even more excited to pick it up. I have several of Paula Daly’s books on my TBR even though I haven’t read any of them yet. This one is about a woman named Lisa, an overwhelmed working mother, whose best friend’s 13-year-old daughter, Lucinda, goes missing. Lisa blames herself, and Lucinda is also the second teenage girl to disappear in the past two weeks from their small community. Faced with incredible guilt over the disappearance and public blame from the family, Lisa sets out to make up for her mistake. I don’t even have a good reason for why I’ve had this book on my list for three and a half years without picking it up, since it is exactly the kind of thriller I tend to enjoy. I am definitely planning to get to this one by the end of this year!
5) The Accidental Book Club by Jennifer Scott
I bought this one not too long ago from Book Outlet after remembering that I’ve had it on my TBR for quite a while. I tend to like books that have to do with books and reading, and this one just sounded fun. It is about a woman named Jean who starts running a book club for a group of six very different women after her husband passes away. Jean ends up taking in her 15-year-old granddaughter Bailey, whose parents are on the verge of divorce, and she turns to the women in her book club for support. I think the main reason I’ve put this one off for so long is because I need to be in the right kind of mood to read this kind of story, so I kept putting it aside for other books that interested me more at the time. Now that I have a copy though, it’s harder to keep that as an excuse. It’s another book that has very mixed reviews, and I’m a little on the fence because I’m not sure how much I’d really relate to a book about a woman trying to bond with her teenage granddaughter, but it also sounds like it could be an interesting story.
Abyssal Librarian 