[Official Blurb] Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature / weekly meme created by The Broke & the Bookish. The meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists here at The Broke & the Bookish. We’d love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your Top 10 Lists! In January, 2018 this meme is now hosted byThat Artsy Reader Girl.
[Topic inspired by: Books That Have Been On My TBR the Longest and I Still Haven’t Read – I decided to re-write this topic to reflect the #NonFiction Stories I have been Itching to Read and simply haven’t had the joy of consuming (yet)] – whilst going OT for today’s prompt!
NOTE: I am preparing a post which coincides with today’s actual topic “Top Ten Most Anticipated Books Releasing In the First Half of 2020” – however, as I was caught up in the tides of the current events for the past week of the New Year, I found myself without the focus on reading, blogging or actively tweeting. I made a few appearances but I had planned to release quite a few posts and even a few reviews – all of which I have pushed forward to begin this week instead. Thereby, I am giving myself more leeway and time to write the post which befits today’s topic and have opted instead to run a topic I loved from last year.
Today’s entry was inspiring to me for the following reasons:
I’ve been wanting to be more proactive in blogging about which works of Non-Fiction spark my readery interest to read whilst at the same time, I’ve been struggling for several years now to get into the heart of the Non-Fiction narratives I’ve been receiving for review.
My backlogue has a predominate slant towards Non-Fiction over Fiction because it took me nearly too long to realise what was wrong – my chronic migraines were making it impossible to shift out of the clustered attacks & the supernova migraines (those really horridly intense ones!) to lay thought and notion on ANY thing outside of a fictional story – and more likely than not, I was reading larger print Harlequin Heartwarming stories post-migraine than I was reading hard-hitting Historical Fiction or re-attempting to read select topics of interest in Creative Non-Fiction, Narrative Non-Fiction, Biography, Autobiography or Memoir; or areas of topical interest in the fields of Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics.
I suppose you could say the main reason all of these started to backlogue on me is because I kept thinking *each month!* – I’d find my way back into resettling into reading Non-Fiction and that I could start to eliminate the backlogue right then and there. I just hadn’t realised the connection between my disconnected focus with Non-Fiction and the issues I had with my migraines overall until somewhere in the midst of [2019]. It was in September of 2019 I started to read Non-Fiction again (releasing a review for “Angels Among Us”) before I was struck down in October with thirty days of unwellness which led into a December fighting off a Winter cold.
This January marks my first month of being restored in health – both from the cold & of being migraine-free to where I can once again re-focus my energies on reading Non-Fiction and re-finding the joys I had in requesting each of the titles I am going to be reading this January and each month of the New Year.
This Top Ten Tuesday, I wanted to highlight the 10x works of Non-Fiction I have found challenging to begin reading inasmuch as I am challenging myself to read them *first!* rather than pushing them far, far afield into [2020]! Sometimes it is best to give ourselves a proper nudge of encouragement than to continuously feel we’ll never get into a book at all for whichever reason which first led us away from it.
I’d love to hear from you if you’ve struggled to focus on reading a particular story (Fiction, Non-Fiction, Poetry, Classical, etc) or subject you’ve wanted to chase after but have felt yourself pushing back or thinking the obstacle to read what interested you couldn’t be conquered for whichever roadblocks and obstacles you found in your readerly life where leading you away from them.
My goal with these works of Non-Fiction is to approach reading them throughout the coming year and hopefully within the first quarter or half of 2020.
*NOTE: all of these works of Non-Fiction were sent to me in exchange for honest reviews
Week of Thursday, 26st of September through 1st of October, 2015 | Hostess List
I’ve honestly wanted to start participating in this weekly meme in 2014, however, I would always seem to get distracted during the hours leading up to Thursdays OR completely forget to compose my thoughts for this meme until into the weekend; at which point, the time had come and gone. I like the fact we can exchange thoughts percolating in our minds that run the gambit of the bookish world, creative outlets, or thoughts we want to share that might show a bit more about who we are behind the bookish blog we maintain. I am going to attempt to thread the journal of my 10 Bookish / Not Bookish Thoughts by order of the entries arrival into my life rather than a preference of 1-10.
No, your eyes did not lie to you, this is No. 6, No. 2-5 will be released this Autumn.
No. 1 | Corvidae + Scarecrow | Anthologies by World Weaver Press
As you might have recalled I happily devoured the stories in Rhonda Parrish’s first anthological series debut FAE, wherein I found myself quite delighted to find stories of the fae represented in such a uniquely clever collection of inspiration and craft of story-telling. After concluding my review on behalf of FAE, I wasn’t quite sure what I should request next via World Weaver Press, when happily their publicist Ms Wagner suggested I follow FAE with the next two anthologies in sequence:
What is so wicked awesome about these two anthologies is there is a serial short between them, which outside of pulp fiction and the classical serials found in zines decades inside the early 20th Century, I haven’t come across serial shorts inside anthologies! I’m quite a newbie to anthologies of the 21st Century, and thereby, each time I make a discovery I am wicked excited by the possibilities of what I am about to read!
I am now piqued with keen interest to read Sanctuary and Judge & Jury! I had agreed knowingly with the reviewer – sometimes you come across a short so profoundly moving, if you never found another you loved dearly as much, the collection was worth it’s weight in gold! This happened to me once in another anthology where I found a writer so tapped into the human condition and the emphatic heart we all have within us, I was forever moved! Shorts despite their length are powerful in what they convey! The four I focused on myself from FAE are still with me, even now.
I must confess, this fellow book blogger out here in the book blogosphere is as keenly passionate about these anthologies as I am, as it’s his reviews on behalf of these two anthologies that encouraged me to take the plunge into reading them myself!
I must admit – reading the reviews on Tangent in combination with reading the Press Kits helped make my decision because Tangent has bloggers who knit out the heart of each story and give me ‘just enough’ to whet a thirst of interest.
Do visit his reviews, ahead of my own which will be arriving in October!
And, dear hearts guess what!? Parrish isn’t yet done with her Magical Menagerie! She’s putting together a new collection entitled: SIRENS! Eek. Can you just imagine!? Watery stories of EPIC MYTHOLOGICAL loveliness?! I’m not sure about you, but World Weaver Press has bewitched me!
No. 2 | Being a part of DAW’s blog tour for This Gulf of Time and Stars by Julie E. Czerneda
I initially thought my path had crossed with Ms Czerneda during Sci Fi November 2014, until I ran a search for our tweet convos and realised it was a bit earlier in 2014 during the Sci Fi Writer’s chat! Who knew!? I used to duck inside the #sffwrtcht on a regular basis, as I have a healthy appetite for SFF whilst getting the opportunity to talk to writers who are enveloping us in worlds that are a jolt outside our own realities to the brink of epic intraspace proportions! As we do not just jettison ourselves off of Earth or into the orbit surrounding Earth, we sometimes traverse the divides of time itself whilst visiting territorial systems beyond our line of sight. Then, there is the hidden joy of writers who write an arbitrage of stories contained on Earth herself but within the light years of time ahead of our own living futures, taking us both on land and sea to explore new frontiers and the plausiblilties of life therein. Read More
