This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is a freebie, so I thought I’d share ten of the titles I currently have borrowed from one of the three library systems I belong to:

1. The Wager by David Grann
2. Ari Shapiro’s The Best Strangers in the World
3. Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman
4. She-Hulk by Rainbow Rowell with illustrations by Rogê Antônio and Luca Maresca
5. Lucy Gilmore’s The Lonely Hearts Book Club
6. Aurora’s End by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
7. Not Your Villain by C.B. Lee
8. Shveta Thakrar’s The Dream Runners
9. To Fill a Yellow House by Sussie Anie
10. I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg

What do you have out from the library right now?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share our most anticipated titles being published in the second half of the year. Here are some of mine:

1. Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree
2. A Power Unbound by Freya Marske
3. Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
4. The Mysteries by Bill Watterson
5. The Lost Library by Rebecca Stead & Wendy Mass
6. The Year of Second Chances by Lara Avery
7. The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt
8. The Blonde Identity by Ally Carter
9. Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski
10. Sleepless in Dubai by Sajni Patel

How about you? What books coming out later this year are you looking forward to most?

I always enjoy the seasonal topics posted by That Artsy Reader Girl as part of Top Ten Tuesdays. Here are ten titles I’m hoping to get to this summer (even if tradition dictates I’ll maybe finish only 20% of this list before fall:

1. The Year of Second Chances by Lara Avery
2. Elizabeth Acevedo’s Family Lore
3. The Wager by David Grann
4. Jana Goes Wild by Farah Heron
5. Brian Selznick’s Big Tree
6. Tell Me How It Ends by Quinton Li
7. Susannah Hoffs’ This Bird Has Flown
8. Enter the Body by Joy McCullough
9. The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer
10. Jami Attenberg’s I Came All This Way to Meet You

How about you? What books are you looking forward to reading this summer?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl invites us to share Books That Feel like Summer.

To me, summers include vacations, road trips, times at the beach or pool, camp, and high school jobs. Here are some books, five of which I recommend and five of which I hope to read, that include those items:

Read and Recommended:

1. Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright
2. Summerland by Michael Chabon
3. Wayward Son by Rainbow Rowell
4. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
5. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

On My Radar:

1. I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back by Ben Blatt
2. Beach Read by Emily Henry
3. The Rest of the Story by Sarah Dessen
4. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
5. Mrs. Nash’s Ashes by Sarah Adler

How about you? Are there books that just scream summer that you’re hoping to read or that you’ve finished and recommend?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesdays at That Artsy Reader Girl follows up our must-read quirks by asking about the Things That Make Me Instantly NOT Want to Read a Book. Here are ten of my literary turn-offs:

1. A description of “thriller.” Almost always too dark and intense for me.
2. Overly flowery language. Particularly irksome in audiobooks, because apparently I’ve trained my eyes just to skip over lengthy lists of adjectives in print.
3. Repetitive phrasing. Again, an audiobook peeve. My parents love the Spenser books by Robert Parker, who never met a conversation where it was not necessary to include “he said,” and “she said,” after every line of dialogue, but it drives me to distraction. Did he need them to hit a word count for each book?
4. Solving the mystery in the first chapter. If I can figure it out in your first ten pages, there’s no point to my reading the other 250.
5. Books set during war. We know beloved characters aren’t making it to the end of the story, and that’s already real life. I don’t want that in my books.
6. Unlikeable main characters. Again, I have to interact with people I don’t like off the page. Why would I want to give them any of my reading time?
7. Ambiguous endings. If reviews talk about twists or offer up comparisons to “The Lady or the Tiger,” I’m out. I want a positive, conclusive end to my books. (Exceptions will be made for the middle book of a planned trilogy, since tradition dictates those will end in an unsatisfactory way.)
8. Publisher branding. When Rudi and I visited Paris, we walked into the bookshop around the corner from our hotel only to be greeted by an entire store filled with white spines, because they were all put out by the same publishing house. I felt too overwhelmed even to try to pick something out and immediately turned around and left. (I had more luck in a general bookshop later on).
9. Books featuring animals as main (or vital secondary) characters. Like war novels, 99% of these are not going to end happily.
10. Books by authors I’ve deemed insipid. I will never read another Nicholas Sparks or Mary Higgins Clark novel again.

How about you? What makes you immediately close a book?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl focuses on the things that make me instantly want to read a particular book. Here are ten of mine:

1. It’s been recommended by someone I know who shares similar tastes in books.
2. It’s written by an author I enjoy. (These include Jasper Fforde, Sherry Thomas, Rainbow Rowell, and T.J. Klune, among others.)
3. It’s part of a series I like. (The Veronica Speedwell books come to mind.)
4. It’s on a topic I’m interested in. (This more pertains to nonfiction than fiction, obviously.)
5. It’s got a clever title. (I love me some puns.)
6. I’ve heard or read an interesting interview with the author.
7. It’s set someplace interesting.
8. It’s got a catchy opening line/paragraph/scene.
9. Or, if it’s a collection of poetry, I like whatever poem I randomly flip open to.
10. It’s got a cute cover. (You can’t judge a book by its cover, but it sometimes can make you want to pick it up and look at it more.)

How about you? What instantly draws you to certain books?