Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish. Each week, they post a topic and encourage fellow bloggers to list their own top ten answers. This week’s prompt, inspired by spring fever, is to choose the top ten books you’d play hooky with–which I took to mean the kind of fun, engrossing, maybe even slightly trashy books that cause an afternoon to fly by, despite the many pressing obligations you’ve got waiting for you! (Being in graduate school and working on my thesis means I don’t often actually get to play hooky from school…)
The Top Ten Books I’d Play Hooky With
1. The Zona, by Nathan Yocum
A futuristic dystopia, a cruel theocracy, and badass “Preachers” who roam the former Southwestern U.S. looking to eradicate “sin?” Why wouldn’t you want to play hooky to read this book? Check out my full review of The Zona here.
2. The Hunger Games Trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
As everyone and their mother knows by know, these books are wonderful, and best devoured whole. 🙂 It might be because I just saw the movie this weekend, but The Hunger Games have been on my mind and I think I’m due for a reread, especially of the second and third books. I imagine I’ll be ducking out of some responsibilities in order to make this happen.
3. A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R. R. Martin
My boyfriend and I read this entire series (well, minus A Dance with Dragons, as it hadn’t yet come out) over the course of two to three weeks. They’re not for everyone, but I love gritty fantasy, and the way Martin deconstructs classic fantasy tropes is masterful. I have no problem saying I’m addicted to this series.
4. You Suck: A Love Story, by Christopher Moore
Moore is consistently hilarious, and You Suck delights in poking fun at vampires, vampire hunters, San Francisco, teenagers…basically, anything and everything in his path. While this novel is the second in his A Love Story trilogy, it works as a stand-alone book as well.
5. I Was Told There’d Be Cake, by Sloane Crosley
Short story collections always whiz by me, and Crosley’s makes for some fluffy, sugary reading. While it isn’t one of my favorite books, it would be perfect for a lazy spring afternoon’s worth of reading.
6. The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
You may know del Toro best as the director of such films as Blade II, Hellboy, and Pan’s Labyrinth, but he’s also a writer! In The Strain, the first of a series, he introduces us to some very ugly, very hungry vampires and the team of scientists and academics that stand between them and total domination of New York City. I still haven’t read the others in the trilogy, but this one is definitely worth reading if you’re a horror/thriller fan!
7. Savage Grace, by Natalie Robins
I’ll let GoodReads handle this one: “A spellbinding tale of money and madness, incest and matricide, Savage Grace is the saga of Brooks and Barbara Baekeland — beautiful, rich, worldly — and their handsome, gentle son, Tony. Alternately neglected and smothered by his parents, he was finally driven to destroy the whole family in a violent chain of events.”
8. We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver 
While in the end I really disliked this book and found the narrator to be unbearable, I can’t deny that I read it obsessively for a few days. This tale of a mother struggling to explain and cope with the violent actions of her son is certainly gripping, despite my annoyance at the epistolary style and pretentious voice.
9. The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston
I purchased, started, and finished this book in an airport in North Carolina. Focused on the spread and containment of a deadly African virus in the U.S., and based on a true story, I couldn’t put this one down.
10. The Passage, by Justin Cronin
Another vampire book, though much more serious and “literary” than del Toro’s take. I still found it, for the most part, it be fast-paced and contain enough mysteries that I had to keep reading.
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