Top Ten Tuesday: 2015's Anticipated Reads

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme for bloggers who like books and lists.  It's awesome and is graciously hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

I'm tweaking this week's a topic a little bit because it is very similar to some recent and future topics.  Also I am terrible at keeping up with upcoming releases unless they are the next in a series I am in the middle of and I just listed all of those a couple weeks ago.

My tweak is that I am going to pick ten of the books I most hope to read from my 100 Books Project list.  This is a list of 100 books that I made two years ago that I hope to get read in five years (so by the end of 2017).  Since you can likely do math you can probably calculate that I need to read 20 per year if I want to split them up evenly so I would like to get to the ones listed here in the first half of 2015.  I'm thinking that by identifying which books to target I'll be more efficient about tackling them? Sounds good in theory...

 

 1) Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

I have a closet obsession with all things frontier-esque and this is an iconic western that I have not read.

2) The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

Bryson is a hoot and a delight.  The kind of fella you'd like to sit and giggle (or perhaps chortle?) with over a pot of tea.  I have been on quite a kick of his books recently so it's time to tackle his memoir early in the year.  From what I understand it focuses on his childhood growing up in Des Moines, IA which is right down the road from where I currently live.

3) Utopia by Thomas More

I am more than a little concerned that I will leave all the hardest books on the list for the final year and then will struggle to get through all of them.  To avoid that, I am making this one a target for when I next am in a philosophical frame of mind. Hopefully I hit that frame of mind sometime in the next 6 months. It's only 135 pages. 

4) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Yes, I am the only female in America not to have read this in her childhood. About the four daughters of the March family in Nineteenth century New England.

5) In the Garden of Iden (The Company #1) by Kage Baker

I just found and bought this book in my neighborhood used book store!  It sound really intriguing.  Here's part of the blurb from Goodreads:

In the 24th century, the Company preserves works of art and extinct forms of life (for profit of course). It recruits orphans from the past, renders them all but immortal, and trains them to serve the Company, Dr. Zeus. One of these is Mendoza the botanist. She is sent to Elizabethan England to collect samples from the garden of Sir Walter Iden.
But while there, she meets Nicholas Harpole, with whom she falls in love. And that love sounds great bells of change that will echo down the centuries, and through the succeeding novels of The Company.

6) A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh

A classic mystery series and writer that I have not read.  This is the first in the Inspector Alleyn mysteries that take place in Britain between the wars.  Marsh was writing about the same time as Agatha Christie.

7) The Passage by Justin Cronin

I can't believe it has taken me so long to read this book as it sounds right up my alley.  A literary vampire, apocalypse thriller. How awesome is it that such books exist?

8) Howard's End by E.M. Forster

I actually began reading this recently but wasn't in the mood.  It seems like a book I will really like so I'll try again next year.

9) Wild Seed by Octavia Butler

A science fiction master (mistress?) that I have yet to read.  She has a large catalog and I picked this book somewhat based on vague things I have heard about it.  If anybody recommends starting with a different book of hers, I'd love the advice.  The blurb from Goodreads:

Doro is an entity who changes bodies like clothes, killing his hosts by reflex or design. He fears no one until he meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu is a shapeshifter who can absorb bullets and heal with a kiss and savage anyone who threatens her. She fears no one until she meets Doro. Together they weave a pattern of destiny (from Africa to the New World) unimaginable to mortals.

10) Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith

Lee Smith is a Queen of Southern Fiction and I've read a couple of her books but not this one which seems to be her most widely lauded book. An epistolary novel that takes place in turn of the century Appalachia in Virginia.


Well, that's my list. It's actually rather daunting.  To take my mind off of all the daunting reading I have coming, I am looking forward to seeing everyone else's more current TBRs!