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.
Welcome back to Tuesday! It is a cold one here in Massachusetts. My garden might be prepared, but I am not ready for freezing temperatures yet.
Today, we had a choice of sharing the Top Ten Books I Enjoyed That Were Outside My Comfort Zone or the Top Ten Books I Would Like to Read That Are Outside My Comfort Zone. I chose the latter to give us something new to chat about.
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy - Post-apocalyptic worlds are not my favorite. Worlds with no hope aren't exactly my cup of tea either.
- The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz - Not sure I could get through this one, considering its content and part of it being in Spanish, which I have long since forgotten how to speak or write. However, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson - I like Gothic novels, just not sure horror is in my wheelhouse these days.
- Panchinko by Min Jin Lee - I rarely read fiction outside of America, but I often enjoy it when I do. Not sure why I don't indulge in it more often.
- Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu - Similar to above. Exploring life from a different perspective brings greater understanding.
- The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf - Even the word science makes me run. It's almost as bad as math to me.
- The Overstory by Richard Powers - Even the great cover wouldn't make me think to pick this up off the shelf to read what sounds like a fascinating synopsis on the back cover. Another Pulitzer Prize winner.
- The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton - Exploring how and why we travel makes traveling seem more like work.
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders - While Civil War fiction is something I crave, a novel about young Willie Lincoln ending up in some type of purgatory after he dies, and a struggle ensuing over his soul, makes me uneasy as a parent and a person.
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter - Cognitive science and mathematical philosophy in one book. Wow, I am so far outside of my comfort zone, I may no longer be on the planet Earth.
Tell Me Something Tuesday (TMST) is hosted by Jen Twimom at That's What I'm Talking About. TMST is a weekly discussion post where bloggers discuss a wide range of topics from books and blogging to life in general. Participation is optional, and you leave your comments in the weekly post when participating. Check it out if you would like to join.
Another fabulous topic for this week's Tell Me Something Tuesday. There are so many things I would tell my younger self, but here are three things my younger self needed to know:
- Being a good person is better than being popular.
- Learning to listen more than you speak is vital to creating strong relationships.
- In a world full of Captain Kirks, be a Jean-Luc Picard.
Looking forward to visiting you today.
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9 comments:
You have some 5 star books I love on your list. Here is some advice from me:
Listen to the audiobooks for Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Lincoln in the Bardo.
In Oscar Wao audiobook you get someone else reading the Spanish and Spanglish words. The book is so good. I loved it. Very quirky book, which is my style.
Lincoln in the Bardo audiobook won all kinds of awards. It used 166 unique narrators. It blew my mind. I really, really enjoyed it. My friends, who read the print version, didn't admire the book as much as I did.
Interior Chinatown in another winner. I also listened to the audiobook for it, which was fun since part of plot centers around Asian actors being forced into using an "Asian" accents on films.
The Road is very depressing but it is also a love story of a father for his son. It is heartbreaking. I think about it all the time.
The Overstory and Pachinko are both so well done...both are long and take some commitment, but so worth the effort.
Pachinko was surprisingly good! It took me a while to get used to it, but once I was able to put some reading sprint in I was captivated and found it hard to put the book down.
My TTT: https://laurieisreading.com/2025/11/11/top-ten-tuesday-books-i-enjoyed-that-were-out-of-my-comfort-zone/
I really want to read Pachinko!
The art of travel sounds interesting.
Here's a link to my TTT post
https://rosieamber.wordpress.com/2025/11/11/%f0%9f%93%9a-toptentuesday-10-books-outside-my-comfort-zone-reading-tuesdaybookblog-booktwitter-bookx/
This is quite an intersting list. I'm not sure I would pick any of these up either.
Pam @ Read! Bake! Create!
https://readbakecreate.com/ten-graphic-novels-ive-read-in-2025/
I agree with Anne's comments about The Overstory and Pachinko and Lincoln in the Bardo. All three of these are very worthy books.
"The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton - Exploring how and why we travel makes traveling seem more like work." lol!! You are right!
And The Road was good, but a very hard depressing read. It has stuck with me long after reading it.
The novel version of The Haunting of HIll House was totally different than the tv show. I hope you like all of these titles.
Well, the only one on here I have heard of is Shirley Jackson, but i haven't read any.
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