TOP TEN TUESDAY: Auto Buy Authors

 

The topic this week for Top Ten Tuesday hosted at The Broke and the Bookish is Auto Buy Authors. Since I don't actually buy many books, this is as much a list of  MRE (must read everything) as it is auto buy. 

In the words of that beer actor, I don't buy many books, but when I do, I buy these authors.

 1. Maeve Binchy 
Although she has died, new books keep getting published, new collections of short stories, like Chestnut Street, which is the last new book I bought.

2. Tracy Chevalier
I still have a few of her books left to read, The Last Runaway and Remarkable Creatures. I'm rationing her books

3. Tana French
Oh, I buy these mysteries as soon as they come out.

4. Lori Lansens
Great Canadian author. I want to get her newest book, The Mountain Story soon.

5. Mary Lawson
Another great Canadian author, not very prolific, but all  excellent.

6. Kate Atkinson
I'm still missing Jackson Brody, but also still reading her newer books.

7. Mo Hayder
Creepy detective series with Jack Caffrey. Kinda like Criminal Minds as it's just at my threshold of being able to read without nightmares.

8. Gillian Flynn
Big fan after reading all of her thrillers. Stop making movies and instead write another book!

9. Emma Donaghue
I've really enjoyed the diversity of her writing style and topics, and I still have a few more in her back list to read.

10. Lisa Lutz
Never fails to disappoint with her humour and there is a new release, How to Start a Fire that I must get a hold of.

Hey! What do my authors all have in common? Can you guess?

AUDIOBOOKS: YA Sync 2015

All of these books were excellent!


X - Ilyasah Shabazz (audiobook)

Really good 'memoir', written by Malcom X's daughter. It is classified as fiction, but I felt like I learned a lot about his early life. I listened to this around the time/just after the (multiple) incidents with police and African-American deaths, and it was so sad. How have things not changed at all?

I should watch one of the movies about Malcom X.

Dodger - Terry Pratchett (audiobook)

Pratchett does not disappoint - see Good Omens for reference. Funny, educational (the guy who cleaned up the London sewers appears) and meta - what more could a person want? A young tosher named Dodger gets mixed up with a different class of people (Charles Dickens, Disraeli, Angela Burdett-Coutts) after rescuing a young lady. Much happens, including a run in with Sweeney Todd and maybe love. It's not Dodger from the Dickens book, but maybe how Dodger developed? I love that this was paired with Great Expectations.

Must watch the Sweeney Todd musical movie.
Must listen to Great Expectations, and then watch the movie.

Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices - Walter Dean Myers (audiobook)

This was certainly different, but might be a better way to 'read' poems. Sort of a Canterbury Tales, each poem is a biography of a person from Harlem, read by different readers. Each is short, and unique, and wonderful. I tried to just listen to one or two at a time, and then come back. I definitely felt the 'feel' of Harlem.

A Corner of White - Jaclyn Moriarty (audiobook)

While it took a while for me to get into this one, I persevered having read and enjoyed Moriarty books before. There are two worlds, which have to be developed and set up with characters and back stories which was took a while. One in London and the other the kingdom of Cello. Once the two worlds connected however, I was hooked. I loved the references to Newton and science a lot, and the characters of Madeline and Elliot, although young adult, where very real, and facing tough decisions.

I was a tad disappointed to discover it's part of a trilogy and that I couldn't get the second, The Cracks in the Kingdom on audiobook. However, I would read the next one definitely as the last chapter or two had a lot of new information, and makes the reader want to find out what happens!

The Explorers Club - Nell Benjamin (audiobook)

A little play acted out by the Los Angeles Theatre Works  which had a Important of Being Ernest vibe to it. (The LATW will show up again with a wonderful version of In the Heat of the Night). Set in the late 1800s, focusing on explorers and anthropologists in London and a feisty woman trying to gain entrance in the Explorer's Club. There are misunderstandings, word play, and plenty of 'there, there, deary' misogyny/British Empire dismissals. Silly boys.