Top Ten Tuesday – Travelling (June 4)

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week a different topic is posted inviting the participants to come up with a list of ten things to do with the topic.

This week’s topic is ‘Top Ten Books Featuring Travel In Some Way (road trips, airplanes, travelogues, anything where there is traveling in the book!)’ This one could be hard to narrow down to ten, as there are so many good books that involve some kind of travelling, but I’ll give it a try.

1. The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien) – there could be no other choice for the number one book on this list. The subtitle of There and Back Again says it all. This is the best literary journey ever.

2. The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) – another epic journey written by Tolkien, which comes a close second to The Hobbit.

3.  The Road (Cormac McCarthy) – this post apocalyptic tale of a journey undertaken by father and son is well worth the read.

4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) – there’s lots of interesting and unusual travelling in this intergalactic classic. Just don’t forget your towel!

5. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway) – the journey taken in this classic was one that the main character had not intended to take. I’ve loved this book since high school and still like to read it from time to time.

6. The Chronicles of Narnia (C.S. Lewis) – there is lots of travel between our world and the world of Narnia in these seven books, which I’ve enjoyed for almost 40 years now.

7. Comet in Moominland (Tove Jansson) – I’ve been reacquainting myself with the Moomin books lately and still enjoy reading them, almost as much as I remember enjoying them when I first read them in the 1970’s. This one tells the story of a journey to a mountain observatory undertaken by Moomintroll and Sniff.

8. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Rachel Joyce) – I really enjoyed reading this tale of the title character’s 600 mile trek from the south of England to the north. It’s a well-written and moving debut novel.

9. The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (Reif Larsen) – this is a great story of a 12-year-old’s journey from Montana to the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and his adventures and discoveries on the way. It’s a very different kind of book, quite unique and worth reading.

10. Clockwork Angels: The Novel (Kevin J. Anderson, Neil Peart) – this collaboration of a bestselling science fiction writer and a famous rock drummer tells the story of a young man’s quest to follow his dreams rather than the ordered life that he has been prepared for. The story is an expansion of the album of the same name by Rush.

Teaser Tuesdays – The Man in the Picture: A Ghost Story (June 4)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Here are my teasers for this week:

I had satisfied myself, I am pretty sure, that Theo’s death had had nothing to do with the story he had told me, with the Venetian picture or indeed with anything shocking or unexplained. Yet I could not forget the look of terror on his dead face, the horrified expression in his open eyes, the way his arm was outstretched.

From pages 123-4 of The Man in the Picture: A Gohst Story by Susan Hill. I picked up this one for $0.50 at the library book sale. I know nothing about it, but it looks like it will be a good read.