Bio:
Maria Vicente is an Associate Agent at P.S. Literary Agency. She is also the Wicked Witch of the East Coast.
Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/MsMariaVicente
Website:
http://www.mariavicente.com
Thanks largely to the recently uploaded video What if Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?, and my own obsession with Wes Anderson films, I’ve decided to focus on Wes Anderson fans for this week’s Top 10 Tuesday.
Anderson is known for combining comedy with melancholic topics. He loves topics like grief, the loss of innocence, sibling rivalry, and unlikely friendships. Aesthetically, his films typically adhere to a color palette, make use of flat space camera moves, and involve hand-made miniatures or stop motion animation. If you’re a fan of his films, try out the following books the next time you’re looking for something to read.
BORN WEIRD by Andrew Kauffman: This book is focused on a group of siblings (family name: Weird), and the characters and setting are just as visual as any Wes Anderson film. Anderson would certainly approve of the relationships explored between the family and the very strange “curse” that plagues them.
THE POST OFFICE GIRL by Stefan Zweig: Wes Anderson has spoken at great lengths about Zweig’s work and how this novel in particular helped shape the inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): “Many of the ideas expressed and/or explored in Grand Budapest we stole directly from Zweig’s own life and work.” So there you go.
Quirk Books is linking up with The Broke and the Bookish for Top 10 Tuesday! This week we’re talking about books from the past three years that were so fantastic and over-the-top amazing that they somehow made their way onto our “all-time favorite books” lists.
I am extremely selective when it comes to choosing which books are allowed on my “favorites” shelf. There sits great books that I have re-read multiple times and that only get better with age: Wicked by Gregory Maguire; Looking for Alaska by John Green; The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon; Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson; Of Bees and Mist by Erick Setiawan; The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler; The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter; etc. But there are a few books, published at some point in the past three years, that absolutely deserve a place on this shelf:
Quirk Books is linking up with The Broke and the Bookish for Top 10 Tuesday! This week we’re sharing our favorite fictional heroines… the kick-butt female types, not the drug. The internet told me that a heroine is “the principal female character in a story, play, film, etc.” That wasn’t good enough for me, so I searched online a little deeper (I just clicked the next link, but no one really needs to know that) and found a much better definition: “a woman of distinguished courage or ability, admired for her brave deeds and noble qualities.” Yes. That sounds good.
Quirk Books is linking up with The Broke and the Bookish for Top 10 Tuesday! This week we’re talking about the book related problems we have. I got 99 problems and they’re all related to books, so this post is creepily similar to you sitting in on a therapy session.
Problem #1: I can’t fight the habit of writing notes in books. I know that this makes me a horrible person, but there’s a thrill to writing on the pages of a book. It could be because in elementary school we were always threatened with death (not really) if we wrote in the library books. I’m not a monster—I do not write things in library books—but I do mark up the books I own. If you ever borrow a book of mine, there’s a 75% chance you’ll know exactly what I was thinking when you least want to hear my thoughts.
Problem #2: No matter what, I never have enough bookshelf space. Where does everyone put all the books?! I keep buying bookshelves and I still have no space. I have stacks of books everywhere. My cat is drowning in a sea of book towers. The books are balancing against every piece of furniture imaginable. Books. Everywhere.
Problem #3: I usually won’t purchase a book if I don’t like the cover. I guess I’m a design snob. If I’m going to spend money on a book, I want to like the entire thing not just the words. It’s not that I won’t read books if I don’t like the cover, I just probably won’t buy them. (Thanks, library!)
Quirk Books is linking up with The Broke and The Bookish again for Top 10 Tuesday! This week we’re discussing what we like (and dislike!) about romances in fiction, so I’ve decided to share ten of the romance tropes I really hate to love. So many of the following tropes are cliché and sort of horrible, but I can’t help but love them anyway.
Today Quirk Books is linking up with The Broke and the Bookish for Top 10 Tuesday! This week we’re talking about books we haven’t read. I personally read across many categories and genres, so of course I can’t read everything that catches my eye (although I would really, really like to). Especially when it comes to YA novels—the hype around new YA releases is infectious. Reading book blogs about this great novel, and that great novel, I know there are a few staples that I simply need to read… and yet I haven’t. Here are ten books that I’m super guilty of still having on my to-read shelf:
