I’ve read 65 books so far this year. Of these, StoryGraph characterizes my reading as predominantly “emotional”, then “reflective”, “funny”, “mysterious”, “light-hearted”, and “informative”. My most frequent categories of books are romance, historical, contemporary, memoir, and literary (as categorized by StoryGraph, which isn’t necessarily the way I’d categorize each book). I’ve read more nonfiction than…
This week’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is our favorite books of 2021. Here is a list of my favorite books this year, broken down into six categories. These are books I read this year regardless of when they were published (though quite a few were published this year): Contemporary fiction:…
I hope you had a very happy Christmas (if you celebrate it) and a safe and healthy holiday. In this post I’m talking about the best new authors I read this year. If I’ve calculated correctly, I read 58 books in 2021 by authors that were new to me. That’s out of 111 books, so…
‘Tis the season for “best books of year” lists. One of my favorites is the New York Times 100 Notable Books, which I prefer because getting a list of 100 books is much better than trying to distill the best reading of the year down to a handful of books. In fact I didn’t really care for…
For this post I picked out some of my favorite audiobooks from this year so far (these books weren’t necessarily published this year). They range from very serious to just for fun – I think audiobooks work best for really emotional topics, and are often perfect for lighter, atmospheric books like romances, horror, and mystery. I…
This week, we’re sharing our favorite books of 2020 for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl). I found it hard this year to identify ten favorite books, maybe because I read more than usual or because I read a wider range of books. Or maybe just because it’s 2020. I found myself struggling…
2020 was a good year for audiobooks, since mostly what I did was take long walks every day to get out of the house. Audiobooks were also a great distraction inside the house, perfect for things like baking and laundry (things I also did a lot of in 2020). Of the 120 books I’ve read…
These lists seem to come out earlier every year, but I guess that way people can add them to their wish lists and give them as gifts. And this year is a better time than ever to 1) support your local bookstore and 2) hunker down and read. You can find the New York Times…
This post is about some of my favorite new-to-me authors in 2020 (so far). I focused more on fiction than nonfiction, with a couple of exceptions. I’ve read some excellent nonfiction this year, like Rachel Louise Snyder’s No Visible Bruises and Garrett Graf’s The Only Plane in the Sky, but here I’ve chosen books that…
We’re a quarter of the way into the year — does anyone else feel like March has gone on forever? I’ve been having trouble coming up with meaningful things to write about, so I thought I’d share some of my favorite books so far. It seems like some of you have a lot more reading…
Happy New Year! The topic for today’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, is the best books read in 2019. I’ve broken mine down by a few categories, in no particular order. Fiction: Ghost Wall by Sarah Mosse Asking for It by Louise O’Neill Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout The Great Believers…
As a lead-up to my post on my favorite books of the year (coming Tuesday), I thought I’d write about the books I read this year that can be seen most often on this year’s best-of book lists. Many of these I found really good but a few were disappointing, and my own best-of-2019 list…
The Book Stop 