Top Ten Tuesday: Books I've Read and Enjoyed, But Rarely Talk About

I've been keeping this blog for almost ten years now; that's a lot of time in which to rank reads and hype favorites. Except, of course, for when I don't.

As it turns out, after I started pondering this week's "Top Ten Tuesday" topic, there are quite a few books which I've read - and often reread - but that don't get their chance in the sun much here. It's not any particularly purposeful oversight, it might just be a chance of not wanting to repeat content, or focus too much on certain genres... but that's all changing right now.

Here are my Top Ten books I've read and enjoyed, but which rarely ever get the recognition they deserve on this platform!

1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
Stalwart blog readers might recognize this particular novel as not just a favorite, but a childhood favorite... one I've been reading every summer since I was eight years old. This story hits a sweet spot of new and nostalgic every time I pick it up again, and it carries with it the significance of accompanying me on many a summer vacation.

2. A Whole Lot of Graphic Novels and Comics
This might be a lot more true for in years past, but I read a lot - a LOT - of graphic novels and comics that don't end up getting a lot of words written about them on the blog. Whether it's glancing through a classic old Bill Watterson Calvin and Hobbes compendium, or getting lost in a treasured continuation like Alex Hirsch's Gravity Falls: Lost Legends, or giggling over a thick hardbound copy of Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant, there are more than just a few in my collection who deserve some extra attention.

3. Beyond: the Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comic Anthology, edited by Sfe. R. Monster
Specifically among those Graphic Novel and Comic book ranks, is this collection of just what the title leads you to believe it is: an anthology of LGBT-focused short comics, of the Science Fiction and Fantasy varieties. While my reception of the various contents were mixed upon first reading, there are still elements from them that I still think about literal YEARS later. I honestly think it may only have improved with time.

4. In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan
Truly one of my favorite YA reads of all time, and one I am absolutely unable to trace where I heard about in the first place. I think it might have been a throwaway recommendation on a YouTube channel sometime a few years ago, but this book - contemporary YA Fantasy following a boy as he grows up in a magical world just on the other side of a wall from ours, making mistakes and falling in love, but with elves and mermaids and harpies and such - has been read multiple times since then, and is one of my favorites to recommend, especially as LGBT rep. Read it!!

5. Romance Novels
I know, I know, I actually do talk a lot about romance novels on this blog... like I do here, or here, or even most recently, here. But in actuality, that's only the kind of stuff that's fit for dinnertime conversation. In reality, I read a lot more romances that not just don't make it onto my blog, I don't even add them to my Goodreads Challenge. No, I won't tell you which.

6. Cookbooks
I'm a passionate and devoted cookbook fan. It's one of my favorite arguments against the whole "ebooks and the Internet will destroy traditional publishing" thing: no matter how many recipes you can find on Pinterest or Google at a moment's notice, there's still an inherent value in buying a print cookbook that you don't get when you just watch a Tasty video instead. And yes, this is another one of those subjects that I do quite frequently discuss on my blog, but the reality is, I flip through at least one or two cookbooks daily. (It's one of my favorite ways to unwind.)

7. Humor Books
I don't mean like Tina Fey's Bossypants, or B. J. Novak's short story collection... I mean like the really short form funny stuff, like Mallory Ortberg's Texts from Jane Eyre, or Jill Poskanzer, Wilson Josephson, and Nora Katz's Literary Starbucks, both of which are some of my favorites for riffing on works of classic literature in a hilariously irreverent, but loving, way. (Definitely for fans of Sparknotes' impossibly good Instagram profile.)

8. Meddling Kids, Edgar Cantero
Here's the thing: I enjoyed this book. I really, really did. In fact, I enjoyed this book so much, that my opinion has fully gone unchanged, despite numerous people whose opinions I respect telling me how much they absolutely hated it. This bananas book is a parody of teen sleuths, but more specifically, the Mystery Gang... the difference is that in their equivalencies, Velma's a lesbian, Fred is dead, and Shaggy's going crazy from constantly having to deal with what he believes is Fred's ghost talking to him. Also, there's a strong Cthulhu component. Read at your own peril, but if you choose to go along for the ride, there's a good chance you'll have a good time. Maybe.

9. Feed, M. T. Anderson
I was talking about "always recommend" books with a friend a couple of Christmases ago, about what books that, no matter who the audience was, we would recommend to absolutely everybody. She chose this uncannily prescient dystopian novel, which - despite covering topics like factory-farmed meat substitutes, eerily responsive ad recommendations, and body-modifying tech that works suspiciously like an iPhone - was written in the 2002. It was one of my first books of 2017, and it's pretty much set the standard, in my mind, for Science Fiction ever since.

10. All The Lives I Want: Essays About My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers, Alana Massey
It's a weird one, but one that I love. What I had originally thought, based off of its cover, was that this book would be a quasi-fluffy-marshmallow-y riff on other memoirs I've read, discussing someone's relationship with various celebrities who have shaped their pop culture perspectives, but this book is so much more than that. It's an intensely feminist lens pointed at things like the vilification of Anna Nicole Smith, the double standards of media coverage of prominent black female rapper feuds, and the horrifying public commodification of the personal beings of underage women, like Mary Kate and Ashley's virginity, or Britney's body. If this all sounds intense, it definitely is, and that makes it one of my favorite contemporarily published feminist works that I've read in the past couple of years.

What's in your Top Ten? Let me know, in the comments below!