It’s been a while since I did Top Ten Tuesday, now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. But seeing others’ posts about their top reading of the first half of the year made me want to join in. Here are my picks:

• The Sixth Extinction explored our environmental disaster-in-process, scary but strangely heartening in that it reminded me of our human power for good as well as evil.
• The Art of Waging Peace gave some useful tools for activating the good part.
• The Ghost of Thomas Kempe was a beautifully written, deceptively simple child’s-eye meditation on time, memory, loss, and growing up.
• Journey to the River Sea was another lovely children’s book, an adventure story set in the Amazon region.
• The Maze at Windermere was a brilliant time-switching novel from one of my favorite college professors.
• City of Gold took Old Testament stories and brought them to life by vividly imagining their narrators and time periods.
• Animals in Translation gave fascinating insights into the brains of animals and humans, from the viewpoint of an autistic person.
• The Shuttle was a fun romantic tale with an empowering message.
• Invisible Man presented a powerful picture of racial injustice, brought to mythical proportions.
• The Kingdom Within brought together a survey of Jesus’s teachings on “the kingdom” with the insights of depth psychology.

What have you loved so far this year?

I haven’t been keeping up with Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, but when I saw some lists on other blogs I could not resist this topic!

Here are some of my outstanding reads so far this year:

• The Winged Girl of Knossos
• The Book of Joy
• May Cause Love
• Bronze and Sunflower
• My Cousin Rachel
• Dark Money
• Scaramouche
• The Unwinding
• Troy Chimneys
• The Bear and the Nightingale

What’s on your list?

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic invites us to identify our favorite villains. Bad they may be, but one has to admit that without them to cause trouble, most stories would not even begin — so we need to be grateful for them too.

The kind of villain I prefer, though, is not the pitch-black Dark Lord type of unrelenting evil, which is one-sided and ultimately dull. I much prefer it when seeming villains transform into something more complex, or when we’re invited to see the other side of their story, or even when one-sided goodness turns bad. Here are some of my favorites — please share yours!

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Wizard Howl in Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
Howl has a horrible reputation in the fairy-tale village of Market Chipping, along with his wicked-looking fire demon, but it turns out that they themselves are really the ones in danger.

The Lady in Green in The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope
In this Elizabethan version of the Tam Lin legend, the Lady is the leader of the uncanny folk under the hill, and earns a grudging respect from those who fall into her hands.

Orual in Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
The jealous sister from the myth of Cupid and Psyche gets to tell her own side of the story, and thus see herself truly — not an easy task for any mortal.

Lord Vetinari in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett
Vetinari proves that it is possible to be so bad you’re good, with his twistedly effective rule of the city of Ankh-Morporkh.

Bastian Balthasar Bux in The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
And Bastian proves that it’s possible to be so good you’re bad, as his well-intentioned reign over the land of Fantastica almost ends in disaster.

Medraut in The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein
That’s Mordred to you, the evil bastard who brought down King Arthur. In a refreshingly original take on the much-retold legend, Wein makes us see him in a different light.

The Queen of Attolia in the Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner
Another ruler who has to make some very hard choices — and choosing to love can be the most difficult of all.

Pa Twite in the Wolves Chronicles by Joan Aiken
Pa is a puzzle: how can he do such dreadful things, even to his own children, and yet make such beautiful music? Aiken gives a few hints, but sadly puts an abrupt end to his career before we can really understand him.

M. Coque de Noir in The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
The alchemical marriage of sun and moon, gold and silver, brings redemption even to the wicked smugglers and their leader in this enchanting tale.

The Evil Wizard Smallbone in the book by Delia Sherman
This one is brand new, and already a favorite. Who wants to move to Maine and live in a magical bookshop? Me! A (possibly) evil wizard lurking around and turning people into spiders and rats would merely be an occupational hazard.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme from The Broke and the Bookish is “Back to School,” so I’ve come up with a list of ten of my favorite books that are set in schools, both realistic and fantastical.

This list focuses on children’s and YA novels; I could do a whole different list of books set in colleges and universities, or of adult memoirs of childhood, and maybe I will soon.

With those exclusions in mind, here are my picks. What would yours be?

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Maida’s Little School by Inez Haynes Irwin

There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom by Louis Sachar

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones

Sabriel by Garth Nix

Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffrey

Heaven To Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace

Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery