Top 5 Tuesday: Historical Fiction

Top 5 Tuesday is a meme by the fantastic Bionic Book Worm, and it explores a different bookish topic each week. If you’d like to join in on the fun, check out the Top 5 Tuesday June topics!

I looove historical fiction. I love exploring historical events and time periods and cultures through books, and I love how they expose the different sides of humanity. Which is to say: I like my historical fiction to be heartbreaking and tragic and usually involving a war. So fair warning, nothing on this list is a happy read, but they do have a lot to say about love and perseverance and the human heart during tragic and terrible times of history.

My top books of 2016!

I put the exclamation point in the title because these books make me EXCITED and HAPPY and SAD and ANGRY and THEY’RE JUST GREAT and I LOVE THEM SO MUCH.

According to my Goodreads account, I read 71 books this year, and luckily they were a lot of very, very, very good books. Which was why when I decided to narrow it down to five, I got nervous. All the amazing books I read this year flashed before my eyes. I thought this was going to be an impossible task.

In the end it really didn’t take long to decide, and mostly I think it’s because I went with my gut. If I’d started thinking really deeply about all the books I read this year, I’d get impossibly lost. These were the ones that just…stuck the most, I suppose. Left the strongest afterglow. The ones that nestled the most deeply into my heart and my brain. They’re books that make me immediately react with the thought and feeling of, Yes, I had a fantastic time reading that. 

So, my top 5 books of 2016: