This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years”.

I’m not sure if my list is entirely accurate – I track my reading through Goodreads and found it easy enough to find the books I’d marked as finished on or just after 11th August each year, but that doesn’t mean I was necessarily actually reading them on that date. Anyway, I’m sure it’s close enough!

Here are my ten books, beginning with 2025 and going back through time to 2016.

2025 – One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie – I’ve been taking part in the Read Christie challenge every year for the last few years, so it’s not surprising that there are two Agatha Christie novels on this list! The one I read last August is a Poirot mystery in which he investigates the murder of a dentist.

2024 – Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives by Alice Loxton – An entertaining nonfiction book containing biographies of eighteen historical figures, with a focus on how their first eighteen years shaped the rest of their lives.

2023 – Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith – Only a small part of this psychological thriller is actually set on a train, but it’s the scene of a very significant meeting between a pair of strangers who find themselves discussing a plan to commit two perfect murders!

2022 – The Wolf Den by Elodie Harper – Ancient Rome is not usually a favourite setting of mine, but I found this novel about a group of prostitutes working in a Pompeii brothel completely absorbing.

2021 – The Sussex Downs Murder by John Bude – A British Library Crime Classic first published in 1936 and one of many John Bude novels to feature Superintendent William Meredith. I enjoyed it, but found the solution to the mystery too easy to guess – something I don’t say very often!

2020 – Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie – The second Christie novel on my list and my favourite of the two. This time it’s a Miss Marple mystery – the final Miss Marple novel to be published, in fact – and I found it a particularly atmospheric one.

2019 – The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware – our narrator Rowan Caine arrives at Heatherbrae House in Scotland to find that she is just the latest in a long string of nannies in a very short time period. Could the ghostly occurrences taking place in the house be the reason?

2018 – Post of Honour by RF Delderfield – The second book in Delderfield’s A Horseman Riding By trilogy is set during the First World War and explores the impact on the lives of the inhabitants of Devon’s Sorrel Valley.

2017 – Shadow of the Moon by M.M. Kaye – I read this as part of a readalong and loved it, which was no surprise as Kaye’s The Far Pavilions is one of my all-time favourite books. Both books are set in India but are completely separate novels and this one takes place before and during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.

2016 – Exposure by Helen Dunmore – I loved this book which on the surface is a Cold War spy novel but has so many extra layers it becomes something quite different, exploring the consequences of one decision on the lives of a man and his family.

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Have you read any of these?