Top Ten Favorite Classic Books

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for our Top Ten Favorite Classic Books, which is one of my favorite topics! It's also incredibly hard to just pick ten!

1) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

2) The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

3) Persuasion by Jane Austen

4) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

5) The Sign of Four (Sherlock Holmes) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

6) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

7) Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

8) I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

9) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

10) Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck

 

BONUS: Shakespeare! I can’t pick between his plays so I’m going to give him his own bonus spot.

Hyde Brothers Books

 

Indiana is not flush with great used bookstores, or bookstores at all for that matter. We have a few good Half Priced Books and Barnes and Nobles. We also have some unique hole-in-the-wall spots, but they are becoming more rare. My personal favorite remains Indy Reads Books, but I recently discovered a new gem. Hyde Brothers Booksellers in Fort Wayne is just a dream for bibliophiles.

It's located in Fort Wayne, which unfortunately is nowhere near me. There are towering stacks of books around every turn. Ladders help employees reach the highest shelves in each aisle. I found a 1948 copy of I Capture the Castle, one of my personal favorites, and it came home with me.

When you head down the rabbit hole into the basement, you discover a second floor of books. Eventually I came upon another staircase that took me back to the main floor in a different spot. It was just perfect. I can't wait to go back and stay for a longer stretch of time.

Are there any incredible bookstores that you guys have discovered in your states?

Photos by moi.

Top Ten Books I Wish Could Have Had Sequels

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for the Top Ten Books I wish could have had sequels. I listed a few that I wish had sequels and a few others that might make great prequels or parallel books.

1) Love’s Labor’s Lost: This Shakespeare play supposedly had a sequel, Love’s Labor’s Won, but no one has ever seen it. I wish we could discover it!

2) Motherless Brooklyn: I would love to read more stories featuring Lionel Essrog, the private eye with Tourette's syndrome. He was a hilarious narrator and provided a fresh voice to the classic detective story.

3) Neverwhere: Adventures in a world beneath London, I love it! Richard Mayhew is a regular guy who ends up in a dangerous sideways world. I feel like there are so many more strange characters we could meet in that world.

4) A Dirty Job: I recently read this hilarious account of a reluctant grim reaper and his daughter. I think it’s ripe for a sequel about that daughter and her loyal hell hounds.

5) The Night Circus: I think that Celia and Marco’s story is complete, but I would love a sequel about the twins, Poppet and Widget and their time with the Le Cirque des Reves.

6) Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: Maybe Miss Pettigrew Takes a Trip or Miss Pettigrew Gets Lost; the character is delightful and the possibilities are endless!

7) I Capture the Castle: I think Cassadra’s stepmother Topaz and her sister Rose are interesting characters and would love to read a parallel novel telling the story from their points-of-view.

8) The Red Tent: I don't want a sequel exactly, but a series of similar books. This one retells a biblical tale from the woman's point of view. It was so good and I think there are lots of other stories in the Bible that would be fascinating from the woman's perspective, Jezebel perhaps, or maybe Bathsheba. Francine Rivers has done something similar, but her Lineage of Grace series lacks the depth of The Red Tent.

9) Rebecca: I would definitely read a well-done prequel telling Rebecca’s side of the story.

10) Harry Potter: I wish Rowling would write a prequel about when Lily, Sirius, James and Remus were at school together. I would love that!

Top Ten Characters I’d Like to Switch Places with for 24 Hours

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for the Top Ten Characters I’d Like To Switch Places With For 24 Hours.

 

1) Daniel Sempere, “The Shadow of the Wind” – I want to explore the Cemetery of Forgotten Books so bad I can taste it!
 
2) Claudia, “From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” – Who wouldn’t want to spend the night in the MET.
 
3) Cassandra, “I Capture the Castle” – I’d love to spend one day in that drafty old castle, drinking tea and day dreaming.
 
4) Lizzy Darcy, “Pride and Prejudice” – I want to switch after they’re married! I could spend the day wandering around Permberley and enjoying the company of the lovely Mr. Darcy.
 
5) Watson, Sherlock Holmes Books – I don’t think I would want to be Sherlock, because I have a feeling it would make my brain explode, but I would love to see him at work.
 
6) Trillian, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – What girl wouldn’t want to be whisked off on adventures around the galaxy?
 
7) Hemingway, “A Moveable Feast” – Yes, I know this book is nonfiction and Hemingway is a real person, but lets forget that just for a second. I would love to spend a day in Paris during the 1920s, hanging out with Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald and Pound, drinking and talking about life and what we’re all writing.
 
8) Jeeves, Jeeves and Wooster Books – P.G. Wodehouse’s infamous valet knows just about everything. It would be so much fun to be in his shoes for a day.
 
9) Arwen, “Lord of the Rings” – She lived in Rivendell and married Aragorn, yes please.
 
10) Hermione Granger, “Harry Potter” – What can I say, she’s awesome and I’d love to explore Hogwarts!

Image from here. 

Top Ten Favorite Quotes from Books

This week's Top Ten from The Broke and the Bookish asks for my Top Ten Favorite Quotes from Books.

1) “Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life…And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.” — A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

2) "You must never feel badly about making mistakes, as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong than you do by being right for the wrong reasons." — The Phantom Tollbooth

3) “I realized that you can get so used to certain luxuries that you start to think they’re necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don’t need them after all.” — Half Broke Horses

4) "The world is a great book...they who never stir from home read only a page." — St. Augustine

5) "What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.” — The Uncommon Reader

6) “But we are living in a skeptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generations, educated or hyper-educated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belong to an older day.” — Dubliners

7) “By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourself of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip into the stream." — A Room of One’s Own

8) “Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.” — I Capture the Castle

9) “It could be said that they are still people who consider a bookshelf as a mere storage place for already read books and do not think of the library as a working tool.” — A Passion for Books

10) "I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago." – Notes From a Small Island

BONUS QUOTES:
“America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature.” — The Lost Continent

"That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence Voldemort knows and understands nothing." – Harry Potter Book 7

“No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time – he can never return to simplicity.” — Sweet Thursday


“The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?” — Dorothy Parker

Image from here .