TOP TEN TUESDAY | LAST 10 BOOK HANGOVERS

In looking back over the books I’ve read in the past couple of years, I was surprised by how few immersed me enough to leave me with that book hangover feeling when I finished them. Perhaps it’s partly reading more non-fiction – it doesn’t feel quite the same as reading a fictional plot and it takes a brilliant narrative non-fiction with a lot of personality to create a book hangover – and partly just bad luck. There have been some great books I’ve read in the past couple of years, but a lot of them were a decent amount of work and the type of payoff I got wasn’t the plot-heavy, completely-lost-in-the-story type of experience. So the ones I’ve listed below are a mixture between books that have left me feeling like it took me a while to surface from a fictional world, and books that left me feeling deeply moved and affected by them for a while after putting them down, either due to the topic, the writing, the personal story or all of these.

           

Girl, Woman, Other was a slow burn and by the end I felt like it had snuck up on my emotions and done some kind of magic. This book has stuck with me long after finishing it, and some of the characters I met in this book taught me some new things about life, which is always a sure way to make a book a favourite for me. My Lovely Wife was full of raw emotion – pain, heartbreak, anger, and most of all, love. It will make you suffer, but it will also restore your faith that, with the right partner, you can find a way through the darkest of places. Patient, though it deals with very different medical issues than my own, let me feel a sense of recognition, and made me feel less alone in my fear and the paralysis that follows a serious medical trauma. I’m still struggling to find a way out of that paralysis, so reading a book about someone going through something similar helped me a little bit. It also stuck with me and made me feel like I’d made a new friend. Daisy Jones gave me one of those true, deep book hangovers. The kind that come from a page-turner of a novel that has you completely immersed. The characters were so real to me that as I was reading, it felt like I was right there with them. I didn’t connect to them the way I did to more sympathetic characters, but only because they all had their issues, and I don’t think you’re really meant to feel such a sympathetic bond with them.

            

Both of Tracey Thorn’s books – this one and Bedsit Disco Queen – combined together as one reading experience for me because I read them back-to-back. And they drew me in completely. She had me fascinated by the mechanics of singing, something I have no experience with and no previous interest in. But her writing teased out the topic in such a way that I was enthralled. Her writing is such that I think she could make anything interesting. An American Marriage has left me, after long-term reflection, a bit unsure. But when I first finished it, I felt very much like I’d just been through a very intense rollercoaster ride. Warlight was another book that didn’t stand out to me at the time – it wasn’t a traditional page-turner and the characters were a bit hard to get to know. But the atmosphere of this book was consuming. I felt the post-war city of London coming to life around me, and Ondaatje’s depiction of what the urban landscape would have been like at that time presented its abandoned neighbourhoods and bombed-out houses in a way I hadn’t imagined before. I read Another Brooklyn a long time ago, so I don’t remember the details very well, but I do remember that I tore through it very quickly and its characters were beautifully and tenderly rendered.

   

Both of these books straddled two genres – literary fiction and thriller. They had the depth and writing style of literary fiction, but the plot had thriller elements. This hybrid genre is a new favourite of mine. I love thrillers, but really appreciate the extra character development and the stylistic flair of books like these two.

I’d love to hear if you’ve read any of these books, and if so what your reaction to them was. Did they stick with you? Did they make any favourites lists? Which books have you read recently that left you with a crazy book hangover?

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly link-up feature created by The Broke and the Bookish and hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every week TTT has a different topic, and everyone who links up has to create a link of ten items that fit that topic. To see past and upcoming topics, go here.