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Memes Miscellany To Be Read Books

Ten Books I Said Nay To

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we have a Spring Cleaning freebie. So here are ten books I recently said Nay! to.

1 / The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh Because it turned out to be Vampire + Melodrama + YA genre, and I’m afraid I’ve outgrown that.

2 / Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse Because it’s an amazing series but only the first book is out yet and I’d rather wait and then binge-read.

3 / Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker Because I was really looking forward to this till I came across a very different perspective.

4 / Soulswift by Megan Bannen Because I got to know it has a tragic end, and I can’t stomach one of those right now.

5 / Snake Eyes by Hillary Monahan Because although it was extremely well written, it was also a very grotesque (for me) tale about reptile humanoids.

6 / The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan Because although it’s rare to find a YA book dealing with disability with such sensitivity, this book seemed relentlessly bleak.

7 / Death in the Stocks by Georgette Heyer Because this turned out to be exceptionally boring with characters that were all very “cold fish”.

8 / Lucy Anne Trotter Series by Anya Wylde Because this didn’t turn out to be as funny as I had hoped, and rather contrived.

9 / Corrag by Susan Fletcher Because it reminded me too much of Outlander, and I’m not sure I want to read something along similar lines at the moment.

10 / Planetfall series by Emma Newman Because I really liked the premise but other readers have warned it’s not a read for pandemic times.

Any of these sound familiar to you? What’s your spring-cleaning mission been like?

Categories
Miscellany

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Humor is a subjective thing, especially when it’s of the droll, dry wit variety. The Moving Toyshop came highly recommended on the Funny + mystery lists out there – and so I picked it up with high expectations.

The Plot:

Richard Cadogan, poet, comes down to Oxford for a trip, finds a desolate toyshop with a murdered corpse, and gets bludgeoned on the head. When he wakes up, the corpse is gone, and overnight, the toyshop has turned into a grocery shop. No one will believe Richard – except Gervase Fen. And Fen only believes Richard because the murderer seems to be using Edward Lear’s poetry (of which I’m a huge fan) to kill off people. You see, Fen is a Professor of Literature at Oxford.