Hidden Gems (Top Ten Tuesday)

It’s Tuesday again, and you know what that means!  Another Top Ten Tuesday post.  This week, we’re going to be talking about Hidden Gems.  I’m guessing that this is the opposite of the Hyped Up Books topic that we did at the end of July.  So today I’m writing about some books that I liked, that don’t get talked about a lot.  Since I’ve only been book blogging for about four months, I apologize in advance if I include a book that was once really popular but I haven’t heard much about.

I’m only including books that have already been released.

As always, Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

So before I dig around into the Goodreads vault to find some books that I liked that I read a long time ago, I’ll start with some YA books.  One recent book that I really liked was Echoes, by Alice Reeds.  I couldn’t put it down, and ended up reading it in one day.

Not that reading a book in more than one day means that I didn’t like the book (it took me a few days to read King’s Cage and I thought that was great), but in the absence of having to go to work and reading a book that is über-long, it usually takes me a day to read a really good book like this.

Another story that I read this year that I thought was pretty good was My Real Name is Hanna, which is a story about a Jewish girl who struggled to survive in the Ukraine during World War II.  I haven’t heard a lot about this story, which is pretty sad, because the story was enjoyable.

From here we go back in time, although The Weight of Feathers was released in 2015, so it wasn’t that long ago.  I read it this April, however.  This book is a little like Romeo and Juliet, in that it is about two teens from feuding families that end up falling in love.  It has a different sort of ending, however.  It won some awards, and I found out about it because my library posted a link on Facebook about it.

I don’t know if you’d really consider The Book of Lies to be a hidden gem, because I first heard about it on television, but this book has been around for a while (it came out in 2008) and I’m sure it doesn’t have many people talking about it any more.  I only remember bits and pieces of this story, but I remember I liked it quite a lot, and I ended up staying up late to finish it.  Did you know that Superman has something to do with the Bible?  The answer to that connection lies in this book.

The Heavenly Man is definitely a hidden gem.  I first heard about it in church, LOL.  I really loved this story, and I’ve heard from a few people that read it later, and they really enjoyed it as well.  It made me rethink the concept of miracles.  We seem to think of them as things that no longer exist today, but I think that maybe we rarely see miracles because we don’t need them that much.

At this point in my list, I think I’m running out of truly hidden gems; maybe if they ever decide to do this list at some point in the future, I’ll have more for you.  Prior to book blogging, I heard of most books on TV, so they can’t really be that hidden, can they?  But I’m sure that the rest of these books won’t be on very many Top Ten Tuesday lists this year anyway.  One of those books that I really liked was 1421: The Year China Discovered America.  I thought that this was a really interesting idea, and China did have quite a fleet at the time that Menzies thinks that China might have sailed to America, so who knows?  It is an interesting idea.

Again, I doubt that we could call Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature to be a hidden gem, because I heard about it on the radio several times before I finally got around to putting it on hold at the library, but I also doubt that it’s going to make too many Top Ten Tuesday lists any time soon.

This book made my list of top books that I read in 2017.  I found it to be really interesting.  We always think of our own times as violent, but when compared to the past, it’s actually not.  If you’ve ever wondered where the phrase “cut off their nose to spite their face” comes from, or have ever pondered whether medieval torture techniques would fly today, this might be an interesting nonfiction read.

I thought Defying Hitler was a great book, even though it’s unfinished.  And yes, I first heard about this book on television.  In my German class way back in middle school, I remember hearing about Germans who had to bring wheelbarrow loads full of cash to buy a loaf of bread.  This is the story of someone who actually lived through it, all the way to after Hitler started to come into power, and people had to go to indoctrination camps.  It was an interesting true story.

In the Garden of Beasts is another one of those World War II books that is quite eerie.  This is the story of an ambassador and his family that came to Germany right about the time that Hitler came to power.  Also probably not hidden, but as this book’s been out for a while now, I doubt it gets talked about as much as it used to.

Never Stop Walking is a book that I reviewed earlier this year, and you still don’t hear a lot about.  Christina Rickardsson grew up in caves and then in the slums of Brazil.  For those of us who grew up living in homes and never really had to seriously worry about our friends getting killed by the police or having to kill someone in order to get something to eat, this story is a journey into a life that we don’t hear a lot about.  This book still remains fairly hidden.

So those are some hidden gems for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday.  Next week I’ll talk about books that I hope to read this fall.