{"id":10300,"date":"2025-01-08T22:27:47","date_gmt":"2025-01-08T22:27:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/books\/top-ten-tuesday-favourite-books-of-2023-the-book-lovers-sanctuary\/"},"modified":"2025-01-08T22:27:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T22:27:47","slug":"top-ten-tuesday-favourite-books-of-2023-the-book-lovers-sanctuary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=10300","title":{"rendered":"Top Ten Tuesday:\u00a0Favourite Books of 2023 \u2013 The Book Lovers’ Sanctuary"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Top Ten Tuesday was created by\u00a0The Broke and the Bookish\u00a0in June of 2010 and was moved to\u00a0That Artsy Reader Girl<\/a>\u00a0in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. <\/p>\n

Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics<\/h2>\n
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Happy New Year and welcome to 2024, everyone!<\/p>\n

And it is more than galling that I am back at work tomorrow \u2013 on the 2nd January! We had far too long before Christmas for my daughter to get anxious waiting for it \u2013 to the point where she was physically throwing up! \u2013 and far<\/strong> too little time afterwards.<\/p>\n

But I do like the chance to reflect on the previous year\u2019s reading as well as anticipate the coming year, which is something that the January Top Ten themes always tend to encourage! And what better way to begin than to consider my favourite books of the year.<\/p>\n

I have already blogged about my five star reads of the year in my usual Year in Books post<\/a> so that is a good place to start.<\/p>\n

So Late in the Day<\/em>, Claire Keegan<\/h2>\n
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After an uneventful Friday at the Dublin office, Cathal faces into the long weekend and takes the bus home. There, his mind agitates over a woman named Sabine with whom he could have spent his life, had he acted differently. All evening, with only the television and a bottle of champagne for company, thoughts of this woman and others intrude \u2013 and the true significance of this particular date is revealed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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There is nothing special about the day Cushla meets Michael, a married man from Belfast, in the pub owned by her family. But here, love is never far from violence, and this encounter will change both of their lives forever.<\/p>\n

As people get up each morning and go to work, school, church or the pub, the daily news rolls in of another car bomb exploded, another man beaten, killed or left for dead. In the class Cushla teaches, the vocabulary of seven-year-old children now includes phrases like \u2018petrol bomb\u2019 and \u2018rubber bullets\u2019. And as she is forced to tread lines she never thought she would cross, tensions in the town are escalating, threatening to destroy all she is working to hold together.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Demon\u2019s story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking \u2018like a little blue prizefighter.\u2019 For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.<\/p>\n

In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty and addiction aren\u2019t ideas. They\u2019re as natural as the grass grows. For Demon, born on the wrong side of luck, the affection and safety he craves is as remote as the ocean he dreams of seeing one day. The wonder is in how far he\u2019s willing to travel to try and get there.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Babel<\/em>, R. F. Kuang<\/h2>\n
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Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oxford, 1836.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The city of dreaming spires.<\/p>\n

It is the centre of all knowledge and progress in the world.<\/p>\n

And at its centre is Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation. The tower from which all the power of the Empire flows.<\/p>\n

Orphaned in Canton and brought to England by a mysterious guardian, Babel seemed like paradise to Robin Swift.<\/p>\n

Until it became a prison\u2026<\/p>\n

But can a student stand against an empire?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Bee Sting<\/em>, Paul Murray<\/h2>\n
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The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie\u2019s once-lucrative car business is going under \u2013 but rather than face the music, he\u2019s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman.<\/p>\n

His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.<\/p>\n

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil?<\/p>\n

Can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written \u2013 is there still time to find a happy ending?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Fall of the House of Usher<\/em>, Edgar Allan Poe<\/h2>\n
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Take the plunge. Dive into this classic from the singular mind of Edgar Allan Poe, who is widely regarded as the short story master of horror fiction.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Fall .. \u201d recounts the terrible events that befall the last remaining members of the once-illustrious Usher clan before it is \u2014 quite literally \u2014 rent asunder. With amazing economy, Poe plunges the reader into a state of deliciously agonizing suspense. It\u2019s a must-read for fans of the golden era of horror writing. \u201cThe Fall ..\u201d is one of Poe\u2019s best known short stories \u2013 if not the best.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Christopher is stunned when he discovers a passage to the Archipelago: a cluster of magical islands where all the creatures of myth still live and breed and thrive in their thousands. There he meets Mal: a girl from the islands, who is in possession of a flying coat and a baby griffin, and who is being pursued by a killer. Together they embark on an urgent quest to discover why the creatures are suddenly perishing, voyaging across the wild splendour of the Archipelago, where sphinxes hold secrets and centaurs do murder, in a bid to save both the islands and the world beyond them from a rising evil \u2013 before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Five star reads are not always the most enjoyable \u2013 which feels rather counter-intuitive perhaps \u2013 and the most enjoyable reads are sometimes not always the best crafted five-star books. Obviously<\/strong>, in many cases the two do coincide: The Bee Sting <\/em>and Impossible Creatures <\/em>were both wonderful reads as well as incredibly well crafted.<\/p>\n

The Lies of Locke Lamora<\/em>, Scott Lynch<\/h2>\n
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They say that the Thorn of Camorr can beat anyone in a fight. They say he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. They say he\u2019s part man, part myth, and mostly street-corner rumor. And they are wrong on every count.<\/p>\n

Only averagely tall, slender, and god-awful with a sword, Locke Lamora is the fabled Thorn, and the greatest weapons at his disposal are his wit and cunning. He steals from the rich \u2013 they\u2019re the only ones worth stealing from \u2013 but the poor can go steal for themselves. What Locke cons, wheedles and tricks into his possession is strictly for him and his band of fellow con-artists and thieves: the Gentleman Bastards.<\/p>\n

Together their domain is the city of Camorr. Built of Elderglass by a race no-one remembers, it\u2019s a city of shifting revels, filthy canals, baroque palaces and crowded cemeteries. Home to Dons, merchants, soldiers, beggars, cripples, and feral children. And to Capa Barsavi, the criminal mastermind who runs the city.<\/p>\n

But there are whispers of a challenge to the Capa\u2019s power. A challenge from a man no one has ever seen, a man no blade can touch. The Grey King is coming.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What Moves the Dead<\/em>, T. J. Kingfisher<\/h2>\n
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When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.<\/p>\n

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.<\/p>\n

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In Ascension<\/em>, Martin MacInnes<\/h2>\n
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Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth\u2019s first life forms \u2013 what she instead finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings.<\/p>\n

Her discovery leads Leigh to the Mojave desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency\u2019s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world, each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister, and faces an impossible choice: to remain with her family, or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Birnam Wood is on the move\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned.<\/p>\n

But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker \u2013 or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Astrid is returning home from art school on Mars, looking for inspiration. Darling is fleeing a life that never fit, searching for somewhere to hide. They meet on Deep Wheel Orcadia, a distant space station struggling for survival as the pace of change threatens to leave the community behind.<\/p>\n

Deep Wheel Orcadia<\/em>\u00a0is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect. This unique adventure in minority language poetry comes with a parallel translation into playful and vivid English, so the reader will miss no nuance of the original. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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And there we have it, my favourite reads of the year -for a variety of reasons. And thinking of these has been a very positive way of avoiding thinking about the rigours of tomorrow\u2026 or the horrors of re-setting a 0530 alarm and mo<\/p>\n

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Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes<\/h2>\n

January 9:<\/strong>\u00a0Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2024
January 16:<\/strong>\u00a0Bookish Goals for 2024
January 23:<\/strong>\u00a0Books I Meant to Read in 2023 but Didn\u2019t Get To
January 30:<\/strong>\u00a0New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023
February 6:<\/strong>\u00a0Top Ten Quick Reads\/Books to Read When Time is Short (Books under 150 pages, or if you\u2019re not a novella reader maybe spin this to be books you could read in a day or a single sitting.<\/em>) (Submitted by Jennifer @ FunkNFiction.com and Angela @ Reading Frenzy<\/em>)
February 13:<\/strong>\u00a0Love Freebie (in honor of Valentine\u2019s Day tomorrow<\/em>)
February 20:<\/strong>\u00a0Bookish Superpowers I Wish I Had (e.g. never accidentally buying the same book twice, every book I buy would be automatically signed\/personally dedicated by the author, the ability to read faster, etc.<\/em>) (Submitted by Cathy @WhatCathyReadNext<\/em>)
February 27:<\/strong>\u00a0Covers\/Titles with Things Found in Nature (covers\/titles with things like trees, flowers, animals, forests, bodies of water, etc. on\/in them<\/em>) (Submitted by Jessica @\u00a0a GREAT read<\/a><\/em>)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n