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My take on ‘The Intimidating TBR’ book tag

What books do you keep meaning to read.. but haven’t?

Welcome!

Today I’ll be sharing with you a great book tag I came across @ bookforager.
I thought it looked fun and I’m short on the time it would take to put something more complicated together at the moment so..
Here we are.

I think the questions here are relatable to all readers and give us an opportunity to share some great books. And who knows. This may book tag may be just the kind of motivation/encouragement you need to pick up those books you keep meaning to get around to.
Let’s find out!

Click on the book title, image, or Here to visit Amazon and find out more
(Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. Any purchases made through my links may earn me a small commission at no additional cost to you.)

What book have you been unable to finish?

Her Name is Knight by Yasmin Angoe

I ended up DNFing this book just a few chapters in.
The storyline bounces between the present and a dark, deeply traumatic past so I would take the trigger warnings very seriously. Some scenes are sick, twisted, and emotionally brutal in a way that could make even the strongest stomach turn.
Shame.. it sounds like such an interesting read.

Stolen from her Ghanaian village as a child, Nena Knight has plenty of motives to kill. Now an elite assassin for a powerful business syndicate called the Tribe, she gets plenty of chances.

But while on assignment in Miami, Nena ends up saving a life, not taking one. She emerges from the experience a changed woman, finally hopeful for a life beyond rage and revenge. Tasked with killing a man she’s come to respect, Nena struggles to reconcile her loyalty to the Tribe with her new purpose.

Meanwhile, she learns a new Tribe council member is the same man who razed her village, murdered her family, and sold her into captivity. Nena can’t resist the temptation of vengeance—and she doesn’t want to. Before she can reclaim her life, she must leverage everything she was and everything she is to take him down and end the cycle of bloodshed for good.

What book have you yet to read because you just haven’t had the time?

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. When Charlie is seventeen, he meets a dog named Radar and her aging master, Howard Bowditch, a recluse in a big house at the top of a big hill, with a locked shed in the backyard. Sometimes strange sounds emerge from it.

Charlie starts doing jobs for Mr. Bowditch and loses his heart to Radar. Then, when Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie a cassette tape telling a story no one would believe. What Bowditch knows, and has kept secret all his long life, is that inside the shed is a portal to another world.

What book have you yet to read because it’s a sequel?

Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

I haven’t read this sequel yet because the first book, Ninth House, was so complex that I fully intend to reread it again before diving into it.
Hopefully soon.

Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex” Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory—even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale.

Forbidden from attempting a rescue, Alex and Dawes can’t call on the Ninth House for help, so they assemble a team of dubious allies to save the gentleman of Lethe. Together, they will have to navigate a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts to uncover the societies’ most closely guarded secrets, and break every rule doing it. But when faculty members begin to die off, Alex knows these aren’t just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven, and if she is going to survive, she’ll have to reckon with the monsters of her past and a darkness built into the university’s very walls.

What book have you yet to read because it’s brand new?

Immortal Longings by Chloe Gong

Look at that cover. It’s beautiful. And what a fascinating story inside.
This is definitely one I’m itching to get my hands on.

Every year, thousands in the kingdom of Talin will flock to its capital twin cities, San-Er, where the palace hosts a set of games. For those confident enough in their ability to jump between bodies, competitors across San-Er fight to the death to win unimaginable riches.

Princess Calla Tuoleimi lurks in hiding. Five years ago, a massacre killed her parents and left the palace of Er empty…and she was the one who did it. Before King Kasa’s forces in San can catch her, she plans to finish the job and bring down the monarchy. Her reclusive uncle always greets the victor of the games, so if she wins, she gets her opportunity at last to kill him.

Enter Anton Makusa, an exiled aristocrat. His childhood love has lain in a coma since they were both ousted from the palace, and he’s deep in debt trying to keep her alive. Thankfully, he’s one of the best jumpers in the kingdom, flitting from body to body at will. His last chance at saving her is entering the games and winning.

Calla finds both an unexpected alliance with Anton and help from King Kasa’s adopted son, August, who wants to mend Talin’s ills. But the three of them have very different goals, even as Calla and Anton’s partnership spirals into something all-consuming. Before the games close, Calla must decide what she’s playing for—her lover or her kingdom.

What book have you yet to read because you read another book by the same author and didn’t enjoy it?

The Only One Left by Riley Sager

I’ve read three of Sager’s books so far and I can honestly say that I didn’t care for any of them.. but there are still a handful of others to check out and I’m determined to like at least one.
Even if it is The Only One Left.

At seventeen, Lenora Hope
Hung her sister with a rope

Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope’s End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred.

Stabbed her father with a knife
Took her mother’s happy life

It’s now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer—I want to tell you everything.

“It wasn’t me,” Lenora said
But she’s the only one not dead
 
As Kit helps Lenora write about the events leading to the Hope family massacre, it becomes clear there’s more to the tale than people know. But when new details about her predecessor’s departure come to light, Kit starts to suspect Lenora might not be telling the complete truth—and that the seemingly harmless woman in her care could be far more dangerous than she first thought.

What book have you yet to read because you’re just not in the mood for it?

The Diviners by Libba Bray

My nemesis.
One day I will pick you up and it will likely be magic.
Today is not that day.

Evangeline O’Neill has been exiled from her boring old hometown and sent off to the bustling streets of New York City–and she is ecstatic. It’s 1926, and New York is filled with speakeasies, Ziegfeld girls, and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is that she has to live with her uncle Will and his unhealthy obsession with the occult. Evie worries he’ll discover her darkest secret: a supernatural power that has only brought her trouble so far.

When the police find a murdered girl branded with a cryptic symbol and Will is called to the scene, Evie realizes her gift could help catch a serial killer. As Evie jumps headlong into a dance with a murderer, other stories unfurl in the city that never sleeps. And unknown to all, something dark and evil has awakened….

What book have you yet to read because it’s humongous?

The Passage by Justin Cronin (880 pages)

“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.” 

An epic and gripping tale of catastrophe and survival, The Passage is the story of Amy—abandoned by her mother at the age of six, pursued and then imprisoned by the shadowy figures behind a government experiment of apocalyptic proportions. But Special Agent Brad Wolgast, the lawman sent to track her down, is disarmed by the curiously quiet girl and risks everything to save her. As the experiment goes nightmarishly wrong, Wolgast secures her escape—but he can’t stop society’s collapse. And as Amy walks alone, across miles and decades, into a future dark with violence and despair, she is filled with the mysterious and terrifying knowledge that only she has the power to save the ruined world.

What book have you yet to read because it was a cover buy that turned out to have poor reviews?

Sophia, Princess Among Beasts by James Patterson and Emily Raymond

Sophia is smart, beautiful, and accomplished, a beloved princess devoted to the people and to reading books. The kingdom is hers, until she is plunged into a nightmarish realm populated by the awful beasts she read about as a child.

The beasts are real. And so is the great army marching on her castle. The people look to Sophia for protection. They will all perish unless she can unlock an ancient secret as profound as life and death itself.

What is the most intimidating book on your TBR pile?

Jerusalem by Alan W. Moore (1,280 pages)

This book sounds fascinating but damn.. I’m going to need way more sleep and caffeine before I can even consider tackling this beast.

In the epic novel Jerusalem, Alan Moore channels both the ecstatic visions of William Blake and the theoretical physics of Albert Einstein through the hardscrabble streets and alleys of his hometown of Northampton, UK. In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England’s Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district’s narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts, a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrol-colored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them.

Employing, a kaleidoscope of literary forms and styles that ranges from brutal social realism to extravagant children’s fantasy, from the modern stage drama to the extremes of science fiction, Jerusalem’s dizzyingly rich cast of characters includes the living, the dead, the celestial, and the infernal in an intricately woven tapestry that presents a vision of an absolute and timeless human reality in all of its exquisite, comical, and heartbreaking splendor.

In these pages lurk demons from the second-century Book of Tobit and angels with golden blood who reduce fate to a snooker tournament. Vagrants, prostitutes, and ghosts rub shoulders with Oliver Cromwell, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce’s tragic daughter Lucia, and Buffalo Bill, among many others. There is a conversation in the thunderstruck dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, childbirth on the cobblestones of Lambeth Walk, an estranged couple sitting all night on the cold steps of a Gothic church front, and an infant choking on a cough drop for eleven chapters. An art exhibition is in preparation, and above the world a naked old man and a beautiful dead baby race along the Attics of the Breath toward the heat death of the universe.

An opulent mythology for those without a pot to piss in, through the labyrinthine streets and pages of Jerusalem tread ghosts that sing of wealth, poverty, and our threadbare millennium. They discuss English as a visionary language from John Bunyan to James Joyce, hold forth on the illusion of mortality post-Einstein, and insist upon the meanest slum as Blake’s eternal holy city.

I Tag:

Zezee @ zezeewithbooks
Nehal @ inmymindinmyheart
Gin @ ginreads
Leah @ leahsreadsbooks

And that’s a wrap!
Thank you so much for stopping by, I hope you enjoyed today’s post and found a book or two that caught your interest.
Have a beautiful week ahead and Happy reading!

What’s the most intimidating book you’ve ever read?

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This Post Has 5 Comments

  1. Rosie Amber

    Good meme! I have book shelves of books that need reading!

    1. Janette

      Great tag. Jerusalem sounds like an intimidating read in terms of content as well as sheer size

  2. sandysbookaday

    Just read the Stephen King – it’s brilliant! 💕📚

  3. Zainab

    This tag feels very personal because I’m constantly just adding any appeasing book onto my Goodreads TBR 😆I think I borrowed a Riley Sager book but the length of it just initiated me so I never actuallt ended up opening it 😂

  4. Audrey Driscoll

    Interesting topic! Jerusalem does look intimidating.

Comments are closed.