TTT: Books I want to reread in 2021: Blogmas Day 1
- Allison Wolfe
- Dec 1, 2020
- 8 min read
Hello readers, and welcome to day one of Blogmas! I am bringing you a Top Ten Tuesday post. I will link a post in the bottom if you would like to join, or see the entire history of Top Ten Tuesdays. These are created by That Artsy Reader Girl. Be sure to check her out if you would like to! This week, the tag is about books I want to reread. I have just renamed it books that I want to reread in 2021. Comment down below and let me know what books you want to reread in 2021!
I personally do not love rereading books, but I will usually reread 5-10 books through the year. These are just the books that I will choose from, if the mood strikes for me to reread something. I hope everyone is healthy, wearing their masks, and having a great holiday season. Lets just jump right into it!
The first book I want to reread in 2021 is Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I think I read this book back in 2013 and have been wanting to reread it for a long time, as the author has finally published a new book, which was back in 2019. I wanted to reread it before I get to his newest book, and I haven’t managed to get to either.
Synopsis: This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that the perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite.
The next book is one I read in August this year. It is a YA horror novel called And the Trees Crept in by Dawn Kurtagich. I listened to the audiobook of this one, and I think it is the best audiobook I have ever listened to. I have heard some people say it is a slow read, but the ending makes it all worth it! I have since bought the book, and I want to reread it. I think it would be a fun experience to reread the physical book.
Synopsis: When Silla and Nori arrive at their aunt’s home, it’s immediately clear that the manor is cursed. The endless creaking of the house at night and the eerie stillness of the woods surrounding them would be enough of a sign, but there are secrets too—questions that Silla can’t ignore: Why does it seem that, ever since they arrived, the trees have been creeping closer? Who is the beautiful boy who’s appeared from the woods? And who is the tall man with no eyes who Nori plays with in the basement at night… a man no one else can see?
I also read Radio Silence by Alice Oseman in August. I think my best reading month was August. I read this because of the Crusty Club Book Club, and it is now my favorite book of the year. I want to buy a copy in 2021, as I listened to an audiobook, and reread it. This book is just a wonderful story of friendship and I just love Aled as a character. I cannot wait to read this book with my eyes next time.
Synopsis: Frances Janvier spends most of her time studying. When she’s not studying, she’s up in her room making fan art for her favorite podcast, Universe City. Everyone knows Aled Last as that quiet boy who gets straight As. But no one knows he’s the creator of Universe City, who goes by the name Radio Silence. When Frances gets a message from Radio Silence asking if she’ll collaborate with him, everything changes. Frances and Aled spend an entire summer working together and becoming best friends. They get each other when no one else does. But when Aled’s identity as Radio Silence is revealed, Frances fears that the future of Universe City—and their friendship—is at risk. Aled helped her find her voice. Without him, will she have the courage to show the world who she really is? Or will she be met with radio silence?
The next two are kind of connected and are the Illiad and the Oddessy by Homer. I have seen an influx in mythology retellings in the last few years. I was thinking about a book called Antigone as well. I want to reread these books, and then read some retellings. I have been thinking about reading Circe for a few months now, and but I have the urge to read the original material first. I know it isn't a direct retelling, but a retelling of a character, but I still want to reread the source first.
The next book I have planned to reread was actually on my list for 2020. It is called Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I know, when I read this in 2015, I hated it. I know I didn’t like the ending and I didn’t like the characters. I found the ending anti-climactic. However, I don’t even remember most of this book, or the ending that I hated so much. After five years, I still own a copy of this book, and I just need to reread it, eventually.
Synopsis: The hero-narrator of The Catcher in the Rye is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep.
This one may sound weird, but I want to reread Twilight. I have been thinking about rereading this book for a really long time. I am just interested to see how I feel about it now. I know all the problematic things that have happened thus far, but I would still like to see if I like it after all this time. My guess is no, but I still want to give it a try.
Synopsis: About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him—and I didn't know how dominant that part might be—that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him. Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, Twilight is a love story with bite.
Red Clocks by Leni Zumas is another book I want to get to. I read this in 2018. I read it around the same time that I read Handmaid’s Tale. I didn’t like Handmaid’s Tale, even though I love the show, but I loved this book. It is set in a slightly different reality where single people cannot adopt children, IVF is illegal, and abortion is banned as well. It follows a bunch of different characters, including a single woman who wants to be a mom, but doesn’t want to be a wife, a pregnant teen, and a woman who performs abortions and odd ways to get them, along with a few other people. I thought it was such a powerful book, and I would love to reread it.
Synopsis: Five women. One question. What is a woman for? In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom. Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.
Quite a few years ago now, I bought a bunch of books I was made to read in high school. It was very rare that I had required reading that I didn’t like. I read The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter. I know this is a book about a white boy who gets kidnapped or somehow ends up living with Native Americans. One day, his original family finds him, and they try to make him ‘civilized’ and he doesn’t want to be that way. I know this book may be a bit problematic, because it is not written by an Indigenous person, but I want to reread it, as I bought myself a copy around seven years ago.
Synopsis: When John Cameron Butler was a child, he was captured in a raid on the Pennsylvania frontier and adopted by the great warrrior Cuyloga. Renamed True Son, he came to think of himself as fully Indian. But eleven years later his tribe, the Lenni Lenape, has signed a treaty with the white men and agreed to return their captives, including fifteen-year-old True Son. Now he must go back to the family he has forgotten, whose language is no longer his, and whose ways of dress and behavior are as strange to him as the ways of the forest are to them.
The last book I have today is another classic. It is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The edition I have of this book was published in 1953. I think it is the oldest edition of a book I own. I found it one day when my grandma was shopping at a Goodwill and I was with her. I read this back in 2015. I don’t think I appreciated it enough, but I have since seen the movie, and I would like to read it again.
Synopsis: Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach. Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing, and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby---young, handsome, and fabulously rich---always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.
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