Top Ten Books I Recently Added To My TBR Pile

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday challenge from The Broke and the Bookish is to list ten books from my to-be-read pile. My TBR pile is huge, I’m even doing a challenge this year focused on clearing some of it, so making this list was a good way of focusing my mind on why I want to read some of the books loitering in that pile.

1. Smoke and Mirrors – Neil Gaiman. I added this to my TBR pile mostly because I heard that one of the short stories in it, Snow, Glass and Apples, is a retelling of Snow White and I am a sucker for fairy tale retellings. In fact, I’m working on my own alternative Sleeping Beauty story at the moment.
2. Below Stairs – Margaret Powell.  This is the memoir which inspired Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey and I’m into both of those series in a big way so it stands to reason that I would also enjoy this book.
3. Silk – Penny Jordan. I found this book by chance in a charity shop recently, and it looked like just the kind of epic family drama that I love.
4. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making – Catherynne M. Valente. Jen Campbell, the author of Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops has been raving about this on every social media platform possible, so I had to include it in my last Amazon order. It’s sitting on my shelf glaring at me as we speak.
5. Ella Minnow Pea – Mark Dunn. I heard about this book on tumblr, and the concept sounded so intriguing that it went straight onto my TBR pile. It’s the tale of a town banning the use of certain letters of the alphabet, with the twist that they also vanish from the novel once they leave the town.
6. The Collected Dorothy Parker – Dorothy Parker. Of all the reasons for adding a book to my TBR pile, this has to be the strangest. I’ve been re-watching Gilmore Girls recently, and in one of the early episodes Rory and Dean read from this book.
7. The Revolution Was Televised – Alan Sepinwall. I don’t often read non-fiction, but this book sounded irresistible to a TV addict like me. It’s the story of 12 television shows and how they changed the nature of TV criticism and made people take TV more seriously.
8. The Tortilla Curtain – T. C. Boyle. Last November, I spent a couple of weeks travelling around Mexico and a woman who I met there recommended this book to me, which is about the divide between Mexican immigrants and US locals in California.
9. Prep – Curtis Sittenfeld. I heard about this from a list on Buzzfeed, and character-driven drama set in a boarding school sounded like a yes for me!
10. The Night Circus – Erin Morgenstern. This has been on my radar for a while but suddenly all my friends seem to be reading it so I think it’s time to bring it properly to the top of my TBR pile.

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