no man is an island

I've read five books since my last post, not quite as many as I wanted but more than I expected given how socially busy the end of the year has been (and given I reread two of my own books prepping for an edit I started at midnight last night and I don't count my own books to my total). I'll do quick reviews of those, and then I'll do my top ten and reading statistics for the year!

( Last five books of the year! )


And now the top ten! I feel like I said much the same last year (I did, I just checked), but while there were a good amount of books I liked this year, there were not a ton that I loved. I'd say the first six on this list were solid, would have made the top ten in most reading years that weren't exceptional, and the last four were ones I liked plenty but were kind of "the best of the rest."

• Cinder House by Freya Marske
• The West Passage by Jared Pechacek
• The Touchstone Series by Andrea K. Höst
• Murder By Memory by Olivia Waite
• Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
• Half-Witch by John Schoffstall
• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
• The Orb of Cairado by Katherine Addison
• Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
• The Marquis Who Mustn't by Courtney Milan

Interesting to me how many of those were novellas! Plus the one play, which is rather like a novella, I think, the point is "lots of short things in my top ten."

Statistics! I read 135 books this year, 13 more than last year, which isn't bad given I have still been reading rather ridiculous amounts of firefighters fic on the AO3. Of those books:

• 22 were rereads (more on that in a moment)
• 9 were nonfiction
• 1 was a graphic novel
• 85 were SFF (though 3 are better termed horror)
• 56 were romances or romance-focused
• Either 2 or 5 were mysteries depending on whether you count Addison's Thara Celehar books as mysteries or not
• 32 were for younger readers

I met a few reading goals this year! I read all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, which was one of my major goals, and I got a blackout on my town library's book bingo card (only one bingo on another library's harder book bingo, though I didn't focus much on that one since I'm not eligible for the prizes). I also wanted this to be a year of reading epistolary fiction, and, well ... I had 22 rereads, and a lot of that was epistolary fiction. Overall, I just did a quick count, and I read 11 books I would term epistolary (one more featured some letters but was primarily narrative, and another contained lots of non-fictional letters but didn't get the correspondence vibe right), and I think four of them were new? I keep looking for lists of proper epistolary books and not finding what I want, and I'm not sure if that's because people are bad at writing lists or because there aren't as many epitolary books as I want there to be.

I'm not sure of my reading goals for this year! I think I only have two preorders on my list, which is pretty dire, and I do have a bunch of books on my shelves right now that I'm excited about, but I keep getting my hopes up and having them dashed, so I am really just going to hope that this year has some books that really sweep me away.