Top Ten  Books I Recommend The Most

1) We Need To Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver. Thebes book I read last year, absolutely stunning and you just can't put it down, I wish everybody would read this.

2) The Perks Of Being A Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky. Beautiful, soulful and ageless. Ignore the hype about John Green because I think this beats anything he's ever done.

3) Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk. My very favourite Palahniuk, and one of my most loved contemporary romances, I love this book.

4) ASOIAF Series - George R.R. Martin. I don't think there's any reader who wouldn't enjoy this series -- it has everything! Dragons, war, death, sex, wolves, beautiful northerners, king's, queen's, imp's, intrigue, betrayal....Read it!

5) Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. The best love story ever written.

6) Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen. Because Mr. Darcy.

7) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov. I had to have one banned book on this list, and this is one of my very favourites. I think before you read it it can be an easy tale to judge, but once immersed you'll wonder why you ever saw any problem with it.

8) Fiesta/The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway. One of my favourite novels, and I think a game changer for those who say they dislike Hemingway's writing.

9) The Most Beautiful Women In Town - Charles Bukowski. This was the first Bukowski I read and I've never looked back.

10) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath. I think it's really important for young women to read this book. Everyone always talks about coming of age stories and recommends The Catcher In The Rye, and while it's a great book, I think it's very easy to grow out of and I think it's important to have a female presence in that genre. The Bell Jar feels like it will be with me always, while now I'm at an age when I just want to tell Holden to grow up.

Worst Book Cover Re-designs

I saw that Jana over at The Broke & The Bookish wrote a post on cover re-designs and I thought, wow what a perfect opportunity for a rant! Here my favourite, worst redesigns;

This one really makes me cringe. Everything from the glaringly obvious terrible sales pitch to the image are just wrong. One, a rose? really? There couldn't have been a less appropriate flower to use, and it's thriving and bold, so unlike the dire and desperate landscape of the novel. Poor show. (Also, a love that never dies? It did die, along with Heathcliff.)

Oh yes show a vain girl putting on her make up! Because this book was really all about how polished and pretty Plath was.

"The most romantic story ever written"....between a prostitute and a gay man.

If Mill's and Boon did the 1920's.

Some re-designs really do pull it off though...

This is probably my favourite re-design ever, well done Penguin! (it's 1984 if you can't see it!)

Top Ten Tuesday

It's another freebie week this week so I'm going to pick a nice and easy topic because  as I mentioned in my last post I'm a very busy bee with Uni work at the minute! I'm going to do a split topic this week so ere are my:

Top Ten Five Most OCD-ish Book Habits:

1) I always read the authors note/dedications the second after I've finished the book and not before.

2) If there's a particular piece of writing I like, a phrase or some dialogue, I fold the bottom page corner, even though I hate the idea of folding a corner to mark where I'm up to.

3) I never ever write in my books. (I used to when I was little, every book I owned was marked as mine and now I hate the idea.)

4) I have to take a book with me pretty much anywhere it's socially accepted. (meaning you won't find me turning pages in a bar...but anywhere else, don't be surprised.)

5) Every new (or new to me!) book shall receive a cursory whiff. Nothing beats the smell of a book.

Top Ten Five Favourite Book Covers:
Note: There are countless numbers of beautiful book covers in the world, some which I one day hope to own, but these five are just some of  my favourite covers from my own collection, they don't have deep meaning nor do I have attachments to the artists, I just find them aesthetically pleasing.

1) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath. For me, this image so contradicts the writing inside, I think that's why I like it.

2) Haunted - Chuck Palahniuk. (Hardback) I do love a dust-jacket that's part of the design inside.

3) Lullaby - Chuck Palahniuk (I know, I know, but what can I say, I've admitted my love for him already!) I just enjoy looking at this. My eyes like it. 

4) Damned - Chuck Palahniuk - (Hardback) I'm not sure why I automatically thought of this cover, but I did. It is a pretty good representation of what you find inside I suppose, and I like that it's such a simple, almost childish interpretation.

5) The Lords & The New Creatures - Jim Morrison. This book is not a novel, it's a collection of Morrison's poetry and I like the cover simply because when I see it I can hear Morrison voice in my head bellowing "I am the lizard King. I can do anything."