Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created and ran by The Broke and the Bookish. This week is a freebie week, which I am always hesitant about! But I recently bought a book of an essays, and realized that I am trying to read more collections, rather than novels. I have a goal to read 12 anthologies this year, and I might loop essay collections into that group. Plus, essay collections can have a bad connotation, and I think everyone should give them a shot.

I also tried to avoid anything too memoir-ish, such as Felicia Day’s book (which I totally plan on reading.) I own a few of these too, so it’ll be more cleaning out my “Own yet haven’t read” shelf.

I also put together my 2016 Book Challenge page, as well as starting to decide what books I want to read for it. If you have any recommendations, please leave me a comment on the page! I like feeling like I’m organizing my year, plus reading some books that aren’t just novels, with a particular love for YA Lit.

1. Encounter by Milan Kundera

   

   The Unbearable Lightness Of Being is one of my favorite novels. I own at least four other Kundera novels, and stumbled across this book the other day at B&N. I really need to stop going into that store.

2. The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories by Marina Keegan

   

   I bought this book on a whim back in 2014. This is a posthumous collections of a young woman who died far too early. I know I’ll cry when I read this book, which might be why I have put it off so long. This will not be a subway book for sure.

3. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

   
   This book was recommended by Bustle for their reading challenge, and the synopsis was intriguing. Feminism is a hot button right now, and while I classify myself as a feminist, I don’t actually feel I know enough to have a well educated conversation on the topic. Thus, I shall educate myself this year.

4. Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

   
   I legitimately cannot remember why I fell in love with the idea of this book, but it’s another one I own. I started reading it in 2015 actually, but at the time my reading was more focused on getting me through an hour on a treadmill. This isn’t the book for that. It starts with an introduction where a man is trying to describe a book topic that he clearly hadn’t read or knew anything about to the author….who was the author of the book.

5. Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

   
   Another book I own and purchased on a whim. And I absolutely love books on dating and romance. I read a book a few years ago called Data, which was all about a woman using math to do online dating. Any book that can help me decide (a) if I want to be single, and (b) if I decide I don’t want to be, how to help me find a man, I am on board with.

6. Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing About Knitting edited by Ann Hood

   
   I do not own this book (haha!) but I love the idea. I don’t knit, but I love crocheting. I did learn when I broke my arm as part of OT, but I could not get the hang of it. This book seems wonderfully girlie, plus a way for so many people of different backgrounds to come together on something that is so personal. Wonderful.

7. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children and Theatre by Sarah Ruhl 

   
   When I bought the Kundera collection, this was the other book I debated for a few minutes. Sara Ruhl is a modern day playwright and a mother of three. The collection wavers between trivial/minimal family things to larger, cultural concepts.

8. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

   
   One of my best friends read this book last year and recommended it to me because there is an essay on tennis. I’m not sure if she finished the book and enjoyed it, but it instantly went on my TBR list at the recommendation. I don’t know much about the author, other than he committed suicide in 2008 and wrote Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It’ll be good to explore a new author.

9. I Was Told There’d be Cake by Sloane Crosley

   
   …I just realized that this author makes a brief appearance on Gossip Girl in season 5. The title of this collection is just wonderful. This is probably too memoir-ish, but whoops.

10. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith

    
    I’m not sure who recommend this book to me, but I am so glad they did. Zadie’s influences are wonderful, and her novel White Teeth has been recommended to me a few times.

I hope that if you thought essays were boring before, you looked at this list and realized they can actually be fascinating concepts. If you have a favorite collection of essays, please let me know!