Top Ten Tuesday – New to Me!

January 24: New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2022

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

That Artsy Reader Girl

Well, I narrowed the list down to ten and I added two more books to 2023’s TBR list. But who’s counting?

I love reading new-to-me authors, especially if it is book one of an already completed series 📚.

1

Bonnie Garmus – Lessons in Chemistry

Lessons in Chemistry already had the Romance label attached to it when I heard about it, which is not my usual cup of tea. The “romance” is a good framing device for this historical novel about a woman far ahead of her time. I believe this is Bonnie Garmus’s one and only novel.

Bonnie Garmus is a copywriter and creative director who’s worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine, and education. She’s an open-water swimmer, a rower, and mother to two pretty amazing daughters. Born in California and most recently from Seattle, she currently lives in London with her husband and her dog, 99.

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And her dog’s name is 99! How cool is that?!

2

Celeste Ng – Our Missing Hearts

To start, I’d like to say “Thank you,” to Ms. Ng for writing Our Missing Hearts. I read it at the perfect time when I was starting to feel hopeful about the U.S.A.’s future again. Have you ever felt a book was written specifically with you in mind? It is as if she wrote out my fears of where the previous administration was attempting to take American culture.

…  social issues that were close to me—Asian American representation, LGBTQ rights, and compassion—as I started to get more well-known. It just seemed to me that if people were listening, I owed it to others to try and speak about something that mattered, and call attention to things that were getting overlooked. You could say I became much more political with the advent of the 2016 election, when the stakes became much higher for me as a woman, a woman of color, and a child of immigrants. But really I’ve always been political, because when you’re in any marginalized group, your existence is politicized for you, whether you like it or not.

Lithub interview

I realize that many people were devastated by the U.S. 2016 election. I am relieved that people as eloquent as Celeste Ng took on the fall-out of electing a white supremacist to the office of the Presidency.

Little Fires Everywhere is one of the books added to this year’s TBR.

3

Charmaine Wilkerson – Black Cake

Black Cake is Ms. Wilkerson’s first novel. It is a mixture of historical, mystery, and contemporary. The story goes from California, the Caribbean islands, London, West Indies, and back to California. Whew! By the end, I was fully in sync with Eleanor Bennett, the deceased protagonist.

Charmaine Wilkerson is an American writer who has lived in the Caribbean and is based in Italy. She is a former journalist and recovered marathon runner whose award-winning short stories can be found in various UK and US anthologies and magazines.

Goodreads

4

Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club

I am not sure how Fight Club ended up on my radar. I know I had no interest in watching the movie, when it was in theaters; I ended up watching the movie when my beloved was watching it. 🤯 But that was years ago. Whatever the reason, I am so glad I finally read Fight Club. I wonder if it is still going on???

Written in stolen moments under truck chassis and on park benches to a soundtrack of The Downward Spiral and Pablo Honey, Fight Club came into existence. The adaptation of Fight Club was a flop at the box office, but achieved cult status on DVD. The film’s popularity drove sales of the novel. … Choke, published in 2001, became Chuck’s first New York Times bestseller.

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5

Isabel Allende Llona – Violeta

I wonder if all of Ms. Allende’s stories are as epic as Violeta: 100 years of personal history living in Chile. Violeta is brought fully to life with all its inconsistencies and her growing self-awareness. The Violeta at the beginning is still the same person, at her core, at the end and she has changed so much as she witnessed the history of the “disappeared” in a most personal way.

Isabel Allende Llona is a Chilean-American novelist. Allende, who writes in the “magic realism” tradition, is considered one of the first successful women novelists in Latin America. She has written novels based in part on her own experiences, often focusing on the experiences of women, weaving myth and realism together. 

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Five of Ms. Allende’s books are already on my general TBR. I should probably start reading one a year for a while.

6

Kira Jane Buxton – Hollow Kingdom, Feral Creatures

Both of Ms. Buxton’s two published novels were a fun romp through the apocalypse brought to us by TECHNOLOGY. When the main narrator is a domesticated crow, you know the story is going to be a little bit different. I highly recommend everything Ms. Buxton has written! 😁

She calls the tropical utopia of Seattle home and spends her time with three cats, a dog, two crows, a charm of hummingbirds, five Steller’s jays, two dark-eyed juncos, two squirrels, and a husband.

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7

Kelly J. Ford – Real Bad Things

Real Bad Things made me aware how much drama, even in real life, is due to assuming. Assuming what someone else’s life has been like, and assuming you know what others are thinking/feeling. I love guessing who-done-it, throughout a mystery, even noting it in my Kindle as I go. I was all over the place with Real Bad Things. Quite the eye-opener.

Kelly J. Ford is the author of Real Bad Things and Cottonmouths, a novel of “impressive depths of character and setting,” according to the Los Angeles Review, which named it one of its Best Books of 2017. An Arkansas native, Kelly writes crime fiction set in the Ozarks and Arkansas River Valley.

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8

Madeline Miller – Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller was born in Boston and grew up in New York City and Philadelphia. She attended Brown University, where she earned her BA and MA in Classics. For the last ten years she has been teaching and tutoring Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students. She has also studied at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and in the Dramaturgy department at Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA, where she teaches and writes. The Song of Achilles is her first novel.

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9

Shelley Parker-Chan – She Who Became the Sun

Shelley Parker-Chan (she/they) is an Asian-Australian former diplomat and international development adviser who spent nearly a decade working on human rights, gender equality and LGBT rights in Southeast Asia. Named after the Romantic poet, she was raised on a steady diet of Greek myths, Arthurian legend and Chinese tales of suffering and tragic romance. Her writing owes more than a little to all three. In 2017 she was awarded an Otherwise (Tiptree) Fellowship for a work of speculative narrative that expands our understanding of gender.

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There is to be a sequal to She Who Became the Sun. I cannot wait!

10

William Kent Krueger – Ordinary Grace

Raised in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, William Kent Krueger briefly attended Stanford University—before being kicked out for radical activities. After that, he logged timber, worked construction, tried his hand at freelance journalism, and eventually ended up researching child development at the University of Minnesota. He currently makes his living as a full-time author. He’s been married for over 40 years to a marvelous woman who is an attorney. He makes his home in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves.

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Mr. Krueger’s This Tender Land is the second book added to this year’s TBR.

Thoughts