I'm linking up with The Broke and the Bookish for another Top Ten Tuesday.
This week's prompt says your wishes can be anything book-related. "YOU DREAM IT AND THE BOOKISH GENIE CAN DO IT." So here are some of my (mostly impossible) wishes!
1. I wish I could read the Harry Potter series again for the first time.
Right? Isn't this the reason people wish there was an eighth book or some such thing, so they can relive that magical world again with new surprises? But really I think what they want is to have the experience again of reading the series for the first time. I hope that someday reading these books with my son / other future children and seeing their reactions will be almost as good.
2. I wish every book I ever wanted to read was available on OverDrive in both Kindle and MP3 audiobook formats.
I get 90% of my books from OverDrive through our local library, meaning I am very spoiled, but I want more! I'm so used to the ease of Kindle reading and audiobook listening that I get annoyed when I have to hold open a hard copy book (especially a big one) or bring it around with me (rather than always having it on my phone). Both formats would be necessary, though, because sometimes a book is too difficult to follow on audio or there's a bad narrator, and sometimes it's too dry in print without character voices.
3. I wish I could read faster.
I already read pretty fast compared to most people... and I do get through 100+ books a year... but how many more could I read if I could read just a little bit faster? I've had to put a lock-down on my to-read list to keep it from being more than I could read in the next five years. But there are so many good books out there!
4. I wish I could know ahead of time if I was going to rate a book a 1 or 2.
I don't want to know all my ratings in advance because that would ruin the joy of deciding how to rate something, and I wouldn't want to avoid 3-star books that I may have liked and learned something from even if they weren't great. But if I could just avoid the really awful books — not even sign up for those book club meetings, for example — then I would have more time for the good ones (see #3).
5. I wish I knew how I would have rated and reviewed books I read a long time ago.
There are a lot of books I read in school and during my summers about which I remember basically nothing. Part of the reason I write reviews is to jog my own memory about what I liked and disliked about a particular book. I'm a very reluctant re-reader, and I would especially hate to waste time rereading a book I didn't like the first time around (see #4).
6. I wish I could get back my lost reviews from weRead.
Ugh. This one pains me. I was a slow adopter of Goodreads because I was already on weRead, which integrated with Facebook and put a little shelf on my profile that showed everyone what I was reading, at least until Facebook made one of its large-scale updates and took away that feature. But by that time I had so many reviews on weRead and had invested so much time adding all of my past books that I stubbornly stuck to it. Then the login stopped working. I waited for them to fix it... and waited... and then the entire site shut down. I contacted the company who had bought it and they told me all my data was gone. Several years' worth of ratings and reviews, never to be recovered. It still makes me mad when I think about it.
7. I wish that the Eddingses had written a good last series instead of a terrible one.
David Eddings was my favorite author for a long time, thanks to penning possibly the only high fantasy series I ever liked, The Belgariad and The Malloreon. His other series, The Elenium and the Tamuli, were also good, as was his standalone, The Redemption of Althalus. His wife was credited as a coauthor on several of his works, which may be how he managed to write such fantastic female characters. Then, before David died, they wrote the Dreamers series, and it was truly awful. And now I have to tell people, "Yes, read David Eddings... but read this series, not that series."
8. I wish I could meet Barbara Kingsolver.
This one could still happen! A lot of my favorite authors are deceased, but she is not. I'd love to meet her not just because she writes some amazing fiction, but also because her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was the reason I stopped eating meat. She's a cool person as well as a great writer, and if I had to pick any author to meet (given that I've already met John Green several times), I think I would want to meet her.
9. I wish I had my own small, soundproof room to read in.
There are a lot of things I love about living in a college residence hall, and also about having a child, but neither lends itself well to having peace and quiet for reading. Even if I manage to arrange a little time for myself out of the apartment to read, there's nowhere in our building I can go where there aren't going to be people talking, running through the halls, laughing, playing games, etc. I just want a little space where I can go for uninterrupted reading time!
10. I wish that there were a theme park based on The Phantom Tollbooth.
This is one of my all-time favorite children's books, and I think it would be so fun to have a theme park where everything is based around wordplay. The book has a cast of colorful characters and a variety of locations (like the Castle in the Air and the Valley of Sound), plus a variety of ways the characters travel through the different lands that could lend themselves to kids' rides. Basically I'm a big nerd and want to go to a place that celebrates imagination and language the way this book does.
Those are my bookish wishes! What are yours?
This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. Thanks for supporting A Cocoon of Books!
No comments:
Post a Comment