It’s Tuesday and I’ve been treating you well today, because I take part in a new-to-me meme and I will post a book review later today. This new-to-me meme I’m participating in is Top 5 Tuesday. Yes, I already take part in Top Ten Tuesday for a while, but now it was time to try something new. This will be tough since both memes have interesting topicS

Top 5 Tuesday is created by Shanah @ Bionic Book Worm and is now hosted by Meeghan @ Meeghan Reads. Each Tuesday, participants share 5 books that fit the assigned topic for the week. There’s a Link-Up where participants share their link so others could visit and react!

This week’s topic is quite tough, because there are so many literary awards that I don’t know many of them. In my country, we have several literary awards, but those are mostly for national books. And I don’t like to read those, I read original Dutch books every now and then but it’s a rarity. I’m more of an international and mainstream reader, so many awards don’t sound appealing to me. Especially not the Pulitzer or something literary like that. However, I found several books that both won an award and have been read by me.

1. Jade City by Fonda Lee – This book has both won and been nominated for several awards. At first, I didn’t like it at all, I had to DNF it twice. However, we got somewhere this year, as I finished it and even finished the entire series now.
2. The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang – Another fantasy that has both won and been nominated for many awards. I also had trouble with this one, I needed two attempts to finally finish this book and the entire series.
3. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong – Another book that won several awards. I started this one in Dutch, but the narration was so dull I just couldn’t be bothered. I switched to English and that was a wise decision. I flew through this book in a breeze.
4. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara – This book is so incredibly intimidating! It also has a slow start, I was on the verge of DNF’ing it multiple times. However, this turnt out to be so so good. Please beware the trigger warnings before picking this up.
5. The Eighth Life (For Brilka) by Nino Haratischwili – This book has been published in Germany and the netherlands way before there was an English translation. To me, it seems that this book didn’t do so well on the English speaking market, at least not as well as on the Dutch. I’m not sure about Germany though. This book is around 1,000 pages long, but I finished it within a week. I was intrigued byit from nearly start to finish. The start is a bit slow so I had to push through for a bit.

I read more award-winning books than I initially thought! Have you read any of these?