8 Books I Love That Were Written 10+ Years Ago

Hi friends! 👋🏻 I may or may not have mentioned this a couple of hundred times, but I’m a bit of an old hat at this blogging game. I’ve been around for almost 11 years and I’ve read a lot of books in that time. Today’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt is all about books that are ten years old or older, and I have a few of those, but I still somehow had a hard time coming up with this list 😅

I am primarily a backlist reader so I thought this would be easy, but it turns out that I just end up reading books from two years ago that I meant to get to earlier. Oops.

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld (2005) - If you know me, you saw this coming. Uglies was one of the first YA books I ever read and it’s likely the one that got me to be a bookworm rather than just a casual reader. I read a lot as a child but I also did other things too, but this was the book that really got me reading.

Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld (2009) - Again, this is no surprise either. Leviathan is my favourite series, maybe even more than Uglies and it cemented Scott Westerfeld as one of my favourite authors.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008) - Sometimes I think back to just how huge The Hunger Games was and it kind of shocks me that it’s just not really talked about anymore. It’s not the merchandising juggernaut that a certain Wizard Boy is, but I think it should be because it’s a better-written series.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818) - In this house, we only acknowledge the first version of Frankenstein because that is the version that I read and studied. Frankenstein is a book that’s very special to me because it’s one of the few books I studied that I actually enjoyed and studying it didn’t make me enjoy it any less. There are so many different ways to interpret the book and its themes and it’s just so cool.

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) - Dracula is another book that’s special to me because it really kickstarted my love for Gothic literature before it transformed into a full-blown hyperfixation. I travelled all the way to Romania for this book, so that just shows how much it means to me.

Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake (2011) - I must have read a lot of meh books between 2011 and 2012 because this is the only book from those years that I could pick out and say that I definitely love. It’s been a very long time since I read this series and they’re relatively quick reads so I may pick them up soon. Plus, this was one of my first forays into horror books so it has a special place in my heart.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) - Here’s a fun fact for you: I have read this book three times. The first time I was 14 years old and read it just because I wanted to, and the other two times were for study. I pretty much know this book cover to cover so seeing people cite it as a way of justifying their gross paranoid fantasies really makes my blood boil. Government health officials recommending that you get vaccinated so that a deadly disease is eradicated is not totalitarianism. Also, this book is neither antisocialist nor anti-communist.

Ring by Koji Suzuki (1991) - I think I’m in a small and somewhat unpopular camp because I prefer the original book to either movie adaptation (the Japanese movie is the better of those two, though). I’m still not very well versed in Japanese horror, but this is a great starting block because it’s mysterious and creepy at the same time.

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What are some of your favourite ‘old’ books?