Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature brought to you by The Broke and the Bookish.

This week’s topic is all about book recommendations. I’ve read lots of great books that people suggest to me, so I wasn’t sure how to narrow down this topic until I thought about the one person with whom I exchange more book recommendations with than anyone else. My mom definitely encouraged my love of reading from a very young age. She loved to read and she loved to read to me. We read the first half of the Harry Potter books together (and pronounced ‘Hermione’ incorrectly the entire time), and ever since I was a teenager we’ve been trading books back and forth.

I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out things my mom would enjoy reading and vice versa. But here are 7 recent/memorable books that my mom recommended to me that I really enjoyed:

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury–My mom has always had a soft spot for this science fiction writer, so when it came up on a summer reading list in high school she suggested I pick it. I don’t think any other book has informed my ideas about censorship as much as this one.
• Trinity by Leon Uris–I actually haven’t read all the Uris books my mom has told me  I should read, but this one was worth all the effort. His books are not easy reads–they’re long and dense–but they yield great rewards in scope and sheer epic-ness. This one is about Irish revolution. There were several unclaimed copies of it at our library book sale and I couldn’t believe it–I think because it was written in the 1970s people just don’t know anything about it.
• Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon–So far I’ve only read the first book in this series, but it’s hard not to get swept up into the setting and the characters, so I’ll definitely be heading back for more.
• Karma Gone Bad by Jenny Feldon–My mom has always loved reading about East and South Asia and their cultures, and this is a memoir she recommended recently to me. We both enjoyed it, even though we felt that Feldon should have gotten over her culture shock a little more quickly and just enjoyed her experience the best she could. Both my mom and I have always wanted to travel, and while we’ve gotten to do more than some people neither of us has left the North American continent yet, so it’s hard to see other people get amazing opportunities and then fail to appreciate them. Still, the book is engaging and offers a different perspective.
• Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones–This book took my mom by surprise, as it wasn’t anything like she’d thought it would be. We both enjoyed this adventure across western China in the name of archaeology. The main character was interesting and complex and the story was really interesting and unique.
• Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden–This book is a far less recent one, but it was so captivating that I purchased it recently so that I could read it again.
• The Incarnations of Immortality Series by Piers Anthony–I can’t remember if I’ve talked about these books before, but they are amazing works of science fiction that play with western ideas of religion and turn cosmology and theology on their heads. Briefly, the series starts with a man who kills Death and thus has to take up his mantle–and indeed all immortal positions (like war and fate) are filled by mortals whose stories all diverge and intertwine.

 

Did your mom/parent ever recommend a book to you that you ended up loving? Let me know in the comments!