TTT | Favorite Book Settings

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly topic hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week she provide a topic and you are free to use that topic and/or variations of that topic to make your top ten list. A full list of the weekly themes can be found here.

Today’s topic is about favorite settings, so let’s see if I can keep this to only 10.

1. Boarding Schools: There is something fantastical about boarding schools that just gives me so many great vibes. They can be either magical and wonderous or creepy and terrifying.
2. Victorian Gothic: I’m doing this term as an umbrella term to cover anything in this genre: houses, schools, the forest, the marsh, London, it doesn’t matter. The Victorian Gothic is just mwah, perfection!
3. Libraries: I mean I have to have this on my list somewhere right? Why would I call myself The Nonbinary Librarian if I didn’t love libraries?
4. Haunted Houses: Give me all the good spooky house stories like The Haunting of Hill House or Northanger Abbey any day of the week.
5. Small Southern Towns: The ones that you think should die off but they hang on just because they can. Where football is religion and you’re in the church pew every Sunday, and time just seems to slow down or completely stop. Those kind of small, southern towns.
6. Universities: Okay, I was trying to hold back from my love of dark academia but I just can’t! Can anyone say Gaudy Night?
7. World War I & II: I cry like a baby anytime I read any of these, but I know I need to read them and their stories because they are so important to remember. Plus, the female friendships that were made during this time period where just mwah!
8. Castles: They’re are just so many nooks and darkness and beauty with castles, that I just love them!
9. Space/Ocean: Okay, there’s a reason that I’m pairing these two together and that’s for the feelings I have whenever I read (or see) these two ideas/things/universes. I just am overcome with so much awe, but also beauty and a sense of longing, as well as a sense of how small I am. There’s also the sense of contentment in realizing that while I am so small, I’m still here, living in this moment and in this place. I just have a lot of emotions when it comes to space and the ocean that I love when books are set on a spaceship or boat.
10. Cemeteries (I’d include forests in this as well): The fact that you never know what you’re going to find or come across in either of these places gives me so much tension but also excitement for what’s going to happen.

Happy Reading Darlings!