The Top Books in my TBR List

I hope that each of you had a great Thanksgiving, by the way. If you know me though, the Christmas season begins in October or August, depending on the year. But before a very long line of Christmas related articles, we have today’s article about my TBR list. TBR is the abbreviation for “To be read,” and my TBR list is extremely long and not even complete yet. I will probably go through major authors and series in my list that I would like to read.

Christian Heroes Now and Then
Heroes of History
By Janet and Geoff Benge

Both of these series are by the same authors, and these are biographies. The first series are the biographies of Christian missionaries who impacted the world through their evangelism. The second series are the biographies of American heroes. I find that interesting because the authors are originally from New Zealand.

Anything Agatha Christie

I love Agatha Christie’s books, and I hope to keep collecting them until I have read all of them. I am now collecting the Poirot series and am missing about thirty of the books in the series. She also wrote other series (Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence), and other books. The books one should stay away from are the ones including the short-stories about witchcraft. Those are in three books, I think. But the rest of her books would make a massive collection. I also just watched "Murder on the Orient Express" in theaters. Do not dare to watch the movie without reading the book because the movie will just be a total spoiler. For someone who loved the book, the movie itself was a great dramatization, but it was different so read the book first. Please.

Books by Classic Authors

Most of my favorite books come from classic authors. I recently read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and it just touched my soul. It is probably my favorite classic of all time (that is because Agatha Christie’s books aren’t classics at least for now). You need to read it. I would like to collect books by Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, O. Henry, Washington Irving, Rudyard Kipling, C.S. Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. If you were wondering, I actually detest anything with the label horror on it. But I don’t find Edgar Allan Poe’s writings terrifying at all; it’s just a little unnerving. I avoid doing anything that scares me, but the exception is when I am reading Edgar Allan Poe (try reading “The Pit and the Pendulum”; now that was one story). These are the best books by the best authors.

Historical Books

On the basis of this blog, you the reader should know that I love history. One teacher told me that the best historical books are eyewitness accounts. This includes books written by Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Captain John Smith, and Benjamin Franklin as well as military memoirs and presidential autobiographies. You know, at this point there are so many books I want to read that I can’t even get to. I have been smashed by my TBR list.

Poetry

I am picky when it comes to poetry. I will only settle with classical British and American poets and William Shakespeare is not included. I’m not a fan of Old English, but I like his sonnets. But I would like to read poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Frost, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (one of my personal favorite poets), and John Greenleaf Whittier. As a quick quiz, try to match these poems with the poets above, and comment the answers below. Here are the poems: “Barbara Frietchie,” “Crossing the Bar,” “The Rainy Day,” and “The Road Not Taken.” Good luck!

Wind in the Rigging by Howard Pease

The Tod Moran Mysteries Series is my favorite series of all time and is written by Howard Pease, an elementary teacher from San Francisco. These books are action/adventures and mysteries revolving around sailors in the 1900s. This series was written from 1910 to 1960, and is fairly clean except for some vulgar language and racial terms which are portrayed as evil to contribute to the theme of racial equality. These books have great themes and characters. I have every book in this series, except for this one. And it bugs me extremely because this book is $100 dollars. It will probably be a while before I finish this series.

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There are other books on my list, but these are the main categories. I have been blessed with an eclectic reader for my homeschool, and I have been introduced to many great stories and authors. If you want to hear a good book, just name a genre, and I’ll try my best to recommend a great novel. I think my TBR list reflects all types of genre and literature. Do you have a TBR list yourself? If so, what do you want to read in the future?

Here is the quote of the week. Besides the fact that books can take us anywhere in our imagination, we soon find that characters are only reflections of ourselves in a sense. In a good novel, the author uses the characters to teach us a lesson that we can all apply to our lives. The theme of The Scarlet Letter is that sin has consequences. This is a Biblical lesson we can all learn. I hope that readers will discover novels like these and that authors will write novels like these.