Ten years ago I’d just gotten out of college, was gearing up to be a student teacher, and was grappling with independent adult life for the first time. I also hadn’t done much pleasure reading for years; being a college English major really kills your drive to read for fun, and I had a lot of trouble getting back into my old habits. I owe Brandon Sanderson a lot for being the on-ramp back into reading. I don’t pick him up much anymore, but I’ll forever have a fondness for the sparks he lit back inside me for books.
I did my best to find the exact books I was reading on August 11 for the past ten years. Many of the earlier years are estimates, as I don’t have exact data. However, they’re certainly books I was reading that year, even if not on August 11 exactly.
2016: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
Truly this was my first step back into reading as an adult. I think I started the book while carpooling back to Kansas over Spring Break my senior year (thank you Kasha for the book recommendation! Hope you’re doing well). Action, cool magic, creepy villains, and holy shit Sanderson knows how to write an ending that pulls together all the loose ends. I’m excited for this to get made into a move, though I mostly want a video game of it.
2017: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
My love affair continued. At one point I promised to get all the leatherobund editions of this series. Thankfully, I didn’t drop that kind of cash on a series that, a decade later, I have very mixed feelings about. However, I still believe this volume is a great epic fantasy book. I know Kaladin is everyone’s baby, but Shallan has my soul, despite how much the internet hates her. I love a good quip.
2018: Tempests and Slaughter by Tamora Pierce
This is Pierce’s most recent release, which came out in 2018. I probably read it immediately upon release, not in August. It follows a major side character from a previous series, focusing on his childhood misadventures at mage school. I hope she is able to continue writing. She’s had quite a few health issues recently, and I’m glad she’s prioritizing that first. She was writing feminist fantasy for kids long before it was in vogue, and similarly featured queer characters and modeled allyship in her writing. I cannot overstate her importance on my development as a reader.
2019: The Girl who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill
A book that I read for school, and remains one of the best middle grade fantasy books out there for adults wanting to dip their toes into the genre. It knew how to engage with storytelling tropes in fun ways. The village kept sacrificing babies to the forest witch. The witch was getting pissed off that the villagers kept dumping random babies in her perfectly good forest. Very magical, and Barnhill’s catalog across both kids and adult fantasy is solid.
2020: They Mostly Come out at Night by Benedict Patrick
My first self-published read! Dark and folkloric, this played to a lot of my preferences at the time. Actually, it coming up in this post reminded me that I always intended to continue reading this series at some point, which I think are all standalone stories with oral storytelling as a recurring theme.
2021: Birthmarked by Caragh M. O’Brien
Another read for school! Back when I taught 7th grade I did a Dystopia unit, and decided to make individualized reading guides for each book club. This meant I read ten incredibly formulaic Dystopia novels back to back, which I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. This was one of the more interesting ones of the lot, dealing with the reproductive autonomy of women and girls.
2022: Wizard of the Pigeons by Megan Lindholm
We have arrived at the era of my google spreadsheet tracker, which means I now have actual information on when I was reading different books. Lindholm is better known as Robin Hobb, and this book makes her other stories look cheerful and trauma-free in comparison. It follows a Vietnam War veteran in Seattle, and it doesn’t pull any punches. It is a powerful, thematic, and bleak read, teetering somewhere between Fantasy and Magical Realism.
2023: The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Imagine my surprise when I was reading my favorite book of all time during early August! I won’t shut up about this novel, but I think anyone who is a fan of epic fantasy or books that blend literary and genre fiction would enjoy it. It is the best Epic Fantasy of all time, and yes I’m including Lord of the Rings in that discussion. You can find a longer review of it here.
2024: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
And then we came crashing down to one of my least favorite reads of 2024. Ministry of Time won a lot of acclaim, but I thought it was a mess trying to blend Romance, Immigration Narratives, and Time Travel Thrillers with each other, but not doing any of them particularly well. For example, the campiness of a forced proximity romance works for Romances, but makes no sense why a modern government would place a man from 2 centuries ago in a house with a woman if they were serious about helping him adapt to a new time. It also doesn’t help that the man in question was a real person from history, which makes this book … uncomfortable. Romantasy has so much more to offer than this book.
2025: Two Who Live On by MN Bennett
The past three years are when I’ve really locked into Achillean books as a focus of my reading, and this series (book 1 is Three Meant to Be) follows a magic teacher at a public high school. He is in a situationship with his celebrity demon hunter ex-boyfriend, and they grapple with whether or not you can have healthy boundaries when one can see the future and the other can read minds. The romance is stronger than the magic school bits, though I always enjoy the perspective of a teacher in books. He’s a bit too much of a teacher martyr for my tastes, but I haven’t found a single teacher protagonist in speculative fiction that doesn’t have that problem, so it is what it is.
Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.
Marked for Plot 
I’ve never gotten along with Brandon Sanderson’s writing myself, but I’m so happy for what he’s done for the genre, and for so many readers. I’m glad he got you back into reading! I would be so sad not to have your blog to read.
Wizard of the Pigeons and Three Meant to Be have both been on my tbr for ages. Your comments are definitely nudging them higher up the list! And Benedict Patrick; I’ve had several friends rec me that series now. (I think you’re right about them all being standalones!)
But dear gods, you read ten YA dystopias back to back?! PLEASE tell me you got hazard pay!
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I didn’t get hazard pay, but I also didn’t end up teaching 7th grade for as long as I thought I would, so the investment didn’t pay off. I will say though, Hunger Game stands out for a lot of reasons in a very crowded market, and that project cemented that I think it earned its hype.
Curious to see what you have to say about Wizard of the Pigeons! It’s dark, and not my normal style but very good and intense. Some lingering elements remind you that it was written in the 80s, but there lots to love there. My gut feeling is that Three Meant to Be will ride or die based on how you feel about the school elements. It’s more on the progression fantasy, power up and fight baddies style of story (though not completely), and iirc that’s not your favorite style. It’s interesting how much contrast there is between the pulpy urban fantasy bits and the school story. Very golden retriever x black cat, but where both of them are a little fucked up and unable to respect each others’ boundaries because it’s impossible to do when your psychic powers don’t really have an off switch.
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My appreciation for Hunger Games has only grown as I get older, actually – I enjoyed it a lot as a teenager, but I can see how much…is technique the right word? went into it that I didn’t recognise then. Like the way the writing style of each book reflects Katniss’ mental state! That’s just so clever. (And far from the only great thing.)
I’m not really a huge Robin Hobb fan – I’ve read the first three trilogies in her Elder Realms setting, but I don’t really get the hype, especially when people wax rhapsodic about her prose…which is why Wizard of the Pigeons isn’t too high on my tbr. The FOMO is very real, though.
I tend to love the school-parts of stories, so I’m hopeful I’ll click with Three Meant to Be!
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I felt the EXACT SAME WAY about The Ministry of Time!!!! The Way of Kings is on my TBR at the moment (I read the first Mistborn book also about a decade ago but I don’t think I’ll continue with the series if I haven’t at this point – but I do want to try some of his other stuff. I also really wanted to reread Warbreaker) but I think I might need to look into The Spear Cuts Through Water as well!
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I cannot gush about Simon Jimenez enough! Spear is a bit chewier and experimental than genre fiction tends to be, and surprisingly dark/gorey for what it seems at first. Princess Mononoke from Studio Ghibli is the closest analogy I’ve found, but its not quite as easy to parse as that. It’s definitely still genre fiction, but he’s got a foot in Literary Fantasy too.
With Ministry of Time I feel the same way that I felt about Frozen. I didn’t think it was phenomenal, but my antagonism towards it grew and grew the more it got rave reviews from major outlets about how revolutionary it was. I think it was one of NYT’s best speculative fiction books of the year? I just … as both a Romance and a Fantasy/Science Fiction fan, I wanted to scream that there are such better mashups of the two than that mess of a book.
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Ministry of Time tried to do too much and ended up failing at all of them as a result. I was especially mad at the ending. And yes – I agree that it made me even more annoyed that it was getting so much critical acclaim.
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This is such a fun exercise! I love Kelly Barnhill but I haven’t read this one.
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Honestly, I think its Barnhill’s strongest book (though I haven’t yet read some of her earlier books). If you’re at all interested in fairy tale adjacent stories, this just hits all the beats I was hoping for
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I’ve only read two from your list – the Sanderson books, strangely enough I seem to have read very little by him for quite some time now.
I had fun with this week’s theme, it was good looking back at what I was reading for the past ten years.
Lynn 😀
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Definitely a blast from the past. It made me put some Tamora Pierce audiobooks on hold. I’ve got them all memorized from childhood, and they never cease to spark joy.
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I always find it a bit funny when other people who studied English say that it ruins reading for fun — I don’t think that’s as universal as people make out. My first two degrees were a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English literature (in the UK, where your degree subject isn’t something you study alongside other prerequisites, but is your full-time only focus for your whole degree) and it never had that effect! I remember being a bit freaked out by some older students telling me it’d be like that, but most of my cohort was fine. It was once they started getting full-time jobs that they actually stopped reading, and that definitely slowed me down too.
I remember I read Wizard of the Pigeons in my late teens and didn’t “get it” much. Definitely not as accessible as most of her other work, heh.
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I am jealous of you! I really wish that had been my experience. I don’t think I can lay all the blame at class’s feet though. It was the first time I was around people who were … well not small town assholes. I’m not in contact with anyone from my childhood anymore. My friends at the time were nice, but college felt like the first time that I made friends of my choosing, rather than only having a few options who weren’t racists and homophobic assholes. So my social life was eating up a lot more free time than it did in high school (plus working a part time job took up even more time). I don’t regret anything about that time in my life, but I’m very happy I got back into books as an adult
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I’ve read a few of these! I loved Kaladin so much in The Way of Kings! I started to love Shallan in book two. I believe each book kind of has a different character as the main focus and that might be why. I still need to finish though. I’m in the middle of book three. haha
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I do love how he gives each character a different spotlight. I hope you enjoy Oathbreaker! Book 4, Rhythym of War, has (in my opinion) the best character that Sanderson has ever written. They’re definitely doorstoppers though
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Oh, I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I was also sorely disappointed with The Ministry of Time. I read it earlier this year and after seeing so much praise around it, I was left baffled and wondered whether I even read the same book as everyone else cos what?! I really wish I loved it, but I guess we can’t love them all.
Funnily enough, Mistborn was also kind of my gateway back into properly reading fantasy when I started reading heavily (i.e. when it became my entire personality, lol) in 2017-ish. I don’t recall much about it now (and have been toying with a re-read for ages) but I do remember loving it a lot. I’ve heard a lot about this Simon Jimenez book and I’ve had it on my radar for a while. Think I might really need to bump it up my priority buy list! ðŸ¤
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