My Year in Reading

As always I’m late to the party but I’ve been reading everyone else’s best of…books and it got me to thinking about my reading habits this past year. Overall I was happy with myself. I read 104 books which is fairly good these days, though admittedly I’m using the term read loosely as some of these were audiobooks. I also read a wider variety of books than usual. Generally I tend to read genre and even then it’s either the year of speculative fiction or the year of mysteries. I don’t even mix it up with a mystery then a fantasy and then horror, nope it’s all of something or nothing. This year though I read more nonfiction and literary fiction

1. Best book I read in 2015 was probably East of Eden which is a bit of a cheat is it was also the last one I read but the story was such a masterpiece I really had to list it. I’d also put Fires in the Dark, Curse of the Wendigo and The Unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry; The Ocean at the End of the Lane or Nightbird in very close competition.

2. The most memorable book I read was Night Film and this is also the book I’d most likely re read

3. The book I was most excited about but was a little disappointed in would be Winter. Don’t get me wrong I still loved it but I think the buildup and waiting was just too much so I built up expectations higher than any story could ever achieve and, in addition, trying to tie up all the characters stories made it a little harder for me to spread my devotion to each character.

4. The best series I started in 2015 Was the Six of Crows and now I have to wait quite a while for the second in the series. It’s all good though as now I’m going back to the first trilogy she wrote and catching up

5. Favourite new author you discovered in 2015? Leigh Bardugo.

6. Book I was dying to read but took forever to come out and then I still didn’t read it? The Promise by Robert Crais. Both my father and I waited and waited and waited… He read ti but it is still on my TBR stack and I’m not sure why I still haven’t gotten around to it.

7. Most memorable character? This would have to be a tie between Cal in East of Eden and Pellinore Warthrop in Curse of the Wendigo.

8. The book which I wish I could get people to read but they won’t The Curse of the Wendigo or any of the books in this series for that matter

9. The character in a series which annoyed me the most but despite this I’ll read the next one anyway Evie Greene from Poison Princess

10. The book that made me the angriest Hands down Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

11. Best nonfiction book Lunch in Paris: a love story

12. Best middle school book I don’t read a lot of these so when I find one I really enjoyed I like to remember and recommend it would be The Thing about Jellyfish

13. The most haunting book I read See How Small. I read that at the beginning of the year and I still remember snippets of this book vividly.

14. Book I started reading in 2015 but got sidetracked and never finished? I am Pilgrim. What I have read of it I really like but it is so long and library books keep coming due so it gets shunted off to the side. Here’s hoping to finish it in 2016.

15. My 2016 Challenges. A friend and I always create our own challenge and we will continue doing that this year as it breaks both out of our reading ruts but I thought I’d also like to do Book Riots Read Harder challenge this year as well. I’d also like to get one book read off my shelves instead of the public library shelve this year. I no longer have TBR stacks but rather TBR bookcases, sigh.

But you'll get so much reading done...

So, I’ve been getting a lot of “staying home isn’t so bad, you’ll get so much reading done…” . On paper as it were, yes this is absolutely true. I love to read, I always bemoan the fact that I don’t have enough time to do it, I’m a captive audience of one, I’ve been imprisoned in my home library and yet… For the first several days I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I read a whole 15 pages in three days. I was too busy worrying about how big the bill was going to be, who was going to pay etc. I was also busy calling my HR department, the disability insurance folks and so on.

Then, after the initial set of worries, I invented others. Yes my husband will tell you I can worry about anything. However things have calmed down a little bit and now I have started reading. Things are still not exactly paradise. I seem to become so easily distracted. I dunno, it could be due to the fact that THE FOOT, alternates between feeling like I have a hundred very small bees in the cast, to having a red hot vice clamped down on my heel. Sadly THE FOOT seems to prefer watching John Stewart on Hulu. It finds itself more easily distracted by the folly that is American politics. So we’ll see if I can actually finish off my fifteen books by the end of August. So far it isn’t looking good. I got five read before the accident and another r one is almost done but that leaves seven to go in two weeks. I’m thinking of forgiving myself though and resetting the clock once THE FOOT behaves itself again.

On the plus side, Miss Scaredy pants “I’m gonna fall again” made it from her walker, to the wheelchair without killing herself. Motivation – fear that my mother in law would see the vast balls of cat hair rolling through the house. German Hausfrau obviously took over from Miss Scaredy pants just long enough to Swiffer the floors from the wheelchair. Huzzah!

Stay tuned – Can German Hausfrau keep it up, will Miss Scaredy pants be vanquished? whoops THE FOOT also just reminded me that it can do sharp dagger needles of pain too!