The Bookshelf Tour Tag

About a month ago, the lovely Liz @ Out of Coffee, Out of Mind created a new tag, and she tagged me to do it! This tag is all about the physical books you have on your bookshelf. I think that's a really fun idea! I get so many books from the library that a huge chunk of the books I talk about aren't books that I actually own.

A short but powerful book - Night by Elie Wiesel

This is one of the shortest books that I own, and also definitely one of the most powerful. I get that the subject matter of concentration camps during the Holocaust makes a lot of books powerful in and of itself, but this book is just put together so well and faces the facts so bluntly that it's even more powerful.

A good, long book - Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray

I chose this book because it's a long book that feels long. It's a tall hardcover that's over 600 pages long, so it'll probably take you a while to get through. But it's so worth it. It's so beautifully written, and the length just means that all the different POVs get their chance to shine.

Favorite classic (on your shelf) - Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

I've had some complicated feelings about Pride and Prejudice lately, which started when I was required to read it for school - you can read my post about that here. But as difficult as it was for me to get through that reread, I adore this book. It's so witty and fun, and it's so easy to get lost in. (Side note: I wish I had an edition as pretty as the one I'm showing here. Mine's really rather plain.)

A relatively obscure book - The Unknowns by Benedict Carey

I think I got this book when I was in elementary school. This will show you how much of a nerd I was (and probably still am): it's a book about solving a disappearing-people case using math. The first clue involves using the Pythagorean Theorem to figure out a location. I'm not even kidding. I thoroughly enjoyed this book when I first read it, but I haven't found anyone else who's even heard of this book, and it has just over 200 Goodreads ratings.

An underrated book - A Madness So Discreet by Mindy McGinnis

I read this last October, pretty quickly after it came out. I knew that I'd enjoy it - it's dark historical fiction set in an insane asylum with no main romantic plot. But I didn't know how much I'd love it. I haven't been able to stop thinking about this book and I've been aggressively recommending it to a lot of people. It has fewer than 3,000 Goodreads ratings, and the average is only 3.77 stars! I think it deserves a lot more love.

An overrated book - A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin

This book took me years to read. I loved the first three books in this series, really liked the fourth one, and then this one was just...not as good. At all. The first 500 pages were really repetitive and boring (hence the spending literal years reading it), the next 300 or so were pretty good, and then the last 400-ish were just weird. I get that this series is popular, so I'm not surprised that this book has over 360,000 Goodreads ratings, but an average rating of 4.29? Really?

Most reread book - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling

I've actually read all of the Harry Potter books three times each, but I'm picking Prisoner of Azkaban as my most reread because I reread parts of it a lot. It's my favorite Harry Potter book, and I think I'm going to have to do another complete reread soon.

Of all the books you own, how many have you not read?

Somewhere around 80. But most of those are nonfiction or classics, which I don't read nearly as quickly. I don't feel any pressure to get those off of my TBR any time soon. 

A book you haven't read - The Serpent's Shadow by Rick Riordan

I read the first two books in the Kane Chronicles as they came out, but more than 5 years later, I still haven't read book 3. I can barely believe it myself. But I'm going to read it this summer, I promise!

A short story collection - A Tyranny of Petticoats by Jessica Spotswood

I think this is the only short story collection I own, other than some of the Sherlock Holmes books. I liked this overall, but my favorites were Pearls, Bonnie and Clyde, and El Destinos.

A nonfiction book - Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris

Here's another book that I'm going to get to this summer! This is part two of a giant three-volume Theodore Roosevelt biography, and I'm hoping to marathon all three this summer.

A book (physical copy, not the story itself) that has an interesting story behind it - A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

I LOVE this question, but I'm not sure I can do it justice. I don't really have any interesting stories behind the books I have, so I just picked this one because the circumstances were unusual. When I was 8, my grandpa had a stroke. The plan was that my dad was the only one going across the country to check on him, but then when I got out of school that day, we were all going. I only had time to pack clothes, and I didn't get to bring any books with me. So as soon as we established that my grandpa was in a stable condition, my mom took me to the bookstore and let me pick out a few books. This is one of the ones I chose - I didn't figure out that it was the second book in the Tiffany Aching series until I tried to read it, and I didn't know about the whole Discworld series until years later!

I'm going to tag... Sky @ Sky's Reading Corner, Avery @ The Pages are Bookining, and you! If you want to. Tell us about your bookshelves!

What are the most interesting books on your bookshelf? Which books do you think are the most overrated/underrated? Tell me in the comments!