Reading

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Books I Read In 2019

December 31, 2019 /

I’m linking up here for Top Ten Tuesday.

Here are some of my favorite and/or the most meaningful books/authors. There are more than 10 books, but only 9 authors, sorry it doesn’t quite fit.

  1. All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot. I listened to this audiobook at work. This the third in a series. I didn’t like the stories as much as the first two, some dark ones (depression and suicide, Soviets)
  2. The Corinthian and The Grandy Sophy by Georgette Heyer. I read lots of Heyers but I’ve marked this two as the top. Not sure if the first would stay as high if I read it again?
  3. The Warden, Barchester Towers, and Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope. I’m working my way through The Chronicles of Barchester which E.S. Grayson recommended on her blog. Witty, intriguing look into Victorian England. Still satirical but much less exaggerative than Dickens and not full of caricatures.
  4. Three Times Lucky, The Ghosts of Tupelo, The Odds of Getting Even, and The Law of Finders Keepers by Sheila Turnage. Darling, witty, charming, whimsical middle grade series.
  5. The Moonspinners and This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart
  6. Death in Cyprus and Death in Zanzibar by M.M. Kaye. These four books I read close together and the first three in particular all sort of fit together (and not just because they are all set on islands in the Mediterranean that start with a “c” although that was some of it).
  7. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter. I’m not a biography person but this was a brilliant work about a brilliant man.
  8. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. The title is probably intentionally obnoxiously click-bait-y to go with Sethi’s (hilarious in my opinion) sense of humor. I just loved the way he presented finances and financial advice. Sometimes you know, it just has to click with you. I bought his newest version and plan of rereading it and implementing as much as I can.
  9. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. I randomly picked this off of Catherine’s blog Based on the Book. It was rather different from my normal read but another unique biography and quite hilarious. It was also fascinating/hilarious to juxtapose its more normal, light of day feeling with the dark, romantic suspense feeling of Corfu in This Rough Magic.

8 Comments

    • Livia Rose

      January 11, 2020 at 9:25 pm Reply

      Yeah, I’m kinda stuck on the middle book, but I think I just moved into a different listening interest for the time too.

  • Catherine

    January 4, 2020 at 8:29 am Reply

    I really liked that Humphrey Carpenter book too, it was very readable 🙂 Glad you liked My Family and Other Animals! I keep meaning to try one of Laurence Durrel’s books to see whether the stuff Larry was writing was actually any good, haha. I want to try some James Herriot too, might look them out in work!

    • Livia Rose

      January 4, 2020 at 2:06 pm Reply

      I’d forgotten Larry was a writer, I have to wonder what that is like since he seemed to think so differently from Gerald.

      I LOVE the Herriot audiobooks. Christopher Timothy does them and he does all the accents so well (to my mind anyway), and I just loved hearing the Yorkshire accent, it’s especially fun to hear a stubborn, superstitious old farmer arguing in that accent about a quack remedy that is the bane of the young educated veterinary. The stories are just so interesting historically, so homey, and yet so humorous. Of course its a bit gross, I mean he’s quite frank about farm and veterinary stuff so that can bother some people. And it can be a tear-jerker, some of the animal stories hurt.

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