Top Ten Tuesday: TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is an original weekly feature at The Broke and the Bookish.  They got a new button and a great topic for this week:  Top ten books you HAD TO HAVE ... but are still sitting on my bookshelf.

I, like everyone else, have a house full of these.  It's like I panic that if I don't buy the book while I'm thinking about it, then I'll forget about it entirely.  Here are just a few brand new hardcovers (which I don't even like reading all that much) that I bought and still haven't gotten around to.  All of these books were published in the last two years.

10. Freedom by Johnathan Franzen:  I really liked The Corrections and had been hoping that Franzen would publish something new even before the hype.  And then there was the hype, and I couldn't resist it, but also didn't find time to read it.

9. Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives by Annie Murphy Paul: I heard this author on NPR and was intrigued by her ideas about how the mother's health and behavior impact infants prenatally.  I actually ordered this from my local bookstore, and couldn't believe I was doing it then.  My internal voice was screaming, "Wait for the paperback."

8. The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood: I really like Atwood's dystopian fiction - I've been teaching The Handmaid's Tale every semester for a couple of years now.  I was excited for this, but then I realized that it was a follow up to Oryx and Crake, which I haven't read.  So, now there are two books that I need to read, but haven't yet.

7. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart:  Here is one where I couldn't resist the cover.  It also was one of those Amazon recommendations based on other things I liked, and sometimes I have trouble resisting those.

6. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown: I bought this one right when it came out.  It is the beginning of my new book hoarding pile for 2011.  I am really looking forward to it, but keep giving priority to something else.

5. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver:  I am a big Kingsolver fan. The Bean Trees is still one of my favorite books, and one I would love to reread.  I'm not sure why I haven't read this one yet, but I haven't.   It  has graduated to this year's TBR shelf.

4.  A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan: I saw this on all the top lists of 2010 and just couldn't wait for the paperback, so I ordered it from Book Depository and justified it because it was pretty cheap with no shipping.  However, whenever I order for Book Depository it is just evidence that I'm not going to read it right away, because I'm not going to get it very quickly. So obviously, I could wait.

3. Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayar Hamann: This is one of my more compulsive purchases, because I don't even want to read it that badly.  I read something about it, thought it sounded interesting and then the next time I saw it at the bookstore, I bought it.

2. Great House by Nicole Krauss: My brother-in-law got us a Barnes and Noble giftcard for Christmas, and I went in with a list from my wishlist, and this was the only book on it that they had on the shelves.  Apparently the last minute Christmas shoppers ravaged the selection.

1. The Instructions by Adam Levin: I had such bad book lust for this one, it isn't funny.  I drooled over it as the Powell's Indie-spensible selection and added a subscription to my cart a bunch of times and then talked myself out of it.  Then I saw it at Book Soup in L.A. and realized that it was the size of a suitcase and  my husband thought it would be absurd to by a book of that size on vacation (come on, we drove).  I conceded and then bought it online as soon as we got home.  It is taking up a lot of space now on the shelf. 

If all these books were hanging around your house, which would you read first?