Top Ten Tuesday: TTT Rewind

By: Leah

Top Ten Tuesday used to be a weekly post hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, but was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl. “It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.” This is definitely something I can understand and want to participate in.

Originally posted on Leah’s Books.

I haven’t been blogging for nearly as long as TTT has been going, so this rewind gives me the time to revisit previous topics that I never got the chance to do. This week I’m going to talk about gateway books. Have you ever read the kind of book that gets its hooks in you and makes you want to read a ton more books in that genre? Here’s my gateway books for various genres:

1. The Witching Hour by Anne Rice — while I classify this one firmly in the fantasy genre, it also has a major historical fiction component, and it made me want to read more historical fiction books. Especially focusing on witches.
2. The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories by Mary Higgins Clark — I got my hands on this book early on and fell in love with mystery/thrillers and haven’t stopped reading them since.
3. Hook/Lost in Darkness by Gina L. Maxwell — I definitely had a grudge against romance, thinking it was going to all be the cheesy 80s and 90s style romance that I used to sneak-read as a kid. This was suggested to me, and boy did it open a whole new world of modern-day spicy romance novels to me.
4. Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert — this book showed me all about the genre of rom-coms that were inclusive, where I could identify with a plus-size and disabled character, laugh while reading, and not have to deal with corny words for genitalia.
5. Circe by Madeline Miller — I didn’t even know that mythology retellings were an entire subgenre until I discovered this book, and then fell into a whole rabbit hole of retellings.
6. Kill the Queen by Jennifer Estep — this was my first introduction to fantasy as an adult, and I haven’t looked back since. Now it’s my most frequently read genre most months.
7. The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang — as a subgenre, military fantasy has quickly become a favorite, and to think that I didn’t even know that it existed before this book dropped.
8. Dread Nation by Justina Ireland — this was one of the first horror books that I read recently, and I like to call it horror-lite. As a self-proclaimed wuss, this is a genre I’m only starting to read, but the ones I can manage, I do enjoy.
9. Game of Cones by Cynthia Baxter — this was the first cozy mystery I ever read, and I was actually surprised at how much I love the genre, since I also love the super dark and gritty and gory kind of mysteries too.
10. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt — I’m sure I read literary fiction before this, but this one stands out the most to me, especially since I loved this book so much. This is a genre that can be hit or miss for me, but when it hits, it hits hard.

What are some of your gateway books?