Happy Friday Junior, and Backlist Blast day, everyone! This Tuesday (January 22), Alan Bradley’s The Golden Tresses of the Dead (the 10th book in his Flavia de Luce series!) came out, and it reminded me that I still haven’t read the first book in the series! I’m really ashamed of this because a) I own a copy of the first book, and b) the main character’s name is Flavia! That never happens! I mean, I wish she was older, but still I’m just so happy to see a character out there with the same name as me (although I think she pronounces her’s differently). Have you read any books form this series?

Backlist Blast is a meme created by Milana from A Couple Reads and myself, and is meant to encourage book bloggers to feature and talk about backlist books (meaning books that were published 6 months ago, or earlier). We all get excited about all of the newest books coming out, but many of us also have a looming TBR of books published 6 months ago or earlier that we still need to read!

The main purpose of this meme is to talk about those books, and remember why we wanted to read them in the first place. Another purpose is for readers to find out about awesome backlist books that they might have never heard of before! For more information on the meme, and for optional themes, please see the info page here.

Title: The Sweetness
at the Bottom of the Pie
Author: Alan Bradley
Type: Fiction
Genre: Mystery, Historical
Publisher: Delacorte Press (Penguin Random House)
Published: April 24, 2009

It is the summer of 1950–and at the once-grand mansion of Buckshaw, young Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison, is intrigued by a series of inexplicable events: A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Then, hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath.

For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.”

With an education in electronic engineering, Alan Bradley worked at numerous radio and television stations in Ontario, and at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in Toronto, before becoming Director of Television Engineering in the media centre at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, where he remained for 25 years before taking early retirement to write in 1994. In July of 2007 he won the Debut Dagger Award of the (British) Crimewriter’s Association for his novel The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, the first of a series featuring eleven year old Flavia de Luce, which has since won the 2009 Agatha Award for Best First Novel,the 2010 Dilys Award,the Spotted Owl Award, and the 2010 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel.

THANKS SO MUCH FOR READING MY BACKLIST BLAST POST! HOW HUGE IS YOUR BACKLIST TBR, AND WHICH BOOK/BOOKS DO YOU THINK YOU’LL GET TO FIRST? WHY? LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!