Top Five Wednesday – Used To Love ‘Em But…

Okay, full disclosure, I’m writing this post as I’m watching the Election Returns so I’m sorry if my writing seems a little off.  I’m distracted you know?  Even though I’m still hopeful and optimistic anything can happen (and has been…) and I’m kind of freaking out.  Sooooo I figured I’d write a blog post!  And thankfully our faithful moderator Sam from Thoughts On Tomes has given the T5W Goodreads group another great prompt.  The task?  Find five characters I used to love but now don’t, whether I’ve outgrown them, have come to hate them, or am just now casually indifferent to them.  So here’s who comes to mind when I’m trying not to worry whether or not my country’s about to implode under a Trumpocalypse… 

Top Five Wednesday – Gateway Books

It’s been a bit busier again since the school year resumed so I haven’t had time to do a Top Five Wednesday post in a few weeks.  Isn’t it annoying how, you know, regular work days can interfere with reading and writing?!?  But such is life I suppose :).  Well, to close out September the T5W Goodreads Group (created by Lainey of gingerreadslainey and now moderated by Samantha of Thoughts on Tomes) has requested we fine participants cobble together a list of five great gateway books to our favorite genre.  Curious what made the cut?  Well read on!

Top Five Wednesday – Welcome to the Family!

It’s Wednesday once more and this week our creative stewards over at Goodreads have issued another exciting reflective challenge.  This time around we’re to pick the top five characters – whether speaking generally or specifically – we’d like to have as family.  I’ve said before these T5W posts can lead me down a rabbit hole of hours and hours of analyzing, reworking, and over-thinking.  But this was another easy week!  My #1 choice came to me in a matter of moments and the rest of the list followed shortly after.  And I certainly had a lot of fun with this one too.  

Top Five Wednesday – Read By Year’s End

This was a surprisingly easy week in the Top Five Wednesday world!  I say “surprisingly” because, no matter the topic, I always seem to end up over-analyzing both the topic and my choices.  Don’t get me wrong; I have fun doing that :).  But more often than not a substantial amount of thought has to go into narrowing down my choices to see what makes this list.  But it was easy this time!  Our T5W stewards over at Goodreads have designated this week as the top five books you want to read by the end of the year. 

Top Five Wednesday – Books I’ve Come to Feel Differently About

Ah yes, Wednesday…the calendars have turned over once again to this magical day.  The world is treated once more to the latest in literary engaging prompts from the lovely people running the T5W group over at Goodreads.  Yay!  These always end up prompting faaar more deep reflection then I expect once I actually sit down to write them.  Because of that, they’ve become some of my favorite posts.  The idea this week was to highlight five books that I feel differently about after I’ve had time to think about them or reread them.  After several days of thinking, talking it out, and starring at my bookshelves, here’s what finally made the cut!  This may have ended up being my most eclectic Top Five Wednesday yet…

Top Five Wednesday – Most Unlikable Characters

On a non-Top Five Wednesday related note, it’s Mom’s BIRTHDAY today!  Yay!  With that being said, there’s all sorts of celebrating to do…which will actually be super welcome since writing this post has made me really annoyed.  You see, this week, the T5W Goodreads group‘s challenge was to discuss your top five UNLIKABLE characters.  Now, the trick was they weren’t to be villains per se but rather protagonists and/or side characters who are unlikable.  With that being said, let’s just go and get my controversial choice out of the way first…

Top Five Wednesday – Additions to My Wish List!

I realized yesterday that I haven’t posted anything since geeking out about the AMAZING new Ghostbusters last Friday nor have I really been on WordPress since the weekend.  It was unplanned but proved to be a nice mind-clearing, resetting sort of mental holiday.  Anyway, it’s Wednesday and you know that that means – it’s Top Five Wednesday time!  This week’s topic, care of the good folks running the Goodreads group, is the top five books you’re dying to add to your collection.  Sounds fun :).  Yay!

Top Five Wednesday – Outside the ol’ Comfort Zone

The first Top Five Wednesday prompt the Goodreads group assigned for July was to pick five books you love that are outside of your comfort zone.  For example, if you like fiction try to pick something nonfiction that you enjoyed.  I struggled with this one since I enjoy reading a wide variety of genres.  I think that’s half the fun of reading!  There’s so much to choose from!  Obviously, I love comic books and my home book shelves are filled with novels.  But I also regularly read memoirs, biographies, theology, philosophy, history, sacred scripture from various traditions, and even have a passion for a small selection of poets.  So finding books from a genre I don’t normally read was a bit of a challenge, but here’s what made the list!

Top Five Wednesday – Settings

Admittedly, I’ve only been doing this Top Five Wednesday thing for three weeks now but this one proved a little bit challenging for me.  The good folks who run the Official T5W Group over at Goodreads said we were to write about the top five settings we wanted to see more of.  They could be time periods, places, real, fictitious, etc.  What made this hard is, upon reflection, I learned that the setting is rarely what draws me to a story, let alone makes me fall in love with it.  For example, I love New York City but I won’t read a book or see a film just because it’s set there.  And few books or movies make the city as central a part of it as, say, Begin Again did (which, if you haven’t seen, you should check it out NOW – it’s beautiful).  So it’s not the setting that I love but rather what the author does with the story and the characters they choose to place in that setting.  But!  I wasn’t going to throw in the towel!  So, after some careful consideration, here are the five settings I’d like to see more of.

Top Five Wednesday – My Greatest Hits

The Goodreads Top Five Wednesday post for this week was an interesting one.  Essentially you’re to compile a list of five of your favorite posts.  So basically I’m putting together my (still very young) blog’s Greatest Hits.  Now I just have to hope that this list is like Bruce Springsteen’s 1995 Greatest Hits album where he went on to make (and continues to make!) some of the best music of his career after he released it and not something like Poison’s Greatest Hits 1986-1996 where it was an awesome album…but then not so much great new material afterwards.  (Although, giving credit where credit is due, they did a wonderfully fun cover of “SexyBack” in 2007.)  I’ve also included little (new) summaries of the posts and why they made the cut.  So there’s new material here too.  Anyway, let’s see which posts made the cut!