All recommendation lists get tagged thus.
First Top 10 Tuesday post of 2026! Happy New Year, everyone!!!
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt has us look at our best books of 2025, and I am eager to see what everyone has to share!
My own favorites are listed below, and reviews shared earlier by me HERE. My reading list is still heavier on the historical fantasy fiction side, but I am glad I managed to pick up on non-fiction reads as well.
So, which were your best books of 2025? Do share in the comments!
Happy New Year 2026!
Lots of watches this past year 2025, and here’s a time capsule of everything good that I binged on.
Standout watch of the year. This movie is a spellbinding visual feast. To think it is based on a book written by 20-year old Mary Shelley during a writing contest among friends in 1818! This story remains relevant for modern times, as genius scientific inventions come perilously close to upending longstanding concepts of humanity… and you wonder, at what cost? Where are we heading towards?
Joan of Arc is a fascinating historical figure, so I jumped to watch this French silent film, which has been restored after great damage to the original reel and is in public domain. Yes, I know, silent films are difficult to watch, especially when superstition and religion are added to the mix. But seriously, the acting by Renée Jeanne Falconetti is phenomenal. She does not need words, her facial expressions of the solemn, devout, hurting, doubting Joan convey it all. When they burn her at the stake near the end, it is an electrifying, goosebump-raising, horrifying moment that will bring tears to your eyes. An underrated masterpiece.
Ralph Fiennes has been my favorite actor ever since I saw him in The Constant Gardener and he shines in Conclave too. The election of the next Pope is a grand but top-secret affair, and now we look within to see how it all plays out. But what if the former Pope had been murdered? Fiennes, playing caretaker of the Papal elections, has a difficult task indeed. I am not particularly fond of the resolution, but I know I was glued to the screen throughout.
When the world is going grim, you take refuge in the pieces of awe and marvel around you. Sharing some art, photography and music to click for.
{Disclaimer: None of the links or images shared here belong to me in any way, and no copyright infringement or commercialization is intended by sharing them here for fair use purposes.}
[1] Feast on the photos of the Earth’s most stunning landscapes for the 2025 International Landscape Photographer of the Year contest. In case you have trouble accessing the official website, also try The Atlantic and My Modern Met. I could not take my eyes off this haunting landscape photograph from New Mexico by Karol Nienartowicz.
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt (ten books in special settings or time period) was so cool and could have gone a thousand different ways. Yet, what I ended up thinking of were books set in ominous places.
I was thinking of places that are remarkable and likely very dangerous, not somewhere you may want to venture — at least, not outside of a book.
1 / The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
Trapped in a castle with a wicked uncle and no way out? Crossed out.
2 / Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
Stuck at an afternoon picnic where reality and dreaming are blurred? Crossed out.
3 / The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip
Desperate to enter a tower which won’t let you in? Crossed out.
4 / In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss
Lots of known fairy tale characters forgetting what’s important? Crossed out.
5 / Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Living in an amusement park in a swamp while wrestling alligators and fighting off rabid competitors? Crossed out.
6 / The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Raised in a library that is not really a library? Crossed out.
7 / The City in the Lake by Rachel Neumeier
Trying to figure out a mirror city that is trying to become the real city? Crossed out.
8 / Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
Packed off to a remote and dreary island for reformation? Crossed out.
9 / The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino
Feasting with weird and melodramatic people straight out of tarot decks? (Hopefully) crossed out.
10 / The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Living in fear for your life in a house surrounded by a moat, when you know Sherlock Holmes will be too late to the rescue? Crossed out.
What about you? Which ominous fictional places have stood out in your recent bookish memory?
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt is to recall profound/ witty/ [insert your chosen adjective] things that book characters have said. It made me think of quotes that have seemed miraculous to me, full of insight and capable of bringing great healing. I call them “talisman” quotes.
“When someone who I have given a great deal to
And who has been a source of great hope
Betrays and insults me,
May I regard him as a great sacred friend.”
~ Shantideva (as quoted in The Anger Diet by Brenda Shoshanna)
“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, We Are the Builders of Our Fortunes: Success through Self-Reliance
It’s time to list our top 10 reads of 2024 (and download massive TBR reclists, of course). Not much of reading this year, but I would not have missed this Top 10 Tuesday theme for the world!
I have not been a great fan or follower of the Grishaverse, so was hesitant in picking this up. But what a marvelous story this turned out to be. We peer into the ages of 16th century when anti-semitism was rife. Luzia is desperately trying to escape her confined pitiful life with her displays of magical craft… but soon ends up getting embroiled in a larger political net. Everything in this book was so impressive – the Spanish Golden Age/ Renaissance feel, the worldbuilding, the writing, the prose, the characterizations. Aaaaand, it is a standalone. If you’ve liked Mistress of the Art of Death, you’ll love this one too.
This week’s Top 10 Tuesday has an interesting theme – how our reading habits have changed over time. This actually proved to be a fun walk down memory lane. Let me count the ways, then!
I am ready to write bad angsty poetry on my never-ending reading/ blogging slump! Still, somehow, pushing myself to do this mid-year 2024 blogpost on stuff I have liked till now.
Let’s all pledge to move out of Slump Valley! And just in case these recs reach you, hope you’ll like some of these.
I have not been a great fan or follower of the Grishaverse, so was hesitant in picking this up. But what a marvelous story this turned out to be. We peer into the ages of 16th century when anti-semitism was rife. Luzia is desperately trying to escape her confined pitiful life with her displays of magical craft… but soon ends up getting embroiled in a larger political net. Everything in this book was so impressive – the Spanish Golden Age/ Renaissance feel, the worldbuilding, the writing, the prose, the characterizations. Aaaaand, it is a standalone. If you’ve liked Mistress of the Art of Death, you’ll love this one too.
Top 10 zippy reads? I am all for it these days – and that’s the theme for this week’s Top 10 Tuesday. Here are my recs, with equally zippy blurbs!
The Throme of the Erril of Sherill by Patricia A. McKillip
Tropes: Knight quests, Riddles, Puns, Folktales
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Tropes: Snarky, Retelling, The Odyssey, Ulysses hero-not-hero
Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne Valente
Tropes: Native American, Retelling, Snow White, Wild West
Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa
Tropes: Anthology, Japanese folklore, Dark, Compassionate
Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
Tropes: Anthology, Science-Fiction, Bizarre, Quirky Horror
Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema by Lindy West
Tropes: Essays, ROFL Funny, Old blockbuster movies, Punchlines
Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Terror
Tropes: Surreal, Otherwordly, Lurid, Anthology, Poetic
How the World Became Quiet by Rachel Swirsky
Tropes: Anthology, Science-Fiction, AI & Identity Crisis, Evolution
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Tropes: Graphic Novel, Poetic, Feel-Good, Found Families
Princess Floralinda & the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir
Tropes: Snarky, 40-floor fall, Coming of Age, Unexpected friends
So, do any of our choices match? Do you have any zippy read recs? Let’s chat!
Happy New Year ’24, everyone! And at last, my favorite topic for the yearly wrap-up to Top 10 Tuesday: favorite books of 2023. We save the best for the end, and it is so much fun adding those best to Mount TBR. Here’s my list too.