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
Good morning and Happy TTT to everyone!
Is it my imagination or are the days starting to stretch out a little bit again? It’s still pitch dark on my morning runs but I don’t feel that I am both driving to and home from work in the darkness!
And this week’s theme is a lovely one, a celebration of the books I have read in 2023 – which already seems a very long time ago and we have not yet finished January! – from authors I have not come across before. We all have those familiar favourite authors, don’t we? Those writers who we just know we will feel welcome and comfortable and familiar with, even in a new book – and that is a wonderful thing! And alongside that, it is a joy to uncover a new author whom we might also fall in love with, possibly with a weighty backlist to enjoy, potentially with a future of more books to come.
It is also a feature that I track on my reading spreadsheet – I am such a geek! – so I can easily share my full list of books by new-to-me authors, of which there were 22.
| Demon Copperhead | Barbara Kingsolver |
| Babel | R. F. Kuang |
| Trespasses | Louise Kennedy |
| The Bee Sting | Paul Murray |
| The Lies of Locke Lamora | Scott Lynch |
| The Eternal Return of Clara Hart | Louise Finch |
| The Haunting of Hill House | Shirley Jackson |
| What Moves The Dead | T. J. Kingfisher |
| The Trees | Percival Everett |
| Deep Wheel Orcadia | Harry Josephine Giles |
| Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow | Gabrielle Zevin |
| Skandar and the Unicorn Thief | A. F. Steadman |
| The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi | Shannon Chakraborty |
| Black Butterflies | Priscilla Morris |
| Cursed Bread | Sophie Mackintosh |
| Children of Paradise | Camilla Grudova |
| A Memory Called Empire | Arkady Martine |
| The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Killing Vampires | Grady Hendrix |
| Seven Moons of Mali Almeida | Shehan Karunatilaka |
| The Cloisters | Katy Hays |
| Uncle Paul | Celia Fremlin |
| In Ascension | Martin MacInnes |
Now, let’s see if we can whittle that down to a top ten favourites!
Demon’s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking ‘like a little blue prizefighter.’ For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn’t an idea, it’s as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn’t an abstraction, it’s neighbours, parents, and friends. ‘Family’ could mean love, or reluctant foster care. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he’s willing to travel to try and get there.
Suffused with truth, anger and compassion, Demon Copperhead is an epic tale of love, loss and everything in between.
For me, this was – by a mile – the best book I read in 2023. It was not an easy and in many places, not an enjoyable read, but it was one of the most crafted, compelling and convincing narrations and contained the most compelling and believable characters that I have read for a while. I had been aware of Kingsolver for a while but had been put off her work for… reasons I am not sure I fully understand. It looked very… American which it assuredly is.
When the rural town of Money, Mississippi is beset by a series of brutal murders, a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, only to be met with resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a mob of racist white townsfolk. This, they expect.
Less predictable, however, is the second corpse which appears at each crime scene: that of a man resembling Emmett Till, the young Black boy lynched in the same town sixty-five years earlier.
As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, what begins as a murder investigation soon becomes a journey into the soul of America’s violent past.
Like many on this list, this was a writer I only read because of his inclusion in a book prize longlist and discovered it to be satirical, biting, dark as anything and powerfully urgent in its exploration of race in America. As well as being at times genuinely humourous.
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.
This was simply gorgeous in both the Orcadian poetic language and in the gorgeous, fluid translation that went alongside it – not a format that lent itself to a kindle! I loved the reading experience and the phonology and sound scape of the novel… even if now I am hard pressed to explain what occurred in it!
In Ascension, Martin MacInnes
Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms – what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.
Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.
One of the most thoughtful and contemplative reads I’ve come across – even though some of it, for me, did not quite work as a novel.
A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine
In a war of lies she seeks the truth . . .
Ambassador Mahit Dzmare travels to the Teixcalaanli Empire’s interstellar capital, eager to take up her new post. Yet when she arrives, she discovers her predecessor was murdered. But no one will admit his death wasn’t accidental – and she might be next.
Now Mahit must navigate the capital’s enticing yet deadly halls of power, to discover dangerous truths. And while she hunts for the killer, Mahit must somehow prevent the rapacious Empire from annexing her home: a small, fiercely independent mining station.
As she sinks deeper into an alien culture that is all too seductive, Mahit engages in intrigues of her own. For she’s hiding an extraordinary technological secret, one which might destroy her station and its way of life. Or it might save them from annihilation.
I really have delved into science fiction last year! I remember being recommended this one a couple of years ago by a colleague and it too a while to get to it! But it was worth the weight and both this novel and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace explored big ideas about language, identity, colonialism and personhood.
The Bee Sting, Paul Murray
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under – but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman.
His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.
Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil?
Can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written – is there still time to find a happy ending?
The novel that (for me) should have won the Booker last year, in a longlist dominated by Irish writers. The fall and humiliation of the Barnes family, their descent into chaos, was compelling and convincing and more thoroughly readable – which perhaps reveals my own natural conservatism – as a novel than others.
Babel, R. F. Kuang
Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.
Oxford, 1836. The city of dreaming spires.
It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world. And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.
Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.
Until it became a prison…
But can a student stand against an empire?
I’ve been aware of R. F. Kuang’s voice for a while and the praise for her The Poppy War series, which I am still to read. Babel was a delight and a pleasure to read, a fascinating magical system and a piercing look at exploitation and colonialism.
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
They say that the Thorn of Camorr can beat anyone in a fight. They say he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They say he’s part man, part myth, and mostly street-corner rumor. And they are wrong on every count.
Only averagely tall, slender, and god-awful with a sword, Locke Lamora is the fabled Thorn, and the greatest weapons at his disposal are his wit and cunning. He steals from the rich – they’re the only ones worth stealing from – but the poor can go steal for themselves. What Locke cons, wheedles and tricks into his possession is strictly for him and his band of fellow con-artists and thieves: the Gentleman Bastards.
Together their domain is the city of Camorr. Built of Elderglass by a race no-one remembers, it’s a city of shifting revels, filthy canals, baroque palaces and crowded cemeteries. Home to Dons, merchants, soldiers, beggars, cripples, and feral children. And to Capa Barsavi, the criminal mastermind who runs the city.
But there are whispers of a challenge to the Capa’s power. A challenge from a man no one has ever seen, a man no blade can touch. The Grey King is coming.
A man would be well advised not to be caught between Capa Barsavi and The Grey King. Even such a master of the sword as the Thorn of Camorr. As for Locke Lamora …
This has been on my to-be-read list for the longest time – years! And it is one of the freshest, most fun fantasy novels I have read for a while despite being some years old now. Exquisite world building, fantastic characterisation, meticulous plotting as Lynch alternates between Lamora’s present and past. Mildly anxious that the others in the series may not measure up…
What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.
What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.
Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
I’m not sure why I’d picked this one up – perhaps it was part of my generally fruitless search for a chilling Hallowe’en read – but I remember devouring it in one sitting – a modern re-telling of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. I loved the freaky hares and the fungus – and I am glad that Miss Potter will be returning in the upcoming second novel!
A pirate of infamy and one of the most storied and scandalous captains to sail the seven seas.
Amina al-Sirafi has survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands, and one actual demon to retire peacefully with her family to a life of piety, motherhood, and absolutely nothing that hints of the supernatural.
But when she’s offered a job no bandit could refuse, she jumps at the chance for one final adventure with her old crew that will make her a legend and offers a fortune that will secure her and her family’s future forever.
Yet the deeper Amina dives the higher the stakes. For there’s always risk in wanting to become a legend, to seize one last chance at glory, to savour just a bit more power…and the price might be your very soul.
Chakraborty has been on my radar with The Daevabad Trilogy for a while now – not dissimlar to R. F. Kuang perhaps. The release of a stand alone novel gave me a chance to encounter them without the somewhat daunting aspect of an entire trilogy – although this novel did set up the potential for sequels too. Perhaps it falls somewhere between the stalls of Young Adult and Adult fiction at times, but Amina is a badass, older female pirate with a demon husband – how could it not be compelling?
So I do again wish you all a fantastic Top Ten Tuesday and I look forward to seeing all your posts celebrating your newly discovered authors!
Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes
February 6: Top Ten Quick Reads/Books to Read When Time is Short (Books under 150 pages, or if you’re not a novella reader 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)
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)
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)
