TTT Rewind: Books I Liked More
or Less Than I Thought I Would
Top Ten Tuesdays were started by The Broke and the Bookish and are now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where we make lists of our top ten books (or something else!) based on that week’s prompt. The topics are provided ahead of time and can be found here. Book links bring you to Goodreads or my review.
This is so fun! There was a period of time where I was barely blogging and skipped a bunch of TTTs so I tried to go back and see if any of them looked good to rewind and do today. It ended up being too challenging to track down so I thought I would do a random number generator to pick which post to try. If it was something super specific I would just keep going until one struck my fancy, but this worked out really well on the first try! I got TTT #333: Top Ten Books I Liked More/Less Than I Thought I Would! I have Goodreads shelves up for the task so I went and looked at my “pleasant surprise” and “super disappointing” shelves to grab five of each. For kicks, here are the books I picked back when I first did this prompt in 2017.
Liked More than Expected
All of these books exceeded my expectations in one way or another! I wasn’t sure the hype would be worth it or they weren’t my usual topics to read about, and they ended up being much better than I thought they would.
I don’t read a lot of books involving music and for some reason it’s not my favorite, so NIGHT MUSIC was a really pleasant surprise. Same could be said about books with much older main characters – THE SWITCH was better than I expected and I don’t know why I thought Beth O’Leary could steer me wrong! THE QUARRY GIRLS is a book I picked up on a whim and read on my honeymoon because I was in the mood for some reason and the historical fiction murder mystery was really, really great. NO EXIT exceeded my expectations because I don’t think I usually gravitate toward “locked room” mysteries. I thought it might be boring and didn’t know why so many people raved about it. They were (mostly) right! I didn’t love it but raced through and was really impressed overall. And finally, LOVELIGHT FARMS: I tend to avoid super popular indie romances online because I just don’t usually like the writing but this was highly enjoyable for me.
Liked Less than Expected
These books really seemed like they would be slam dunks for me so I’m really bummed that they all were not as good as I thought they would be!
Rachael Allen has written some great YA and I found myself feeling meh about THE SUMMER OF IMPOSSIBILITIES. Just not what I thought! I think A DEADLY INSIDE SCOOP was my first cozy mystery and I’m glad I didn’t let it deter me from the genre. I didn’t like the writing style and ended up being really disappointed by this book. BAD LUCK BRIDESMAID seemed like it would be up my alley but wow this book was a mess. Usually I don’t mind it but it just didn’t work for me here. And finally, the two YA mysteries about true crime podcasts. Needless to say my expectations are high for books in this genre and both of these were reaaaally disappointing. KILLING TIME had the benefit of being set in Connecticut but the MC and writing weren’t great. MISSING CLARISSA was one my most anticipated reads of the year and I figured out the culprit AND motive within the first few chapters 🙁
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