2, 8, 10, and 19 for the book asks? 👁️
book asks ! 2. top five books of all time oh my goddd.d oh ym gdo. okay. i think when we start talking top five books of all time, we start moving into the 'books that personally mean a lot to me' rather than books I think are the best written or what have you. so without ado here's five: (1) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Study in Scarlet: really just the entire Sherlock Holmes series. a series that has imprinted on my brain so thoroughly that a well-done homage will make me tear up. second place in the mystery section would be Agatha Christie's Poirot series, as I was actually a Christie reader before I was a Doyle reader.
(2) Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon: a brief exploration into the discovery of the elements and just a profoundly excitable, interested view about the history of chemistry. I love everything Kean has ever written, and there's just something about how invested he gets in his investigations - where you can almost feel the chemist's joy as they finally brew up polonium or whatever - that really gets me.
(3) Preston and Child's Relic (The Pendergast Series #1): it's funny that this is in my top five, as I eventually dropped the series (....16 or 17 books in) due to lack of interest. but it's everything I personally love reading and everything I try to infuse in my writing: an eccentric but kindly detective, an absolutely out of this world mystery, and barely-tied plot details holding it together. I've found a lot of books are almost like. idk. scared??? to press the boundary of what they think is realistic. not sure with the pendergast series, which is full metal all the time.
(4) The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum: an exploration as to the history of forensic toxicology. look, as someone who was really disheartened about the state of modern forensics research, it's so nice to read about the people who are so desperate to use science for justice. people who were pulling together scraps in their labs with nothing at all! just trying to identify poisons! it's one of my favorites to this day.
(5) Anxious People by Fredrik Backman: it's funny, Anxious People never seems to be anyone's favorite Backman book and to me it was the shining star of the sky. it's my favorite hopecore book: yes being alive is hard, yes life is deeply unfair, yes we can still try, yes it's not too late to form a connection with another human person. Anxious People really hit that sweet spot for me - I never relate to books about mental health that take it with deadly seriousness, because I do believe in my heart of hearts that existing in the modern world is a little bit absurd. Nor do I really relate to the Midnight Library style, which basically pushes you to just gratitude your way out of it.
8. what is the first book you remember reading yourself?
definitely one of margaret peterson haddix's broods: she's the first author whose location I memorized in the library. quite possibly it was among the hidden or just ella, both of which I have very vivid memories about! 10. do you have a guilty fav? not a specific guilty fav, but man am I a sucker for shitty thrillers. you know the ones. they have covers that look like this. they're never good. the characters are never good. you're never like, oh my god 'You are Fatally Invited' changed my life. different fucking animal after reading 'Zetas Till We Die'. however, then you'll uncover an actually good one (One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware) and it's like someone taught you how to make bread from grain. oh right thrillers CAN be good instead of brittle aphid-filled husks. 19. most disliked popular book?
this is going to be. sort of obscure perhaps. but when you're talking Thee Classic Literary Detectives, I swear to god that Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is like. in the top ten. and i've tried to read him SO many times. i want to like him so badly. there's so many. there's a fleshed out watson character. an eccentric detective. but I just can't do it man. every time I open the first book, I get a quarter way in before I tap out.
