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I’m going to need to mention some minor spoilers in today’s post in order to explain my selections. Most of the books I picked are older. I did this in large part so that I don’t ruin the plot twists of more recent fiction for anyone. Still, I thought I should warn all of you of this in advance in case your TBR lists include stuff that was predominantly published a few decades or even centuries ago.

Oh, and I was feeling extra chatty today, so this post is going to be longer than usual for me.

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

I’m a huge Jane Eyre fan, but one of the things that always bothered me about the conclusion of her tale was how little attention was paid to the fate of Bertha Mason, the hidden and severely mentally ill wife of Jane’s employer, Mr. Rochester. Bertha had such a sad character arc that I half-expected her to show up again after her death. If Wilkie Collins’ tale had been mashed into this one, we could have gotten the vengeful spirit scenes I was waiting for.

2. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and The Magicians trilogy by Lev Grossman. 

Grossman’s series was marketed as Harry Potter for adults at one point. Both of these writers created worlds where magic was present everywhere and could easily go wrong if you didn’t know what you were doing with it.

While I’m still not sure that marketing The Magicians in this way was a good idea, I am intrigued by the thought of magicians going to graduate school. It never made sense to me that Harry Potter and his friends would have all of the practical knowledge they needed to make it as magicians at the tender age of 18. They really should have talked about higher education for whatever it was they wanted to specialize in after leaving Hogwarts.

3. Watership Down by Richard Adams and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. 

There were so many other magical creatures running around in The Hobbit that I think it would have made perfect sense to include a family of rabbits on the search for a safe, new home. Since this was a world where all kinds of non-human creatures could talk, I’d like to see Hazel and all of the other rabbits be able to speak human languages fluently. Imagine the look on Bilbo’s face if he ran across this group and realized all of the rabbits before him could understand every word he was saying!

4. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery.

Mary and Anne were both orphaned at young ages in societies that didn’t do a particularly good job of protecting orphans. They also had to learn how to thrive in families that weren’t happy to have them and didn’t do much of anything to help them adjust (at least at first). If only these two characters could have been neighbours. I think they would have been the best of friends.

5. The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams and Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. 

Both of these books are about love, loss, and death. One of the things that really bothered me about Where the Red Fern Grows was how dark its ending was after Billy’s beloved dogs died. It would have been nice for there to have been a scene to show the reward every good dog gets in the end. The supernatural twist in The Velveteen Rabbit would have worked nicely in this case, especially since Billy’s pets died when they were both still very young. I’d much rather have them living free and happy somewhere away from the main character than not being alive at all.

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Both of these stories were about what happened to humanity after society collapsed and the vast majority of people forgot how their ancestors used to live. The Book of Dave focused on how that collapse destroyed families. A Canticle for Leibowitz was more concerned with how such a disaster would destroy literature, history, education, and knowledge in general.

Combining all of these factors together would make for a fascinating – if also sometimes frightening- read.

7. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Unwind by Neal Shusterman.

Both of these series portray worlds where some people are murdered so that their organs can be used to improve or save the lives of strangers.

Never Let Me Go showed it happening to childless and unmarried folks in their 50s and 60s. Unwind showed it happening to teenagers, especially teens who didn’t have the protection of loving parents. Honestly, I think any society willing to do this wouldn’t care how old their victims were. They could easily target both groups in order to make sure that the folks deemed worthy by the powers that be would always have the organs and other body parts they needed to survive.

8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy and Earth Abides by George R. Stewart. 

The never-ending hopeless of The Road unnerved me. Like Earth Abides, it was set in a post-apocalyptic world where extinction for humankind seemed imminent. These tales would have worked well together when it came to their descriptions of the lengths desperate and starving people will go to in order to survive for another day.

I’d want to stick with the more optimistic ending of Earth Abides, though.

9. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. 

Gone with the Wind would have been a much better story if one of the main characters in it had been a slave, especially since Scarlett, the actual protagonist, never came across to me as someone who was particularly empathetic or interested in what was happening to those around her. The Book of Negroes was filled with scenes that showed just how harsh slavery was. It would have rounded out what this era was actually like quite well.

10. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Book Thief by Mark Zusak. 

The first time I read Anne Frank’s diary, I assumed she had somehow survived World War II and published her memoir after being liberated from a concentration camp. The fact that this wasn’t her fate made me incredibly sad.

Mixing the true story of what happened to her with the fictional, and much happier, events of Book Thief would be wonderful. I desperately wish we could have known who Anne would have become as an adult. She would have written a lot of amazing stories for sure, and who knows what else she could have accomplished!

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As anyone who has read some of my reviews on this site might have already noticed, I love short stories. There’s something almost magical about being able to step into a three-dimensional fictional world and get to know it well over a short period of time.

A nicely-developed short story can have all of the emotional impact of a full-length novel. I’ve often sobbed or laughed while reading short stories.  Not every character or setting needs hundreds of pages in order to come alive in the reader’s imagination.

You can read everything I talk about today for free online by clicking on the links below. I hope you all find something you enjoy in this list.

1. The Landlady by Roald Dahl.

This was originally something that I read for a high school English class. I didn’t understand the significance of the final scene until we discussed it in class the next day, but I’ve never thought of tea in quite the same way since then.

2. Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx.

I actually watched the film based on this long before I knew it had started out as a short story. Watching Ennis and Jack fall in love worked even better in the short story format. Their relationship was so forbidden in the 1960s that it made sense for it to be condensed into such a small space.

3. To Build a Fire by Jack London.

Mr. London was one of the first authors I discovered whose writing style I liked so much that I decided to read everything I could possibly find that was written by him.

This particular tale was about someone who got caught in a blizzard. Their life depends on their ability to build a fire and warm up before hypothermia sets in. I was on the edge of my seat the first time I read this because of how high the stakes were and how many obstacles the main character had to overcome to do something as simple as build a fire out in the open and warm up.

4. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. LeGuin.

The first time I read this, I felt a nearly uncontrollable urge to write a fan fiction sequel to it so everyone would know what happened after the last scene. The dark underbelly of this society bothered me so much that I really wanted it to be explained more deeply before someone tore it down for good.

I still haven’t written that piece of fan fiction, but maybe someday I will.

5.  The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

Does it surprise you at all that this was yet another short story I read in a high school English class? The teacher I mentioned above did a whole unit on short stories by North American and European writers. She was the one who ignited my love of them.

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6. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe.

I could probably write an entire Top Ten Tuesday post about Mr. Poe’s stories. He was the master of throwing his audience into an eerie situation and only gradually revealing the true horror of it all.

What I like the most about The Tell-Tale Heart  was the raven. I love seeing ravens in real life, but I’d be pretty alarmed if one of them began talking to me.

7. The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson.

Growing up, I was obsessed with fairy tales. (Honestly, I still am!) My grandparents had several large books filled with all sorts of fairy tales, from the widely-known ones like Cinderella to much more obscure works.

The first time I read The Little Match Girl, I blinked away tears. I hadn’t read a fairy tale with such a sad ending before that day, so it came as a shock to me to see what happened to this character given all of the difficult things she’d already experienced in her short life. I still loved her story, though.

8. A Haunted House by Virgina Woolf.

The only thing I’d enjoy more than a typical paranormal story would be if that same haunting were written from the perspective of the ghost instead of a living person. There’s something so interesting about seeing the world from the perspective of the dead.

9. Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I first read this when I was too young to understand the point Mr. Vonnegut was trying to make, so my first reaction was to wonder if I’d enjoy team sports more if there really was a way to eliminate other people’s natural athleticism so I could compete with them better. (I was not an athletic or coordinated child to say the least!)

It was only when I returned to this tale at an older age that I began to appreciate what the author was really saying. He was an astute man.

10. The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin.

Yes, this was another story assigned by the same teacher I talked about earlier in this post. I was fascinated by the thought of the main character being oddly relieved to hear her spouse had died. The idea of remaining in an unhappy marriage had never occurred to me before, so it took a while to figure out why Mrs. Mallard wasn’t heartbroken at the thought of being single again.

What are your favorite short stories?

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There are many bookish worlds out there that are quite entertaining to read about but wouldn’t actually be very nice places to live in for all sorts of different reasons. Since I love post-apocalyptic fiction and other dark genres so much, I could have made this list twice as long if I weren’t restricted to only picking ten examples.

1.  England from P.D. James’ The Children of Men. 

While a world without children would be a terrible place to live in general, what made this futuristic version of England truly horrifying was how hopeless it had become. Suicide had become so commonplace and accepted that painless ways of doing it were routinely advertised on television in the film version of this tale. I found that quite disturbing.

2. Panem from Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.

As if the widespread malnutrition and violence in many of the districts wasn’t dangerous enough, there was also the risk of being sent to your almost-certain death in The Hunger Games every year for the teenage members of this society. There’s no way I’d ever want to live in any of these districts, especially the poorest ones.

3. The entire planet of Earth from Douglas Adam’s The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

Earth is generally a pretty nice place to live in our universe, but in this book it’s demolished to make room for a galactic freeway very early on in the plot. I was pretty surprised by that twist, and I was only more surprised by what happened afterwards.

4. Winterfell from George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. 

Based on what I’ve read about this series, people regularly died violently in this kingdom. I’m not at all good at sword fighting, so I think my chances of being one of the folks who didn’t survive would be even higher than normal for this world.

5. Oceania from George Orwell’s 1984.

As if living in a brutal and totalitarian society wouldn’t be frightening enough, the dark ending of this book would make me even more scared to go anywhere near Oceania. Let’s just say that their government was so powerful that there was nothing it couldn’t accomplish.

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6. America from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

While it’s never a good idea to live in a country that oppresses human rights, the fact that this futuristic version of the United States banned reading books made me hate it even more than I would have otherwise. I can’t imagine going an entire lifetime without being allowed to read stories.

7. China (and then the entire world!) from Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War.

Granted, zombie apocalypses are never great places to live in general, but what makes this book even more disturbing than the typical example of this genre was how long it took China and the rest of the world to even admit that there was a problem in the first place.

If they’d fought back and freely shared everything they knew about how this infection spread as soon as the dead began to rise, the outbreak probably could have been contained fairly easily.

8. The Greater German Reich from Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

In this alternate history novel, The Nazis won World War II and took possession of a massive portion of the United States. Needless to say, life under their regime wasn’t a happy experience for anyone. The Nazis continued to murder people who were Jewish, disabled, part of the LGBT community, and anyone else they decided wasn’t worth keeping alive.

9. Post-apocalyptic Chicago from Veronica Roth’s Divergent. 

Everyone in this world was divided into one of the five different factions of their society depending on that person’s personality and interests.

To be honest with you, none of the factions sounded like good places to live. Some members of their society were deprived of the opportunity to make the simplest choices for themselves like what to wear. Others risked violent deaths ever day for no reason at all. I wouldn’t have wanted to choose any of the five options available to the characters.

10. The army base from M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts. 

As much as I love the idea of a child character who is far more special and dangerous than she first appears to be, the world she lived in was incredibly chaotic. There is no way I would have ever been safe there because there were no safe places left anywhere at all.

What bookish worlds would you never want to live in?

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This week’s topic made me smile. Normally, I will happy reread books that I love over and over again until I can quote passages from memory from them in ordinary conversations for the sheer fun of it.

There are exceptions to this rule, though. As you’re about to see, many of them have gone on my do-not-reread list for the exact same reason. I might not mind certain things the first time I read something, but they can deter me from rereading that particular tale.

1. The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien.

It took me ages to figure out whether I should list this trilogy as individual books or as a group. Since they all told different parts of the same epic adventure and their plots were very tightly woven together, I decided to include all three of them as the first item on this week’s list.

While I loved seeing what happened to Frodo and his companions while they were trying to bring The One Ring to Mount Doom to destroy it and save the world, the pacing of this series was so slow and the books themselves were so long that I don’t see myself ever reading them again.

2. Mockingjay (The Hunger Games #3) by Suzanne Collins.

I loved the fact that the author stayed true to the violent, unjust, and unpredictable world she created earlier in this series even though it meant shattering the audience’s expectations of what would happen next. There were certain deaths and other events in Mockingjay that honestly made me sob. I’m glad I know how it ended, but I never want to relive those scenes again.

3. Anne’s House of Dreams (Anne of Green Gables #5) by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

I was an adult before I realized that Anne Shirley’s adventures didn’t end after Anne of the Island, so I was excited to see what this character’s life was like after she finally married her childhood sweetheart. Without giving away spoilers, something tragic happened early on in their marriage that makes me never want to revisit this portion of Anne’s life again. It was simply too sad.

4. Beloved by Toni Morrison.

As a huge fan of Ms. Morrison’s work in general, it’s hard to admit that I don’t want to reread something she wrote. The descriptions of how slavery traumatized this entire family for multiple generations were so graphic, though, that I can’t handle seeing them suffer that much again.

5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. 
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The pacing of Great Expectations was so slow that I don’t want to revisit it even though I loved Pip as a character.

6. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

I knew quite a bit about the Great Depression when I first picked this book up, but there’s a huge difference between memorizing dry facts and seeing a three-dimensional family struggle to survive when the dust bowl hit their farm and they lost everything. The character development was amazing. It was emotionally difficult to see the Joads face malnutrition, discrimination, and severe poverty after I’d grown to truly love them. I can’t bear to see them go through all of that pain again.

7. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

As intrigued as I was by the storyline in general, it took a long time to figure out what Martian society was like. I’d rather not revisit the slow process of figuring out why Valentine’s worldview was so different from humans who had been raised by other humans.

8. The Martian by Andy Weir.

I loved seeing Mark, the main character of this book, solve all kinds of impossible problems on Mars after a terrible accident there made his fellow astronauts believe he was dead and accidentally leave him behind when they returned to Earth. He could have died many times over before they even realized he was still alive, and that made this a thrilling read. With that being said, I worried about Mark’s health and safety so much the first time I read about his adventures that I don’t really want to repeat that experience.

9. My Ántonia by Willa Cather.

I adored the descriptions of what life was like for brand new immigrants in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century. Surviving their first winter on the prairie was a difficult task for even the most fortunate and well-prepared families. The threat of starvation or freezing to death was always present. That made it impossible for me to stop reading even once they’d slightly improved their diets and the insulation in their homes. I had to know what happened to the characters, but once I did I lost the urge to return to their darkest and most uncertain days.

10. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King.

Like many of the other books on this list, this one was too intense for me to reread it. I was so frightened for Trisha once she became lost in the woods, especially once she realized that there was something awful wandering around out there. Knowing her fate was a relief. With that being said, I don’t ever want to go through that emotional rollercoaster again.