em with pen 🖋

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.

Today’s topic is ‘Books I Loved So Much I Had to Get a Copy for My Personal Library’. My personal library is just at the moment suffering from lack of space (think double stacked and still meandering onto the ‘floor shelf’) and I’m using the local library or my audible subscription where at all possible. So I’m reinterpreting this prompt as books I’ve borrowed but which one day I would love to own.

1. Julia and the Shark by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston. This is a beautiful illustrated book, with the illustrations being a key part of its charm for me.
2. The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri. Really sad, really beautiful, also with some interesting graphic imagery used in the transitions between chapters.
3. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Another emotive read.
4. Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller by Nadia Wassef. A really interesting biography of an Egyptian bookshop that I can see myself diving into again.
5. Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. This had some passages that I really needed to hear at the time I read it. It has a bit of a place in my heart alongside And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, and I’d like it to have a place on my shelf too.
6. Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. I laughed and cried at this book.
7. The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Oh look, another Millwood Hargrave on this list… it might be that I like this author!
8. The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin. Such a good fantasy novel. I’m looking forward to getting to the rest of the trilogy too.
9. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel. Mandel’s books always break me for a while after, which probably means they should have a place on my future shelf.
10. Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie. This is the second book in the First Law series, so a representative for the overall story. I haven’t got to the last book yet, but massively enjoyed the first two. They are so very well written. Characterful, dark, hilarious, epic.

Do any of these have a place in your shelves?