Top Ten Tuesday - Top Ten Settings

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by the ladies at The Broke and the Bookish.  This week's list theme is favorite settings.  This one was a pretty easy one for me because I'm all about a good setting...I need to feel a story...and nothing gets me involved than being able to imagine being there with the characters.  Here are my 10 favorites this week:




1.  Mitford - When I was first introduced to Jan Karon's Mitford series it was the setting that captured me immediately...I actually fell more in love with Mitford itself rather than any one character in the series.  A small, quaint, mostly quiet, eccentric little town...with each new edition to the story, I didn't just read the words; I was there.

2.  Natchez, MS as portrayed in Greg Isles Turning Angel - My entire life I've lived only a few hours from Natchez, but I didn't really appreciate what the state of my birth had to offer until I left it and was able to return.  Natchez is a place where history meets progress...new technology within an antique desk if you will.  The Turning Angel monument actually exists and during the cemetery scenes in the novel, I felt like I was standing right there.

3.  Hogwarts dining hall - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - The boarding school education idea is hard for me to "get."..I can't imagine sending my children off to school at the beginning of a semester and only seeing them a few months later.  I realize this is the way it's done in other countries....it's just different from what I know.  The dining hall scenes are my absolute favorites though where all the children and the professors are gathered together for meals...making it seem more like a great big giant family hall rather than a "cafeteria."  My favorite favorites are the holiday scenes, with Halloween in the top spot.

4.  Tuscanny, Italy - Under the Tuscan Sun - How anyone could have read this uber descriptive book and then watched the follow-up movie and still not want to travel to Tuscanny is beyond me.  I cannot even image the serenity of waking up early in the morning and drinking my coffee on the porch of this beautiful farmhouse in Tuscanny and watching the sun rise or set in the evenings.  And, the entire notion of re-inventing myself within completely different, new and magical surroundings...ahhhh

5.  Bon Temps - Sookie Stackhouse series - Bon Temps is not home to me but it's close.  The little country town where everybody knows everybody and of course everybody's business is the community culture with which I am most accustomed.  I forgot my checkbook once at the grocery store and the manager told me to just take my groceries on home and bring him a check the next day...that's how close knit I'm talking about. 

6.  Eat Pray Love - India - The idea of spending a few months in a spiritual place where you concentrate on your own self and peace, no talking, no interruptions, only reading and meditating.  Are you kidding me??? Can I go right now?? Today?? This minute??

7. Guernsey Island - a part of history of which I was completely oblivious is all I need as an impetus for even more reading.  Once I read  Shaffer's book, I wanted to know everything there was to find out about the past of Guernsey Island.  I would love to go there and just explore...I enjoy historical places and imagining what people years ago did on the very spaces I stand.  That's just plain cool.

8.  Chincoteague Island - I've never owned a horse; the closest I've ever come was when my family and I babysat two of our friends' horses.  What a responsibility that was.  An awing responsibility no doubt, but a responsibility.  Horses are incredible creatures...a lot bigger and stronger than one thinks...I always felt a little sorry for them though.  All these two horses had was each other, a small barn and the same pasture to run around in all day everyday.  (Yes, I'm one of those people who can't even enjoy the zoo because I worry about the animals :/ and yes, I bawled my eyes out at the end of Black Beauty :(
But...
as a young girl I loved reading Marguerite Henry's stories about the horses who ran free on Chincoteague Island in Virgina...and I WILL visit there someday!

9. Washington State - Twilight

I've never really wanted to visit Washington...I'm a Grey's Anatomy fan and I don't even really want to visit Seattle...because I'll just want to nap through the rain :(  But, to read about the natural beauty that is hidden in this area of the world...so bare and unmolested by tourists (well, maybe not now) and the Native American legends and traditions that are honored there makes me want to check it out.  Imagine a place where there is city, deep forests, mountainous areas and beaches all together...I love nature, don't you?

10. A Painted House by John Grisham -

This Grisham is my favorite...and it has nothing to do with a courtroom; it has to do with a rural community, dirt floors, barefoot kids and a cotton field.  This one reminds me of home but more because of stories I've heard my parents and grandparents tell rather than my own childhood.  Generations of my family worked by the sweat of their brow and did what they could every single day just to get by.  Kids worked and pitched in as soon as they were old enough.  The yearly calendar revolved around the crop seasons...when the crop came in that was all that mattered...sunup to sundown the crop was reaped.  The years when there was no crop because of drought, or some bug infestation were hungry years...everybody pitched in to help everybody as much as they possibly could...just to survive.  Sometimes I wonder...