Top Ten Tuesday: places books have made me want to visit (fictional or real)

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Every week they post a new topic that the participants come up with a top ten list for.

Sorry for the lack of posts last week! I was sick and just didn't feel up to it. But I'm back this week! I want to post at least one review and I have a giveaway scheduled for later tonight :)

On to the TTT. This week's topic is places books have made me want to visit, whether they're real or not. What an awesome topic!!



Prague: Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor / Book of Blood and Shadows - Robin Wasserman
I read DoS&B before I went to Prague and it definitely influenced the way I looked at the city! It's such a beautiful, mysterious place. All the alchemy, the magic, but also the blood and violence. It was also cool to visit the place where Kafka used to live and write.



New York City: The Mortal Instruments - Cassandra Clare
I'd never really longed to go to NYC that much before I read those books. But then, I wanted to walk around Brooklyn and ride on the subway and maybe get a glimpse of that world behind the world. That didn't end up happening when I finally went, but it was great anyway :)



Venice: Venom - Fiona Paul / City of Masks - Mary Hoffmann
Renaissance Venice or Florence would be so great to visit! I've been to Florence and it was beautiful but haven't made it to Venice yet. And either way, it's different now. To be at a masquerade or drive in a gondola through the city after midnight with my beau - that would've been something! (What? I can romanticize stuff too, every once in a while)



The Hollows / Cincinnati: world of Kim Harrsion's Hollows series
This was my gateway to Urban Fantasy and still one of my favorite worlds ever. I'd love to take a trip across the river to the Hollows and have pizza at Piscary's. Maybe get a glimpse of Rachel, Ivy, Kisten, and Jenks.


Alternative world of The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Seriously, a world where everyone goes nuts about books? Dodos as pets? To be able to read yourself into a book? Yes, please.


The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
I'd love to go there for a night. Where a read scarf. Walk the tents. See the wonders.



New Orleans: The Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice / Darkness Becomes Her - Kelly Keaton / Drawing Blood - Poppy Z. Brite
Okay, my conception of New Orleans has been heavily influenced by vampire and horror novels. But I'm telling you, when I actually sat in Café du Monde last June, knowing that some of my favorite characters had had their coffee there, it felt great. This city is a blend of so many different influences and I loved it. I also think Kelly Keaton's re-invention of it as New 2 in her series is amazing.



Seattle: Richelle Mead's Succubus series
I didn't make it to Seattle during my trip across the US last summer but I definitely want to go there in the future. I loved the way Mead described the city and its bookstores and coffee shops in the series. Also, grunge music. Can't forget that.



Japan: all the manga I've ever read, plus books by Federica de Cesco, and Lian Hearn's Across the Nightingale Floor series
I've been wanting to go to Japan since I was about 11. Haven't made it yet, but hopefully in the next 1-2 years. I want to see Tokyo and Kyoto but I'd also like to travel cross-country and see more rural areas.

Hogwarts
Duh. I actually didn't come up with this one, my sister did. But obviously I want to go there. When I was 9 or 10 and first reading the books, knowing that I never would was akin to a physical pain.

I'm sure I could have come up with many more places, but sometimes it's hard to tell what was first: the book, or the wish to go there. For example with Paris and London, the way I see those cities is completely tangled up with books I read that are set there, both before and after I went.
Do we have any places in common? And link me to your own post! I want to find more places to go to :)

Stacking the Shelves: Fairies & Lucky Finds

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews to show off the new books we got in the past week. This can be borrowed or bought, print or ebook, for review, gifted, won... just show your awesome new book friends :)

I had two hauls this past week, one was books I had ordered that finally arrived and one that was a stack I picked up at the second hand bookstore. Sorry for the not so good pics, my lamp started to smoke and stink after one pic and I had to shut it off and move to a different, not-so-great lamp...

Bought:

The Pledge, by Kimberly Derting
The Iron Knight, by Julie Kagawa
The Iron Legends, by Julie Kagawa

After reading The Iron Queen, I just had to have the rest of the series. I've also wanted to read The Pledge for a really long time now, and with The Essence coming out I was reminded of it. And since it's now out in paperback...


From the used book store:

Katzenwinter, by Wolfgang & Heike Hohlbein
Measure for Measure & All's Well That Ends Well, by William Shakespeare
Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde
The Devlin Diary, by Christi Phillips
Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
If I Stay, by Gayle Forman

I read Katzenwinter about 10 years ago and it was one of my first fantasy books! I own more than twenty of Hohlbein's books and I've read even more that I borrowed from the library of the school I was going to at the time. I've been meaning to buy&re-read all his old novels from the 80s and 90s but in the same editions I read them way back when... which aren't easy to find anymore. So this was an awesome surprise and I just had to have it :D It's in good condition and was only 3.50 CHF (maybe like 4$. For new hardbacks you pay the equivalent of 30-40$ here).
The other books were about 2$ each. I've been curious about Midnight's Children for a while because I heard so much about it during my studies... and everyone seems to have read If I Stay!

Also, I got extremely lucky with the Shakespeare because look at this:

I don't know whether you can read it, but this was PRINTED IN 1904!!!!
And I paid not quite 2$ for it!!! It's old and worn and smells great :D The Spine is not readable anymore; I just saw this old book wedged between two random paperbacks and was curious about what it was.... and opened it to find this!! I mean it's more than 100 years old! I don't think it's a valuable edition or anything but I love it anyway because it's now the oldest book I own :)


What do you guys think of my haul? Do you love old books too, or do you think they... stink? What did you get this week?
Oh, and check out the giveaways in my left sidebar while you're here :) I changed the entry options for the I Am Alive giveaway so that you can now enter without commenting...

Teaser Tuesday: The Well of Lost Plots

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I decided not to do a Top Ten Tuesday today because I can't possibly choose only 10 of the books I'm looking forward to reading this Fall, and looking at how long my TBR list is and knowing that I'll never be able to read all of it depresses me at the moment. So I'm sharing a teaser from my current read instead :)

I'm cheating a bit and sharing 3 sentences instead of two.

'...here are the main points of the news. Prices of semi-colons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty-eight points off the TomJones Index. The Council of Genres has announced the nominations for the 923rd annual BookWorld Awards; Heathcliff is once again to head the 'Most Troubled Romantic Lead' category for the seventy-seventh year running...'

Haha. This is the footnoterphone entry from page 7 of Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, the third book in the Thursday Next series centering on SpecOp Literary Detective Thursday Next, newly also member of Jurisfiction and currently hiding in an unpublished (for a reason) novel.

This one was one of my dusty reads; I bought it more than a year ago and hesitated to read it because I didn't want to re-read book 2 but was fuzzy on what exactly happened. Well, today I saw there is a recap at the beginning...
These books are a must for all us book geeks! It's about a world where everyone is crazy about literature! Also, people travel by airship (planes are only for the military) and dodos (brought back from extinction) are popular pets. And I mean, who wouldn't want Thursday's talent? The woman can read herself into books! And I mean that physically and literally.
Intrigued? Click the cover to get to goodreads.

What are you guys reading at the moment? Link me up in the comments :)

A While on the Pile: The Well of Lost Plots, by Jasper Fforde

From the Review Pile is a meme hosted by Stepping Out of the Page every Thursday. 

The aim of this meme is to showcase books that you've received for review (or if you don't receive review books, any book that you own and really want to read/review) but haven't yet got around to reading, in order to give the book some extra publicity. It is also inspired by 'A While on the Pile', a post by Rachel from Fiktshun / My Reading Pile.

My choice today is The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde

 

Paperback, 360 pages

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton

Published: 2003

Goodreads description:

Leaving Swindon behind her, to hide out in the Well of Lost Plots --- the place where all fiction is created --- Thursday Next, Literary Detective and soon-to-be one parent family, ponders her next move from inside an unpublished novel of dubious merit entitled Caversham Heights. Her husband, Landen, exists only in her memories and with Goliath and the Chronoguard on her tail in the real world, the safest place for her to be is inside the covers of a book.

But changes are afoot within the world of fiction. The much-awaited upgrade to the centuries-old book system --- in which grammasites will be exterminated, punctuation standardised and the number of possible plots increased from eight to an astonishing thirty-two --- is only weeks away. But if this is the beginning of a golden age in fictional narrative, then why are Jurisfiction agents mysteriously dying? Perkins is eaten by the minotaur, Snell succumbs to the Mispeling Vyrus and Godot is missing.

As the date of the upgrade looms closer and the bookworld prepares for the 923rd Annual Fiction Awards, Thursday must unmask the villain responsible for the murders, establish just what exactly the upgrade entails --- and do battle with an old enemy intent on playing havoc with her memories.

 

 

 I bought this book when I was in London about a year ago, but somehow I still haven't gotten around to reading it. I don't know why exactly - I loved the first two installments of the Thurdsay Next series. Maybe it's because I might have to re-read the second book to get all caught up again and I just didn't feel like doing that. Maybe it's the fact that Thursday's pregnant (sue me, but I don't like reading about pregnancy). I'm not sure. I hope that having made this post will motivate me to pick it up when I've finished the novel I'm reading at the moment.

What's gathering dust on your pile? Have you read any Thursday Next books? If so, did you enjoy them?