Top Ten Tuesday – Unread Books on my Shelf I want to Read Soon

I have a lot of books on my shelf I want to read and at the rate I’m going I won’t finish for a few years. Because of this, there are a lot of books I will have to put off reading for a long time. Also, I’m a mood reader so I can’t plan out what I’m going to read next. Sometimes I want to read a specific book immediately after the book I’m currently reading, but then once I finish my current book I find I’m no longer in the mood and I find a different book to read.

Also, there’s the added reason of how every time I get one of my held books from Libby I get two or three other books immediately afterwards. I then have to read all these books within two weeks and this causes me to push my TBR back a little further. It’s because of these reasons that I can’t make themed TBR lists. I sure as hell can’t make monthly TBR lists because that would be next to impossible for me.

Yet despite the fact I can’t make myself a TBR list for the immediate future and also the fact that I have a lot of unread books, there are many books I want to read soon. This is a list of ten unread books based on a prompt for Top Ten Tuesday run by That Artsy Reader Girl. I’m also including digital books on this list and none of these books are in any specific order. There will only be one book per author so half my list doesn’t end up being by the same author. These are just books I want to read at some point this year because that is how I’m defining soon.

1. Warrior of the Altaii by Robert Jordan

One day last year I was walking home from work. Usually, when I’m walking home I look into store windows to do a little bit of window shopping. The local drug store has in the past had a bin full of books for sale that you can see from the window and sometimes I like to look over them to see if there are any that I would be interested in. Most of the books I see are either thrillers or romance novels, and none of them are anything that I would want to go out of my way to buy.

This time when I was walking down the street I saw that one book had Robert Jordan’s name on it and suddenly I was interested. If you don’t already know Robert Jordan is the author of the Wheel of Time series and I honestly didn’t realize he had published any other novels. I know now that he published other books. I ended up going into the drug store and buying the book and then I looked into it and saw that this was Robert Jordan’s first unpublished novel that was published recently in 2019.

The fact that it was his first novel made me even more interested because if you haven’t noticed I’m currently an unpublished author working on a novel. I was curious to see what the first unpublished novel of a very popular fantasy author was like. I was planning on reading it soon after I bought it and instead, it has sat on my shelf ever since waiting for me to pick it up again.

I honestly don’t know why I haven’t read it yet. It’s only 330 pages long which is very short for a fantasy novel. Compared to some of the novels in the Wheel of Time Series it’s puny. Whenever I felt like reading a fantasy novel and didn’t feel like committing to a 500+ page book I should have taken this one off the shelf and read it. I still can since that happens every once in a while.

2. The Dragon Book Edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

It’s a law that I need to include something related to dragons on every list that I write. I have two dragon books I had to choose between, both bought on the same day. This is the one that I want to read soon the most though. It’s a book of short stories that all feature dragons somehow. I bought it a couple of years ago at a used bookstore in the city. I haven’t been there in a while, but I’m planning on returning every once in a while to buy more used books. I also would like to point out that I have read maybe one of the books I bought that day. One of them is one of the sequels to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I need to reach that point in the series first, so at least that one I have a weak reason for why I haven’t read it yet.

As I look down the list of people who have stories in this anthology there are a few names that I recognize. I recognize Garth Nix and Tamora Pierce, though I haven’t read any of their books yet. Jonathan Stroud also wrote a story for this and I read his Bartimaeus Sequence when I was a kid. Of course, when I bought this book I wasn’t thinking about the authors, I just wanted a book with dragons in it. I’ve been trying to read more short stories and this would be the perfect way to do so and it even includes dragons.

3. The Bibliophile Princess Volume 3 by Yui (The Light Novel)

So far two of the books I’ve chosen for this list have been pretty short. The Bibliophile Princess Volume 3 is the shortest so far. This is a series that I started a couple of years ago when I decided that I wanted to read more manga. You have likely noticed that this is not the manga version though a manga version does exist. By the way, if you don’t know a light novel is a short novel that is typically first written in Japanese and may contain the occasional illustration. This is the only light novel series I’ve gotten into so far.

The first novel follows Lady Elianna as she notices Prince Christopher, her betrothed in name only, with another woman. She assumes this means that he has found someone he truly loves because she is for sure not the one he truly loves. That’s the princess part. The bibliophile part is because her entire family is known for being incredibly intense bookworms. Throughout the books, she uses the things she’s learned from the random books she has read to solve problems and to make the world a better place. On top of that the romance is kind of interesting.

I don’t want to leave this book hanging for much longer hence why it’s on this list. I could probably finish the series in a week if I try. I just have to sit down and read them. There are only five more books in the series aside from this one and the most recently published novel was only published in January so that gives me time before the next book.

4. The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter

This is the other dragon book I got from the used book store and I’ve been meaning to read it for a while. I became a bit motivated to read it when I saw it on a list of dragon books to read instead of Fourth Wing. Also when I was compiling my entire TBR list consisting of owned books I discovered that I have both a physical copy and a copy on my Kindle because not only was I intrigued about this book once, I saw it again and became intrigued by it again when I forgot I already owned it. I should read this book before I somehow come upon a third copy.

Reading the little description of what this book is about only made me want to read this more. It looks like a revenge story set in a world with an endless war where some people get dragon-based gifts. Also, it’s based on African culture, specifically Zulu, and I’m always interested in fantasy stories that aren’t based on European culture. Plus this novel has dragons in it so I’m interested. I will read this book soon.

5. The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I think everyone has a novel that has evaded them multiple times, or at least I hope everyone has one because this novel has done that to me. I have had this book since high school and I started reading it and fell off it because of whatever reason. Then in 2020, I started reading it again when I decided that I would finally finish reading this pile of partially read novels, and fell off it again due to very legit reasons.

Like its not even that long. It’s only 317 pages long according to Goodreads and it was included in a list of “The Hundred Best Fantasy Books of All Time” on Time Magazine so it has to be good. It’s time for a third attempt at completing this novel. I do remember liking the parts I read. Now I just need to reach the end.

6. Firefight by Brandon Sanderson

Last year during the Year of Sanderson I decided to read everything that Brandon Sanderson had ever published. I didn’t quite reach that goal, though I did finish the Skyward series and caught up with the Stormlight Archive. I also read a few of his standalone novels/novellas. All this while reading other books and the Secret Projects.

I kind of neglected the Reckoners though. I read the first book a while ago, and though I not only enjoyed the first book but also bought the next novel, the only other book I read in the series was a novella that is supposed to go between the first and second books. I’m interested in this world of evil superheroes and I want to see more of the secrets that the first novel was alluding to. Also after Firefight, it looks like I only have one more book to go. There is also an audio-only book, but that looks like more of a side story than anything.

I would like to continue my Sanderson readthrough and I think this is the perfect way to do so.

7. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

This is a book that has been on my TBR for a while, however it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I got a copy. It was on sale in the Kindle store like many of the books that I have purchased and didn’t think to look for.

This is an important book for the environmental movement and I was told about it a few times at school while I was studying environmental science. It was even mentioned in The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu which made me want to read it even more. It was published in the early sixties, and though it wasn’t the first environmental book Rachel Carson wrote it is the first one that got a lot of attention and also the one that had the biggest impact on laws and regulations. This is one of the few books I want to read mainly for the impact it has had.

It’s a book I want to read and I could easily take it off my TBR list by actually reading it.

8. The Apparitionists by Peter Manseau

Here is another nonfiction book for my list. The full title is The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. Like many historical nonfiction books I’ve seen it has a simple title and then this long subtitle that is the elevator pitch for the entire book. From the description, I believe this is exactly what I’m going to get from reading this book.

It’s about William Mumler, a spirit photographer who worked just after the American Civil War. If you don’t know what a spirit photographer is, it’s a person who takes pictures of ghosts. He took pictures of living subjects with the spirit of a loved one alongside him. He was a sensation at the time. He was also put on trial for deceiving people, however, he was never charged with anything.

This book is likely going to go over Mumler’s life, how he got into spirit photography, the trial, and then go over a few possible methods he could have used to capture ghosts on film. I like nonfiction books like this. It’s why I have a good number of them on my TBR list.

9. The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

A couple of years ago I participated in a book swap and got The Colour of Magic from it. Then I read it a while later and enjoyed it. When I was younger I read the first volume of the Discworld graphic novels and enjoyed it which followed at least some of the plot of The Colour of Magic.

As soon as I was done reading the first book I went and got the second book and it’s been sitting on my TBR list ever since. I have heard that this isn’t the best part of the series to start at, but I don’t care. I already started at the first novel and it sounds like the second novel starts where the first one left off. Also, I did enjoy the Colour of Magic, so if there are even better novels coming up I can’t wait to read them when I get to them.

10. Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay

This is the first book in The Sarantine Mosaic. I got both this one and the second book a long while ago at a used bookstore and ever since it has sat on my shelf, taunting me for not reading it, and wondering when I would finally get to it. I kind of got these two books in the middle of a lull in my reading. There were a few years where I read a maximum of thirty books a year and most of these books were ebooks from Overdrive. This being a physical novel, made it even less likely that I would read it then.

After I started reading a lot with variety again in 2020 I ended up collecting even more books that I wanted to read. Now is the perfect time for me to get into more novels by Guy Gavriel Kay. I did enjoy the novels that I read when I was in high school, so I’m sure I’ll like this book.

Conclusion

As you can see I have a lot of books that I want to read. It was hard to limit myself to only ten. I tried hard to choose a variety of books and I think I did that. There is manga, a light novel, and multiple big fantasy books as long as you think The Warrior of the Altaii counts as a big book. There’s a non-fiction book in here and even a couple of books that I’ve put off reading for the longest time. I’ll try very hard to read all of these books over the next few months. Of course, it always depends on what I feel like reading.