Hannah Sunderland’s Bookshelf Tour

My bookshelves have always been a sacred space and I’m pretty sure that I spend more time reorganising them to look pretty than I do actually reading the books on there.

I do struggle to read when I’m writing, as my own stories tend to take up too much room inside my brain and leave little space for anyone else’s and as I’m writing pretty much all the time, it takes me a lot longer to get through books than I’d like.

But when I do manage to get a moment to read, my go-to genre is always fantasy. It shocks a lot of people that I don’t read much of the genre I write in and I wish I could give you a reason for that. I do enjoy a good love story but I think the simple answer is that when it comes to reading, faeries and dragons will always seem to lure me in a little easier.

I tried to narrow my list of favourite books down to just one, but in the end, I couldn’t go any lower than three.

My favourite book of all time is Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones. I read this book over the course of a hospital stay a few years ago and it was so blissfully distracting that I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. My favourite film, which won’t come as a shock to anyone who’s read my debut novel Very Nearly Normal, is Labyrinth and Wintersong has a very similar storyline. The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw is another of my favourites as this is a book that got me back into reading after a couple of years of reading nothing at all. This is one of those books where you remember exactly how you felt while reading it and exactly where you were. Reading this book was a special experience and so this one had to make the top three. And my final fave is Where the Heart is by Billie Letts. This is the story of a pregnant teen who gets abandoned by her boyfriend at a Walmart in Oklahoma and she ends up living in the store. If that’s not a hook to drag you in then I don’t know what is.

My current read is The Simple Wild by K.A. Tucker. This was a simple case of Instagram made me buy it. I’m a sucker for a dramatic, mountainous setting. My personal opinion is that too many books (and films) focus too much on London and New York. There are so many beautiful settings in the world to choose from and so when a book has a range of interesting places like The Simple Wild does, including Canada and Alaska, it draws me right in. I’m enjoying it very much at the moment and I can’t stop imagining Calla as Alexis from Schitts Creek, which is only adding to my enjoyment. I’m also listening to The Institute by Stephen King on audiobook, which I am loving every second of. It’s my first King book, but I have been a fan of all the adaptations of his work.

I’m about halfway through (it’s a bit of a long one) but I feel like things are going to get very exciting pretty soon.

I know I’m not alone when I say that my To Be Read list is getting a little out of hand. I read an Instagram post recently that said that buying books and reading books are two entirely different hobbies and I couldn’t agree more. The truth is that there are far too many great books out there and my lifetime isn’t long enough to get through them all. This is why I don’t usually reread books as I always think it’s a wasted slot for a new book that I’ll miss out on otherwise.

The next book I plan to read changes from day to day, but at the moment, my next one is The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett.

His Kingsbridge novels are my all-time favourite book series. I think that Pillars of the Earth is the most finely crafted storyline I’ve ever read and the same goes for the others in the series. The Evening and the Morning is a prequel to the rest, set in Viking England and I’m super excited to get stuck into that one.

Others that I’m excited to read are The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by W.E. Schwab and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix.

I’m a sucker for a vampire from Buffy to Twilight to The Vampire Diaries, so I’m very excited to sink my teeth into this one (pun intended).