Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week they provide a topic and you are free to use that topic and/or variations of that topic to make your top ten list. You don’t have to do all ten. Instead you can do three, five, fifteen, whatever you want. A full list of the weekly themes can be found here.

This week’s theme is Books I Bought/Borrowed Because… I buy books for a variety of reasons so I thought this prompt would be fun! I also love to see the different reasons people choose a book so I’m looking forward to going through everyone’s posts for this week.

HYPE

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There Will Come A Darkness was a book that I had initially seen talked about a great deal on BookTube. Of course, after that I started seeing it everywhere so obviously when it was released I had to have it! This is one I haven’t read yet but it is sitting on my shelf like a gorgeous literary siren, beckoning me to get lost in her pages.

Serpent & Dove is easily one of the most hyped books I saw in 2019. Prior to release this book was absolutely everywhere. It felt like every booktuber and blogger was featuring this title in one form or another and the majority of the press was good. Unfortunately I DNFed this one just shy of halfway through. I found the story to be problematic as fuck in ways that I just couldn’t overlook. I don’t mind violence and gore but stupidity is something I just can’t set aside. This is one book I wish I hadn’t jumped on the hype train for.

A Curse so Dark and Lonely was one of my favorite reads of 2019. Oddly, it was one that I initially had no intention to read. Like many readers, I had grown tired and disenchanted with retellings. But, giving in to the hype (as I often do), I ended up buying this title and I’m SO glad that I did! Cover to cover this book had me sucked in and I gobbled up the second book in the series with equal fervor. This title is well deserving of the hype it received.

IMPULSE

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From Blood and Ash is my most recent impulse purchase. I was just sitting late one night, idly scrolling through book recommendations on my Kindle, and this one caught my eye. I’d heard of Armentrout in passing before but little else. None the less, after a quick glance at the description, I purchased this ebook and continued my scrolling. Little did I know at the time that this book was a surprise release which left a lot of people shook.

Invictus was purchased as an audiobook because I had an Audible credit that needed using and a car ride with a cranky toddler. Since then I’ve reread this book multiple times as well as purchased a physical copy. It is one of my most successful ‘on a whim’ purchases to date and I’m so glad that it caught my eye. Invictus is one of my favorite books of all time and holds a very special place in my heart.

A Darker Shade of Magic. What can I say about this book that hasn’t been said? I had just started blogging here on Literary Weaponry and was not very active in the community yet. One afternoon, browsing the shelves at Barnes and Noble, I saw this book sitting tucked in amongst the adult SFF. I could recall having seen it once or twice online and decided to drop it into my basket with hardly more than a thought. The rest, as they say, is history. Schwab is now one of my favorite authors and her ADSOM series is nothing short of magical.

RESEARCH

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All three of these books can mostly be clumped into the same description. These titles were thoroughly researched before I purchased them. I read numerous reviews, used up considerable thinking time before purchase, and waited for a good deal which involved even more thinking about the title. All three of them flopped for me upon reading. Actually, they all ended up in my DNF pile. I seem to have much better luck buying books on a whim rather than actually researching them beforehand.

I really enjoyed this week’s prompt! I already knew that my impulse buys tend to work out better than my researched titles but it was still fun to lay them out like this. What are some reasons you tend to buy books the most?