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.
Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics
Well, it has certainly been a week this week: we have just had the landlord around for a property check, during which he chose to give notice to quit the property by the end of May… which feels very close at the moment. And there are not that many homes available in the limited areas in which we are looking in order to avoid disrupting our daughter’s schooling too much…
And today, out of the blue, whilst we are still reeling from a recent inspection result, we are informed that my boss has been suspended pending investigations in a series of concerns and allegations…
So, the chance to reflect on short book, books to devour in a day, or when time is short, feels rather fitting!
Many thanks to Jennifer @ FunkNFiction.com and Angela @ Reading Frenzy for submitting this topic. I may not have managed to keep all of these under 150 pages but the Claire Keegan’s – real gems of tiny novellas – are so short my average is probably about that level! And there are a couple of series here, all of which fit the criteria really… so I have only added the first book in each series.
So Late in the Day, Claire Keegan – 43 pages
After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude – and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.
From one of the finest writers working today, Keegan’s new story asks if a lack of generosity might ruin what could be between men and women.
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
Mrs Caliban, Rachel Ingrams – 128 Pages
Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research – but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic, Larry the frogman is a revelation – and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams … Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs Calibanis a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago.
An Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett – 128 Pages
What would happen if the Queen became a reader of taste and discernment rather than of Dick Francis? The answer is a perfect story.
The Uncommon Reader is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely ( JR Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton Burnett and the classics) and intelligently. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advisers. She comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with much that she has to do. In short, her reading is subversive. The consequence is, of course, surprising, mildly shocking and very funny.
An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. Living alone in an old house, he reads comics, collects birds’ eggs and plays with his marbles. When, one day, a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears, exchanging an empty jar of a cure-all medicine and a donkey stone for a pair of Joseph’s pyjamas and a lamb’s shoulder blade, a mysterious friendship develops between them.
A fusion of myth, magic and the stories we make for ourselves, Treacle Walker is an extraordinary novel from one of our greatest living writers.
It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.
One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered.
But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how.
They’re going to need to ask it a lot.
Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin – 160 Pages
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a remote Argentinian hospital. A boy named David sits beside her.
She’s not his mother. He’s not her child.
At David’s ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, a conversation that opens a chest of horrors. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.
A chilling tale of maternal anxiety and ecological menace, Fever Dream is a modern classic. Samanta Schweblin’s unforgettable debut is a prescient warning about our manipulation of the natural world, and an unforgettable exercise in literary suspense.
Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh – 170 Pages
Spring, 1951. Four people meet in a small French town: the baker and his wife; the ambassador and his wife. Two belong to the town, two are outsiders.
Some time later, strange things start happening. Horses drop dead in the fields. Children grow wild and unbiddable. Ghosts are sighted after dark. Someone is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse – but who is the predator and who their prey?
Audacious and mesmerizing, Cursed Bread is a darkly erotic mystery about a town gripped by madness, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.
“As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.”
In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety.
But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.
On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid–a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.
But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.
Deep Wheel Orcadia, Harry Josephine Giles – 176 pages
Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.
Deep Wheel Orcadia is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. The rich and varied cast weaves a compelling, lyric and effortlessly readable story around place and belonging, work and economy, generation and gender politics, love and desire – all with the lightness of touch, fluency and musicality one might expect of one the most talented poets to have emerged from Scotland in recent years. Hailing from Orkney, Harry Josephine Giles is widely known as a fine poet and spellbindingly original performer of their own work; Deep Wheel Orcadia now strikes out into audacious new space.
At Night All Blood is Black, David Diop – 192 Pages
Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France’s German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open.
Without his more-than-brother, Alfa is alone and lost amidst the savagery of the conflict. He devotes himself to the war, to violence and death, but soon begins to frighten even his own comrades in arms. How far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?
Have a fantastic Top Ten Tuesday and I look forward to seeing all your posts celebrating your own short reads! I may be in need of that brevity!
Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes
February 13: Love Freebie (in honor of Valentine’s Day tomorrow)
February 20: Bookish Superpowers I Wish I Had (e.g. never accidentally buying the same book twice, every book I buy would be automatically signed/personally dedicated by the author, the ability to read faster, etc.) (Submitted by Cathy @WhatCathyReadNext)
February 27: Covers/Titles with Things Found in Nature (covers/titles with things like trees, flowers, animals, forests, bodies of water, etc. on/in them) (Submitted by Jessica @ a GREAT read)
March 5: Weird or Funny Things I’ve Googled Thanks to a Book (Submitted by Astilbe @ Long and Short Reviews)
March 12: Books I’m Worried I Might Not Love as Much the Second Time Around (I love re-reading, but there are some books that hit so perfectly and I loved so much that I worry reading them again wouldn’t be the same. Or maybe the books I read when I was younger wouldn’t be favorites anymore. Or maybe some books just don’t age well?)
March 19: Books on my Spring 2024 TBR
March 26: Movies/TV Shows That Would Have Made Amazing Books (Submitted by Sabrina @ Notes From a Paper Plane Nomad)er maybe spin this to be books you could read in a day or a single sitting.) (Submitted by Jennifer @ FunkNFiction.com and Angela @ Reading Frenzy)
