Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Gave Me a Book Hangover

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by Jana @thatartsyreadergirl. This week’s theme is Books I Bought Because…

Happy Tuesday everyone! Hope your week is going well and you’ve managed to find some time to sit down, relax and read. This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is ‘books that have given you a book hangover’. We all know that feeling when you put down a great book and suddenly nothing else compares. A mixture of melancholy, nostalgia and disappointment that its over, a book hangover can usually only be cured with a page-turner or an old favourite. If I’m honest I do tend to have quite high standards when it comes to books, with only a handful receiving five stars each year. It takes a lot for a book to give me a book hangover and so this list isn’t a full ten, rather a select few that I can honestly say left me wishing I could read them for the first time all over again.

The Novels That Shaped Our World #MyReadingLife

Last year BBC Arts asked a panel of leading writers, curators and critics to come together and create a list of 100 books that impacted their lives, kicking off a year long programme of events in libraries across the UK. Marking the anniversary of the landmark publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719, the programme aims to celebrate the English language novel and the ways in which it has shaped our world. Divided into ten categories, the 100-title list is diverse and wide-ranging, although arguably eurocentric in its exclusion of translated literature. Encouraging readers across the country to join the conversation using the hashtag #MyReadingLife, BBC Arts aims to start a discussion about how books influence our thinking. You can find the full list of titles chosen by the panel here.

This is a blog post that I have been meaning to write ever since watching the BBC Arts launch last year, but couldn’t decide on a list that I felt truly reflected the novels that have shaped my world. After much deliberation, I eventually came up with the following ten books…