Top 10 Tuesday is a long running bookish link up which offers a weekly prompt for book bloggers and bloggers who simply love books. I’m excited to participate in today’s theme: My 10 Most Recent Reads.

Lately, my book choices have been dictated by two things: my desire to cull my unread bookshelves (both physical and digital) and my participation in The Book Voyage: Read Around the World reading challenge hosted by The Book Girls’ Guide. To turbocharge the culling process, I’ve been reading more than one book for each category of the challenge. This is the reason many of the books in my list below will seem related. Books are listed in order of completion along with their setting and my emotionally driven and very subjective star ratings.

The Last 10 Books I’ve Read

1. Disappearing Earth by Julia Philips. Kamchatka Penninsula (Russia) for the Eastern Europe category. 4 stars
2. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. Chechnya for Eastern Europe category. 4 stars
3. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. Ancient Troy (Turkey) for Middle East category. 5 stars
4. Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. East Prussia for Eastern Europe category. 4 stars
5. Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys. Lithuania and Russia for the Eastern Europe category. 4.25 stars
6. If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha. South Korea for Northern Asia category. 3.5 stars
7. Monsoon Mansion by Cinelle Barnes. The Philippines for Southern Asia category. 3.5 stars
8. Pavilion of Women by Pearl S. Buck. China for Northern Asia category. 3.75 stars
9. The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X. R. Pan. Taiwan for Northern Asia category. 4 stars
10. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Korea and Japan for Northern Asia category. 4.25 stars

My recent reads have been intense, dishing out large doses of hardship, tragedy and trauma. But, I’m also getting a crash course in world geography, history and culture. I am constantly searching the Internet for clarification about dates, places, foreign words, native/traditional costumes and historical context. The reading challenge has also proved beneficial in helping me reduce the number of unread books cluttering up my life. Of the ten books listed above, eight had been wallowing in book purgatory for years.

Educating myself, decluttering my shelves and completing categories for the Book Voyage reading challenge – now that’s a winning combination.

What have you been reading lately?