Top Ten Tuesday: Winners I Haven't Read

Being the second day in the month, that means it's time for another question from Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by the Broke and the Bookish.

Today's question is: Top Ten Books I Can't Believe I Haven't/Want To Read From X Genre

Well, seeing as my "to be read" pile is thousands of books long, and I will probably never ever finish them all before I die, I wasn't sure how I wanted to spin this one at first.  But then I remembered the ALA awards for children's an YA lit came out this week (the Printz, Morris, Newbery, Caldecott, etc.).  So in honor of that, I decided to look up past winners/honorable mentions from the past few years and list the top ten books I can't believe I haven't read yet from those awards.  These are books that I have intended to read before knowing they won awards, not because they were winners. 

So here they are in no particular order:

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale (Newbery Honor, 2006) - With as much as I absolutely love Shannon Hale, I have no idea why I haven't picked this one up yet.  I know pretty much I would love it, and I even own Book 2 as well, but I have never read either of them yet.

A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly (Printz Honor, 2004) - I've read one other book by Jennifer Donnelly and didn't really like it at all, which is why it's slightly surprising that the premise of this one has always appealed to me so much.

Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl (Morris Finalist, 2010) - Lots of hype about these books.  Still have never picked them up, even though they do sound interesting to me.

A Curse Dark As Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce (Morris Winner, 2009) - This one is a fairy tale retelling I've had on my to-read list for ages.  I blame my ever expanding bookshelves for hiding it away from me in the back as the reason I've never read it.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson (Morris Finalist, 2012) - This book interested me from the very moment that I heard about it.  I think I haven't picked it up yet because I haven't gotten my hands on the third one yet, and I have this weird thing about not starting a series until I have several of the books in case there are cliffhangers.

Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson (Newbery Honor, 2007) - I've gone back and forth on this book for many years now.  I keep checking it out from the library and never actually getting around to reading it before I have to return it.

Seraphina by Rachel Hartman (Morris Winner, 2013) - Another book I've wanted to read since before it came out and I read what it was about.  Usually the books I like never get shortlisted for awards, so I was surprised that it won both this and the Cybils award in 2013 for its category. 

Belle Epoque by Elizabeth Ross (Morris Finalist, 2014) - One of the only books from this year's awards that I feel a need to read right away. 

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (Newbery Winner, 2009) - This is the one book I'm a bit torn about on this list, because I have actually read a bit of it for when I was on the Fantasy/Sc-Fi committee for the Cybils in 2009.  I actually didn't like it that much, but it's gotten so much hype I figured maybe I need to give it a second chance.

Graceling by Kristin Cashore (Morris Finalist, 2009) - This one I'm not entirely sure if it belongs on this list either.  Mostly because I have read about 1/3 of it right before Christmas, and I LOVED it, I just haven't had the time to finish it yet (and I have temporarily lost my copy...).  But since I haven't read it in its entirety yet, I figured it deserved a place on the list. 


With the list being done, I think there is one interesting trend that popped up while I was going through these books.  I really haven't read most of the winners, and I'm not planning on reading a lot of them.  That's because I find that most of the time the bestseller, popular, and "literary" books that win awards don't really appeal to me.  Some exceptions come to mind (I found Harry Potter worth the hype, for instance) but these are the titles that really stood out to me because I was interested in many of these books before knowing they were on the lists.