I think it would be fun to gather together a very random list. Bonus points if you include a sentence or two on what the book was about.
Mine was Smile by Raina Telgemeier – a graphic novel memoir about the author severely damaging her teeth as a child and needing surgery, braces, headgear, and fake teeth.
by Affectionate_Run7435
41 Comments
Edgedancer by Sanderson.
The Z Word by Lindsay King-Miller – lightweight/funny LGBTQ+ zombie horror.
Death at a Highland Wedding by Kelley Armstrong. Book 4 in her Rip Through Time series following a modern day detective who falls back to Victorian times and in to the body of a housemaid with a sketchy past.
Sound interesting? Start with book 1 A Rip Through Time.
Strip Tees: A Memoir of Millennial Los Angeles
The Tale of Despereaux (read it to my kids)
If I’m going off of adult books that I read for my own pleasure then it would be “Demon of Unrest” by Erik Larson about what lead to the start of the civil war. Very interesting.
Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson
Swan Song, Elin Hilderbrand
A Murder In Hollywood by Casey Sherman
The Briar Club. My favorite book this year! It is about a group of women living in a boarding house during the MCCarthy era. It is so much of what is going on in the US right now.
*The Last Graduate* by Naomi Novik – Book 2 of the Scholomance trilogy. A darker but also sassier and slightly more British version of the whole Harry Potter magic school thing, but with a magic system that actually makes sense and a plot that feels fully fleshed-out across the entire series from the absolute very beginning.
I think Novik did a great job of channeling late-teenage mentalities in a host of different characters, and I truthfully don’t have anything to complain about across the whole series. The only series I’ve read in recent memory that I can confidently say only grew better with each book.
In a year where I’ve read all 14 of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels and a whole host of other sci-fi and litfic classics, it’s funny that my answer to this question is a fringe-YA (meaning it’s like that tweener level between YA and just regular adult) fantasy series.
Dark age by pierce brown
That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf by Kimberly Lemming
the disabled tyrant’s beloved pet fish vol 1, it’s exactly as the title says 😉
“Tortilla Flat” – Steinbeck
Comic tale of a few bums from Monterey CA. Kinda like “If you give a mouse a cookie” for adults
Dune by Frank Herbert (7th I finished this year)
-mostly sand, but also politics and religion
The Hill by Ivica Prtenjača (7th I started and finished this year)
-disillusioned man spends the summer on a hill with a donkey and a dog
Azincourt by Bernard Corwell
Nicholas Hook an archer fights at Agincourt in the 100 years war.
I seem to read a lot of historical fiction
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. A space opera which melds realistic science and technology with alien artefacts and plague.
The aliens are particularly interesting. One race live on a water planet and manifest in an algae form, subsuming and sharing the memories of all who swim amongst them.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
A tea monk wanders around looking for life’s purpose. Loved it. Made me sad I can’t live in their world.
With things so bad right now, I find I am looking for hopeful utopian books.
Night school by Lee child, one of the jack reacher novels
Growing up Bin Laden by Jean Sasson
The Master and Margarita
The seventh book I’ve finished or the seventh book I’ve started and finished this year?
Finished: War Against All Puerto Ricans – non-fiction about the American colonization of PR and their attempts at revolution.
Started and Finished: The Blue Zones – a Nat Geo explorer goes to a number of Blue Zones in the world to see what similarities exist between these regions and cultures across the world and if there is a formula for increasing your longevity.
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Wonderful.
A short stay in hell
From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough
East of Eden, actually! A fantastic book that everyone should read.
Everything I Learned I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin. Memoir about growing up in a Chinese immigrant family, working at the family restaurant, and finding himself in college
I was re-reading Six of Crows, a fantasy heist, so I could read the sequel.
Wallis in Love by Andrew Morton. It’s a biography about Wallis Simpson and relationships throughout her life
Colton Gentry’s Third Act by Jeff Zentner
The majors by w.e.b Griffin
This was the third or fourth book in the brotherhood of war series
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
About a guy that just decided to f* off one day and live in the woods in Maine, zero human contact for 20+ years.
Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon – first book in a series of silly, cheesy, and ultimately weirdly compelling sci-fi romance novels about a group of women who end up stranded on an ice planet, and how they integrate with the native population of tall, jacked, hung blue alien men 😂 There are over 20 books in the main series and I ended up reading them all.
Blood Test by Charles Baxter. It was pretty unhinged.
I haven’t the faintest clue TBH but I am going to randomly select Kindred by Octavia Butler as my #7 because it was probs somewhere around there!
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
A psychotherapist becomes obsessed with his mute patient, who is accused of murdering her husband.
The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary by Hana Videen
Probably The Gunslinger or The Drawing Of The Three, which are the first and second books in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, respectively. Really great, western-future primitive dark fantasy series consisting of eight books. I’m currently wrapping up number four.
Kafka on the Shore
Traitor King by Andrew Lownie
About the Duke and Duchess of Windsor post abdication. Very well researched but boring AF because there was no overall narrative. And there was EXCESSIVE quoting from peoples letters and diaries. Not in an interesting way that adds flavor to an ongoing story, but literally blocks of text cut and pasted directly from those sources.
I almost DNF’d it, but I managed to push through.
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
It’s been a year of great anhedonia in reading. I wish I could share that this was an exception but it was not.