Top 5 Wednesday l December

December 6th - Bookish Things You're a Grinch About

-- Since being a grinch is a funny thing, try not to make this serious topics that make you angry (like lack of diversity or abusive relationships in fiction, etc) as this is supposed to be more of a petty bookish things you hate. This can be stuff about covers, dumb tropes, etc. Have fun with it.

1. When one book cover is beautiful and gets super popular so then you end up with 1001 copycats
2. Books with super small print, you buy them because they make the whole book smaller but then you have to read that little print. 
3.  Amazing Books With Ugly Covers, this doubles down when they change the covers from something ok (or heaven forbid beautiful) to something ugly
4. When they mix and match the books in a series, 2 hard cover and then a paperback, changing the covers. So stressful. I mean really!
5. Sales Stickers / Recommendation Stickers on my book.

December 13th - Characters on the Naughty List

Characters You Don't Like

1. Clary and Jace, separately and together, I don't like these two at all. The Mortal Instruments, Cassandra Clare
2. Gwendolyn, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Dianna Wynne Jones
3. Tressa, Dragonlands, Megg Jensen
4. Hanna, and Just about everyone else in 13 Reasons Why, Jay Asher - this is a tough one because I liked the book overall, but I have huge issues with how it comes across. I have several rants about this already, but back to my point. The characters are all very whiney and shallow and one dimensional and have no redeeming qualities... 
5. Queen Levena - A whole book just trying to redeem her character, and it still wasn't enough. But I do love to hate her. 

December 20th: Top 5 Books of 2017 

1. The Hatching, Ezekiel Boone
2. Heartless, Marissa Meyer
3. The Cellar, Minette Walters
4. The Dark Tower, Stephen King
5. The Butterfly Garden, Dot Hutchison

December 27th: 2018 Wishlist
--Looking forward into the new year, this is a list of the types of books you'd like to see more of in 2018! Try to avoid actual titles, and discuss themes, genres, or tropes you'd like to see more of in the new year!

1. Creature Features
2. The Queen of the Damned (Anne Rice) and Sleeping Beauties (Stephen King) have both opened the doors to worlds that are 100% women (or at least 90%) using elimination techniques or science to both procreate or curb the male population, it is a really interesting concept and someone could really write an original and interesting book on a variety of premises in this setting. (if they are low key on the crazier feminist, pushy statement, angle)
3. Horror : Short Story Collections
4. A really good non-fiction on the issue of "popularizing problems" (warning this would be SO controversial). Though a variety of sources - non-fiction reading, TED talks, conferences, statistics, being an older sister, and simple observation - I have noticed that people love to belong (common well known fact) but what about when people want to belong to something incredibly risky and potentially destructive? For example its been "popular" to have various mental illness in particular lately Depression and Bipolar (which was ADD and then ADHD when I was a child) which people have been very adept at faking, hand in hand with companies wanting to sell their drugs... studies on "mental illness contagion" "suicide contagion" and any other danger that people are willing to risk in order to fit in. 
5. More books with platonic relationships, with normal people. Romance isn't everything and LGBTQ+ should be represented in literature, but authors are saturating us with these characters now.  Particularly YA. Not that I think we should be pressing the "straight, white non minority" into everyones face either. Plenty of these novels I've been reading would have been amazing and are amazing, for all the other reasons. Unless someones race, gender or sexuality is adding something, you just end up taking away from the story.