Top 10 Tuesdays: Books I’ve Read/Want to Read Because of Top Ten Tuesday

I guess now is the time where I have to confess that I’m really, really bad at keeping up with other people’s TTT posts! I occasionally browse through some of them if I remember to, but not consistently enough to really say that I take recommendations from them. I often find that the other blogs that I do end up looking at either have such similar taste to me that the books are ones I’ve already read, or else they are so radically different from my tastes that I wouldn’t necessarily be interested. Also, and this may be a bit hypocritical, I tend to prefer blogs where there is at least some kind of text or explanation in the post about the books chosen. Unless there is a clear and immediately obvious connection to the topic (ie. the theme is covers that contain a certain element or colour, alphabetical prompts, etc.), I’ve often found myself looking at blogs that contain only pictures of the covers and wondering how the book relates or else what the blogger likes about it. The reason I say it’s a little hypocritical is because I’ve definitely veered more toward image-only posts within the past year or so myself, but in my own posts I tend to use images only when my choices are books I’ve already discussed in detail repeatedly or when they are an obvious fit. For this week’s prompt, I decided to specifically look back at others’ TTT posts about their favourite books of 2022, and their Most Anticipated lists for the first and second half of this year, and specifically pick out some books that I hadn’t heard of before that I thought might interest me. Each book choice is linked to the blog post of where I found it, although some books were definitely emntioned by several blogs.

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

1) Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer (found on UnderTheBookCover)

This book was listed as a most anticipated release for the second half of the year, and I’d never heard of it before! It is apparently based on the author’s viral TikTok series about a woman named Evie who becomes an assistant to a notorious villain, and even develops a crush on her evil boss all while trying to find out w ho is trying to sabotage him. I have literally never been on TikTok nor do I have any interest in it so I had no idea about this author’s series, but I love books that play on the whole hero/villain dynamic, such as Nimona, the Renegades series, and Henchgirl. I’ve also seen that this book has been compared to a mix of The Office, which I love, and Once Upon a Time. It just seems so fun, and an interesting take on the typical office setting. I’m glad I saw this book on the list , since it became an immediate addition to my own TBR!

2) The Reformatory by Tananarive Due (found on this post by Mark Joseph Jochim)

I’ve heard this author’s name mentioned a few times by different Youtube channels, but don’t really know much about her books in general. This one was mentioned in Mark’s post about his most anticipated books for the second half of this year. This book is about a 12-year-old Black boy named Robbie who is sentenced to six months at a reformatory school in the Jim Crow South for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town to defend his older sister. Robbie has the ability to see ghosts, but his talent soon gives him a window into the horrors that happened at the reformatory, including boys going missing and worse. Meanwhile, Robbie’s sister Gloria is trying to gather every family member and connection they have to try to find a way to get Robbie out. This book is apparently based on a real relative of the author’s and the infamous Dozier School for Boys. I don’t know much about this setting or time period, so this seems like it could be a very interesting book to try.

3) The Fake Mate by Lana Ferguson (found on Lindsey Reads)

This book was mentioned in Lindsey’s post about her most anticipated books for the second half of this year, and it was one of the only ones that I had never heard of before. It is about a woman named Mackenzie Carter whose had nothing but bad dates lately, but her grandmother is obssesed with finding her a perfect mate to settle down with. Mackenzie decides that the only way to get her grandmother off her case is to tell her that she’s met someone, and blurts out the name of the first man she sees: Noah Taylor, a grumpy cardiologist at the hospital where she works. Noah has spent his entire life hiding the fact that he is a wolf shifter and facing all the stigma surrounding being an unmated alpha, but when an anonymous tip threatens to out him just as Mackenzie asks him to be her fake boyfriend, it seems like fate. I was initially a bit put off by the wolf shifter aspect of this book, but the premise reminds me quite a bit of The Love Hypothesis with a bit of a paranormal twist and it sounds so fun!

4) It’s Not a Cult (found on TheBookDutchesses)

This one is cheating very slightly because I actually saw this book mentioned elsewhere within the past week. I think it was on a list of Book of the Month predictions, but I’m not sure. When I saw it again on this blog’s post about their most anticipated books for the second half of the year, I took it as a sign to add it straight to my TBR. This book is about a woman named Glinda who moves back to her childhood home with her mother, only to discover that her mom has joined a cult and fallen for its leader, Arlon. When Glinda learns that the cult will turn her family’s home into their commune, she decides to infiltrate it to find out what’s really going on, and soon realizes that there are more sinister things than she first imagined. In order to save her mother, she’ll have to come to terms with her own traumatic history and repair her relationships with her two sisters as well as her friend and coworker Troy. I find cult stories fascinating, but I was especially intrigued to see several reviews mention that this book is similar in tone to the Finlay Donovan series, which is not at all what I expected. I’m very curious to try this one.

5) Find Him Where You Left Him Dead by Kristen Simmons (found on ItStartsAtMidnight)

This blog’s post of most anticipated releases for the second half of this year had so many intriguing books that I hadn’t heard of! It was hard to limit myself to just one choice. I was drawn to this one especially because of the interesting cover. This book is about a group of friends who started a game four years ago, but one of them died. In their senior year of high school, the four survivors are summoned by the ghost of their dead friend to return to restart the game they never finished, a game that drags them into a hellscape of Japanese underworlds where they have just one night to complete seven challenges otherwise they will be stuck there forever. Although these friends were once close, they now can’t stand each other but the challenges demand that they work together, and once again, there is a risk that not everyone will make it out alive. This book has been pitched as a Japanese-inspired Jumanji, which sounds so cool! It’s a little on the shorter side at under 300 pages, but I’m definitely intrigued enough to try it.

6) Close Encounters of the Murderous Kind by Marissa Shrock (found on The Rustic Reading Gal)

To be honest, I wasn’t really expecting to get any recommendations from this post of Rustic Reading Gal’s Top Books of 2022 because our tastes seem quite different. There was one more book that I’d been intrigued by but got a little put off when I saw it was tagged as Christian Fiction, which is just not my thing. However, when I went a little further down the page I found this cozy mystery which looked interesting. It is about a woman named Bobbi Sue who can’t wait for summer to be over so she can leave her hometown and start using her journalism degree to find some more exciting stories. On her way home from a movie, she stops to help an injured dog and sees something that looks like an alien, but then a light flashes and it is gone. She decides that she must have imagined it and chooses not to tell anyone, but when she slips up and tells her friend Hemi, he shows her a similar story from Close Encounters. When a well-known man from her town is found dead close to where she saw the alien, Bobbi Sue knows that she can’t stay quiet. I’m a little put off by how short this book is since it is just 230 pages, but it sounds like it could be very fun to read. I don’t read a lot of books involving aliens nor a lot of cozy mysteries, but this one might be interesting.

7) Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott (found on Leah’s Books)

Again, this one is cheating a little since I’ve seen this book around before and even recently meant to add it to my TBR after seeing it at Indigo while I was on vacation. When I saw it on this blog’s post about Favourite 2022 Debuts, I realized I had completely forgotten about it and immediately went to add it to my TBR. This book is about the Yaga siblings, Bellatine and Isaac, who have been estranged since childhood but are reunited upon learning that they have inherited Thistlefoot, a sentient house on chicken legs. The home arrives from Russia with a sinister figure known as the Longshadow Man, who has tracked it to America along with secrets from the past. As the siblings embark with Thistlefoot on a cross-country tour of their family’s traveling theatre show, the Longshadow Man follows to sow destruction. The Goodreads reviews seem to suggest that this is the kind of book you either absolutely love or hate, which has me a little nervous to try it, but I’m very curious to check it out at some point.

8) A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid (found on Read All the Things!)

I don’t know why this author’s name was so familiar to me. I thought this was a debut, but even when I checked and saw that it wasn’t, I hadn’t heard of her previous two books. I found this book on this blog’s post about the Best YA Books due out in the second half of this year, and it immediately caught my attention. This book is about a girl name Effy who has always been haunted by visions of the Fairy King, but found solace in the pages of Angharad, an epic about a mortal girl who falls in love with the Fairy King and then kills him. Effy’s well-used copy is all that is keeping her going through her first term at a prestigious architecture college, so when the author Emrys Myrddin’s family announces a contest to design the late author’s house, Effy feels that it is her destiny. Upon her arrival, she finds the house nearly an impossible task and it has also become home to Preston Heloury, a literature scholar who is studying Myrddin’s work and determined to prove that she was a fraud. As the two rivals investigate the author’s legacy and piece together clues found within the house, they uncover dark forces conspiring against them, both mortal and mystical. This book seems to have so many of the elements that I tend to love, including fairy tale vibes, academic rivalry, and digging into a famous author’s secrets. I’m very excited to try this!

9) Burlington by Heather Dixon (found on Molly’s Book Nook)

This was another author’s name who was oddly familiar to me, even though this is her debut and I’d never heard of it before. I found it on Molly’s list called 8 Summer Books on My Preorder List, and was immediately intrigued by the cover. This book is about a woman named Mae who is surprised to be accepted into the clique of beautiful and rich mothers at Riverpark Elementary, and invited to be part of their unofficial neighbourhood watch. When one of the mothers disappears and then another, Mae must decide whether it is more important to fit in or to uncover the truth. For some reason, I love books that deal with “playground politics” so this seems like something I might enjoy. The synopsis is a little on the vague side, but I guess there isn’t much more that really could be said for this kind of plotline. This book is out in a couple of weeks, and it seems this author also has another book out late in October, which oddly enough is about a summer at the lake house. I kind of feel like the timing of these should have switched so the summer book was published in summer and the schoolyard politics book in fall, but of the two, this is the one that interests me much more anyway so I’m glad it’s coming first.

10) The Fiction Writer by Jillian Cantor (found on Bloggin’ ‘Bout Books)

This was yet another author’s name that was familiar to me, but at least this time it was for a valid reason. I have this author’s YA romance book on my TBR and didn’t even realize it was by the same person, and I’d also seen her Gatsby-inspired historical fiction. This book is by far the most appealing to me of all of her releases since it is a Gothic thriller inspired by Rebecca, which is right up my alley. This book is about an author named Olivia whose most recent novel has flopped and is currently struggling with writer’s block, so when her agent offers her a ghostwriting opportunity, she jumps at the chance. Olivia must interview Henry Asherwood, a reclusive billionaire to help write a book that reveals a secret that involves Daphne du Maurier and Henry’s grandmother. The more Olivia digs into Henry’s family’s past, the more she finds herself in a gothic mystery of her own. Rebecca is one of my all-time favourite classics and I am always interested to read books that are inspired by it! This book is not out until late November, but I’m really looking forward to trying it.