Books With Ordinal Numbers in the Titles

Hello! This week for Top Ten Tuesday we’re talking about books with ordinal numbers (you know, those numbers that end in -th and -nd) in the titles. Originally, I thought I’d have a really difficult time finding books like that (that I’ve read or have on my TBR, at least) because I don’t read many of those titles (or so I thought). I was going to expand my list to include books that indicate its place in a line (because isn’t that what ordinal numbers do?); books with words like last, best, worst, etc.. But then I discovered that I actually did read books with ordinal numbers in them. Just not that many. And many of those are nonfiction.

So today’s list will include a lot of books with centuries in the titles. A few are repeats from last week. I’m putting them in order of the number (they are ordinal numbers after all, so it makes sense).

1. The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers—Elizabeth Cobbs. These were on last week’s list, but they probably deserve to be on this week’s list as well, because it’s a darn shame that so many people forgot about them. In case you missed my list last week, this book is about the American ladies who were enlisted into the Army during World War I—not as nurses, but as telephone operators. The military discovered that guys just weren’t very good at operating phone lines, and there was a group of ladies who had plenty of experience with this (because back in the day they were operated by hand—some long distance lines were connected by hand even into the 1970s!). Anyway, when they got back, they were forgotten, and weren’t even allowed to be called veterans.

Eventually, after most of them died, they were recognized by the military, but this is an important book because we don’t want it to happen again. Although, as I write this, the US president evidently disrespected the US women’s hockey team, so I guess this kind of thing isn’t ancient history after all?

2. First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human—Jeremy Desilva. I don’t remember putting this on my TBR but it does sound pretty interesting. Perhaps I should add some of these books I’m discovering to my TBR lottery. Anyway, Our ability to walk on two legs is fairly unique in the natural world, and Desilva has an interesting theory that it has changed our history. I’m sure the ability to walk would affect the way that we can interact with the world.

3. The Second Sleep—Robert Harris. I haven’t read this book, but I discovered it while going through my TBR on Goodreads. It’s amazing how many books are on there that I’ve forgotten about. Anyway, this book takes place in 1468. Reading a couple of reviews of the book, it looks like there might have been a time travel aspect going on? How would someone from medieval times perceive the objects we use today? It seems interesting.

4. The Second Generation—Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. The first Christmas after I met my future husband, he gave me a book: Dragons of Autumn Twilight by these authors. He gave me a book… so I had to marry him, right? Anyway, we named our kids after characters from these books, and I have a signed copy of an anniversary edition of the original trilogy from this universe. The Second Generation is about the children of the main characters in the original trilogy. The magic system completely changed at around this point in the universe and it wasn’t as fun as before. Recently, they reversed that with some books, although I haven’t read those yet.

5. The Fourth Wing—Rebecca Yarros. This is an incredibly popular book that I’ll probably see on a lot of lists this week. It was just meh for me, and I don’t plan on continuing the series. But she’s making a killing on this book and its sequels, so congrats to her.

6. The Fourth Turning is Here—Neil Howe. This is probably my favorite book on this list this week, and I’m sad that his co-author for the original book on this topic, William Strauss, is no longer with us. This book, and The Fourth Turning before it, hypothesizes that once in a long lifetime, history ends up throwing us a crisis. World War I and II in the early 20th century, The US Civil War (and the revolutions of 1848), the American War for Independence, etc. You can go even further back.

Every generation responds to the crisis that the inevitably live through in a different way. For example, if we were to go to war today, the Silent Generation would be the only ones with memories of the previous crisis, the Boomers would have wisdom (and they currently have most of the people in government, at least in the US), Gen X and to some degree, Millennials, would be the higher ranking people on the battlefield and would provide some wisdom, Gen Z would do most of the fighting, and Gens Alpha and Beta would see the crisis through the eyes of a child, just as the Silent Generation did when they were children. Usually the crises happen about 80 years apart, but it’s been a little longer for this one. I find this book, and the one before it, fascinating.

7. The 5th Wave—Rick Yancey. I loved this book—the first book. It was pretty fun, with the aliens attacking, everybody dying (is it a surprise that I like books about the Black Death too?), and the world upending. Plus the boy the main character has a crush on has also survived.

The second and third books were a little disappointing. They were shorter, the boy the main character was in love with turned out to be a nice guy, but they didn’t develop anything more than a friendship, and they fought the aliens. They were okay, but didn’t quite meet the expectations set in the first book.

8. The Fifth Assassin—Brad Meltzer. I really like Brad Meltzer’s books. Although I don’t read a lot of thrillers, his books are usually pretty good if I want to read something in this category. I don’t remember a lot about this particular book, but it’s about the different presidential assassins and there’s another one that’s about to act. I like how his books often have some history worked in. If you read my post from last week, you’ll see I like history.

9. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century—Barbara W. Tuchman. This was an interesting book that primarily follows one family through the fourteenth century. The fourteenth century was one that brought us the Black Death (probably one of the reasons why I find this century so interesting) and the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, which the family Tuchman followed fought in. She makes the event accessible, even for people who don’t know a lot specifically about this time period.

10. The Oxford History of the Twentieth Century—Michael Eliot Howard (editor). I haven’t read this book, although I wanted to read it shortly after it came out, and recently ordered a used (like new) copy off Amazon. I think centuries from now, if humanity is still around, the twentieth century will be one that a lot of people find interesting. There was so much there. Two word wars (although a lot of people think of it as one long war, because one kind of led to the other), a giant depression, leaps in technology, and civil upheaval all over the world. I lived through part of the twentieth century, although I have now lived longer in our current millennium than the last one, but I do find this to be an interesting time because it is so close to our own.

So there are ten books with ordinal numbers in their titles that I have either read or are on my TBR. There were more of them than I expected, thanks to my interest in history books. What books are on your list this week? Do they tend to predominantly be in a certain genre or two?