Top Ten Tuesday | Santa Claus is Coming to Town (With Books)

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created at The Broke and the Bookish. Each week you compile a list of ten books which coincide with that week's theme. You can find everything you need to know about joining in here!

This week's theme is 'Top Ten Books I Hope Santa Brings'! To be honest I'm not really sure what I want for Christmas this year, although there'll always be books I'd like to get my hands on, so this week I've mentioned some of the books I've included on a wishlist for my bookish secret santa as well as a couple of books I hinted at my parents that I wouldn't mind owning. Whatever I get this year, though, I know I'm going to love it!

And as this is the last TTT before Christmas - MERRY CHRISTMAS! I hope you all have a wonderful day, whether you celebrate Christmas or not, and, if you do, I hope Father Christmas brings you everything you wish for.

Prudence by Gail Carriger: I own all of the Parasol Protectorate books, with only Heartless and Timeless left to go, so it'd be nice to have the first book in the follow-up series to hand.

New World Fairy Tales by Cassandra Parkin: I love short story collections based on fairy tales, so I definitely wouldn't complain if I found this book under my tree.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor: All I've read of Okorafor's so far are her Binti books, but Akata Witch has intrigued me for a long while. It's the first book in a duology (I think?) and recently had a makeover with this stunning cover.

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu: I haven't read any Asian-inspired high fantasy and that's something I'd like to change, especially as I've heard great things about Ken Liu's work.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azakaban by J. K. Rowling, illustrated by Jim Kay: I've been collecting these illustrated editions, they're beautiful, and I think this one in particular will be gorgeous - I can't wait to see Jim Kay's versions of Lupin and Sirius!

Pages for You by Sylvia Brownrigg: I've heard lots of very good things about this one, so I certainly wouldn't be disappointed to get a copy this year.

Elizabeth of York: The First Tudor Queen by Alison Weir: I've always been fascinated by Elizabeth of York but I feel like she gets forgotten quite a lot. Whenever I come across a history documentary featuring Alison Weir I'm always interested in what she has to say, so this book is the perfect pairing of two lovely things.

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: This year is the year I discovered I like Jane Austen and Mansfield Park is the novel I know the least about, so I'm very interested in checking it out.

Unicorns: The Myths, Legends, & Lore by Skye Alexander: This book's about unicorns. What else needs to be said?

The Stuart Princesses by Alison Plowden: I read Plowden's Women All On Fire: The Women of the English Civil War recently and enjoyed it, and it's made me want to learn more about the women of the Stuart era. I know very little about the Stuart royal family so I think this will be the perfect book to widen my knowledge.

Which books made your list this week?

Top Ten Tuesday | O Captain! My Captain!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created at The Broke and the Bookish. Each week you compile a list of ten books which coincide with that week's theme. You can find everything you need to know about joining in here!

This week's theme is 'Top Ten Authors I'm Dying To Meet / Ten Authors I Can't Believe I've Met  (some other "meeting authors" type spin you want to do)'. You may or may not know this, I have no idea, but I studied Creative Writing for four years at university and got tutored by some brilliant writers, but today I thought I'd talk about some of the authors I wish I'd been able to have some lessons with while I was a student - they're all writers I still wouldn't say no to a lesson with now!

Sarah Waters: I love Waters' fiction, The Little Stranger is one of my favourite books, and I think the stories she chooses to tell are fantastic. The focus of my MA was how historical fiction can be used as a tool to write women, the LGBT+ community, poc and any other form of 'other' back into history, so to be tutored by a woman who specialises in LGBT+ historical fiction would have been amazing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I read Adichie's story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, earlier this year and loved it. She's also a very political, outspoken person and I think I could learn an awful lot from her.

Margaret Atwood: The woman's a genius, what more is there to say?

Samantha Ellis: Some Creative Writing MA courses in the UK make you choose between focusing on solely prose or solely poetry, but what I liked about my course at Lancaster University was that you could explore anything you wanted to. Having said that, I've never tried my hand at writing scripts and I think part of that is because we didn't have any tutors who specialised in them, and Ellis is a playwright as well as a writer of non-fiction. She also seems like a genuinely nice human being and I think a workshop with her would be really interesting - if nothing else we could gush about Anne Brontë together.

Alison Weir: I haven't actually read any of Weir's books yet (something I'm hoping to change this year!) but I think she'd've been a great tutor for me during my MA because she's both a historian and a novelist, and I think I could have learned a lot about knowing when to separate fact from fiction and knowing how much research to do without driving myself around the bend as I sometimes found myself doing.

Gail Carriger: I've been struggling to write fiction since I finished uni and entered the world of full-time work, which I'm finding really frustrating and it's making me lose my confidence when I sit down to finish an incomplete short story, and there's something about Carriger's work that seems so indulgent and fun that I think a workshop with her would encourage me to actually get some words on the page.

Angela Carter: Sadly Carter died in 1992 when I was a measly 4 months old so I'll never have the opportunity to be taught by her, and, if I'm being honest, I'm not actually the biggest fan of her work aside from The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. She did teach at the University of East Anglia, one of the best unis in the UK for Creative Writing, and I think workshops with her must have been fascinating because she was so radical.

Robin Hobb: Another author I haven't read but I'm planning to read this year. I think we can all agree that Hobb is the biggest female author in the world of high fantasy and I think she'd have a lot to teach me about building a whole world, with its own countries and cultures and environment, from scratch.

Kurtis J. Wiebe: Something else I wasn't able to explore at uni is writing for comics and graphic novels, and as Rat Queens is my favourite graphic novel series I'd be happy to have a workshop all about writing for comics with Wiebe.

Roald Dahl: Yet another author who has shuffled off this mortal coil, and one who would be 100 now if he was still alive. Dahl died the year before I was born but he was still a huge part of my childhood - I got my dad to read Fantastic Mr. Fox to me so many times that I think we both knew it by heart - can you imagine having a workshop about writing for children with this man? Yes please.

Who did you talk about this week?

Top Ten Tuesday | My Bookish Resolutions

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created at The Broke and the Bookish. Each week you compile a list of ten books which coincide with that week's theme. You can find everything you need to know about joining in here!

Happy New Year! This week's theme is 'Top Ten Resolutions We Have For 2016 (can be bookish, personal resolutions, "I resolve to finally read these 10 books, series I resolve to finish in 2016, etc.)', so today I thought I'd talk about some of my bookish resolutions for 2016.

I would like... To read more books than I buy: It's inevitable when you're a book lover, and particularly when you're a book blogger/vlogger, that you're going to buy a lot of books. If you see everyone talking about a book then you want it, and even if you don't... well, I don't need much persuading to buy a book! In 2015, though, I literally ran out of room, and though I read a lot of books (and in reality I'm pretty sure I did read more books than I bought) I'd like to try and work my way through more of the books on my TBR. Even though I'll still be getting my hands on shiny new releases...

I would like... To read more non-fiction: This won't be hard as I really fell in love with non-fiction in 2015, and discovered I love it! As such I've bought quite a few non-fiction books, and I'd like to get to them in 2016. In particular, I'd like to read Jen Campbell's The Bookshop Book, Alison Weir's Mary Boleyn and Kate Bernheimer's Mirror, Mirror On the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales.

I would like... To finish more series: This is something I completely failed at in 2015 (though I did finish The Lunar Chronicles!), so whether I've already started them or I started them in 2016, I'd like to finish more series than I finished in 2015.

I would like... To read more classics: This was something I managed in 2015, but there are still lots of classics I have yet to read. Luckily for me I'm taking part in The Classics Club's Women's Classic Literature Event, so I'm hoping to read plenty! I'd particularly like to read Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

I would like... To write a book!: I'm a bad writer I let insecurity and downright laziness get in the way of my creativity, and though I say it every year I want 2016 to be the year I break through that wall and write a damn book. I also just want to generally write more, because though 2015 was a fantastic reading year it wasn't a great writing year.

I would like... To join or start a book club: There are plenty of online book clubs, and I'm sure a lot of them are brilliant, but I love 'real life' book clubs. I'm hoping a friend of mine in Swansea will restart the book club she started last year because I really enjoyed it - if not, I may try starting my own!

I would like... To have a bookish clearout: I have a lot of books. Some of them I've read and didn't like, some of them I've read and enjoyed but probably wouldn't ever read again, and some of them I haven't read and probably never will. I want to be brutally honest and send those books off to better homes, leaving myself with the books I really want to own - and a little more space!

I would like... To buy from more independent bookshops: Speaking of buying books, I know for a fact that I own so many because online shopping is my downfall. In 2016 I'd like to support more independent bookshops, especially as I bought a stunning book from Rossiter Books, one of my favourite independent bookshops, in Monmouth, which is a beautiful little shop.

Anna Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth Darcy (née Bennet) and Matthew Rhys as Fitzwilliam Darcy in Death Comes to Pemberley

I would like... To visit more literary places: I'm pretty lucky in that so many famous authors are British, and as I'm also British I have quite easy access to a lot of literary places. Despite that, though, I haven't been to as many as I'd like. I've been to Stratford and I've been to Bath - I've been to Haworth, home of the Brontës, a couple of times, too - but in 2016 I'd like to visit more literary places, whether they're places where authors lived or places where adaptations have been filmed. One of my friends is a butler at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, which has been used as Pemberley twice; one in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and again in the 2013 adaptation of Death Comes to Pemberley. I'll definitely be going there this year!

I would like... To find a new bookish job: If you've been following my blog for a little while, you'll know that last year I worked at the independent publishing house, Seren Books. Sadly my position was a temporary position for a year, so I need a new job! I actually started a new temporary position yesterday at the University of Wales Press, an academic publishing house, but I'd like to find a position that doesn't have an end date to give myself a little more stability. I'm hoping to secure a job as an Editorial Assistant somewhere!

What are your resolutions?