Top Ten Tuesday: The First Ten

Today's prompt for Top Ten Tuesday from That Artsy Reader Girl is "First Ten Books I Reviewed."

I started doing book reviews on other blogs of mine about eight years before I started this book blog.  I've been blogging at Hamlette's Soliloquy since 2002 and, in 2004, I started tossing an occasional book review into my mix there.  Later, I had a writing blog called Inscriptions and a crafting blog connected to my Etsy shop, and I posted book reviews on them as well.

But in 2012, I was becoming friends with a lot of book bloggers, and I decided that I was tired of having my own book reviews scattered around at all these different places.  I wanted my own book blog that I could use to discuss all bookish subjects, and where I could collect all my book reviews.  So I started this blog in September of 2012, but I kept it private for a few months while I worked at collecting up all my reviews from all my various blogs and posting them chronologically here, with links back to the original posts and what dates I'd originally written them.  I kept posting book reviews on Hamlette's Soliloquy through the end of 2012, and then made this blog public at the dawning of 2013.

All this is to explain why the following reviews have little tags at the end of them that say "Originally posted at" and then another blog name and a date and so on.

All titles linked to my reviews, and I've included a line from each review here too.  Okay, here we go:

1. Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl -- "Heyerdahl is conversational while being creative. He writes about the everyday things, like whether or not he got tired of drinking coconut milk. Yet he keeps things fresh, using precisely the right words and descriptions."

2. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde -- "It's incredibly hard to describe, but I'll try. It's set in 1985, but not the 1985 we knew...in this 1985, things like time travel and pet dodos are common. The main character, Thursday Next, is a literature detective, and she eventually winds up inside the book Jane Eyre, helping Mr. Rochester rescue Jane from the evil genius who kidnapped her."

3. I Never Had it Made by Jackie Robinson with Alfred Duckett -- "While I know that most autobiographies need to be taken with a grain (or shaker) of salt, this one contained far less hubris than most I've read."

4. John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth by Michael Munn -- "It's the first biography of John Wayne I've ever managed to finish reading."

5. Zorro by Isabelle Allende -- "The voice of the novel is great too, like some friend of yours is telling you all the stuff that happened when they went on a vacation. Only they had a fun and fascinating vacation, not the kind where you spend most of the time in the car trying to get somewhere interesting."

6. An Antic Disposition by Alan Gordon -- "This is a book full of intrigue, humor, and more than a little violence. Even if you're not obsessed with Hamlet the way I am, if you like suspense and mystery stories, try to find this book. You will be entranced."

7. John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet by Richard L. Sterne -- "This book was so delightful, so crammed with thoughts about the play that I'd never even considered, that I simply had to buy my own copy. I have a feeling it's one I'll return to often."

8. Keeping Watch by Laurie R. King -- "I couldn't imagine what each new page would bring, but I couldn't wait to find out."

9. A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh -- "If nothing else, her words assured me that I'm not the only woman who needs alone time, who needs to create things to feel more complete, be they stories or books or afghans or pumpkin pies."

10. The Ninth Configuration by William Peter Blatty -- "I saw The Ninth Configuration in a film class in college and liked it right away. It's twisted, it's weird, it's off-beat, it's creepy, and it's very unlike most of the movies I like. But I dug it anyway."

Okay, there are my ten!  Have you read any of these?  Did you do a TTT post this week?  Share in the comments so we can chat!