Thursday, December 31, 2020

Year In Review

2020, man, right? Whoa boy. 

 One of my goals coming back here is selfish: I like getting prepub books from Netgalley and they like when you review the books that they give you. So I've got a list of books that I got advance copies of--many from several years ago--that I did read and form opinions on. I'd like to post those opinions to get partial credit, even if it's way overdue.

I'd also like to start blogging what I'm in the middle of again, because within a few hours of finishing a book it becomes hard to talk about. I need to be right in the guts of it to really do that; I want to try it.

But let's take a moment to talk about 2020 as a reading year! I can't pick apart this year from other years, but I can tell you that I'm reading a lot more romance than I used to, that I have library books that are overdue by MONTHS, and that my book count would be significantly higher if I counted book-length works of fanfiction, but I'm far too reliant on Goodreads to pull that off.

I look back at the list of books I read and I literally can't believe this was all this year. This was the year I started reading The Innkeeper Chronicles? But...but that was in the Before Times! It was just in January? I am relying entirely on Goodreads for these records; if it tells me that I read The Rules and gave it five stars, I'm going to have to believe it, I guess.

Some exciting bests this year! The aforementioned Innkeeper books, which Sarah K. has been pushing at me for years and I resisted because the covers are pretty darned cheesy. But then my book club friends got into it and I gave it a try and now I am desperately waiting for Ilona Andrews to write the next book about Maud and I have a whole new breed of warlike spacefaring vampires to be weirdly fascinated by.

The Rules for Vanishing was one of the scariest books I've ever read; it is like someone took Tim Burton and stripped all the candyfloss and gave the script to, I don't know, Ridley Scott maybe to film. 

I already posted about Catfishing on Catnet and am absolutely chuffed to bits (as my son says in imitation of his favorite YouTubers) to have an ARC for the next one, which you'll hear about as soon as I read it. 

No real "worst" books of the year; a few 2-star outings, but none that I had high hopes for. Nothing unfinished and nothing hate-read, which is really for the best.

Oh, my book club is new this year! Or at least from the very end of last year. It's really quite the best. It was all over Zoom from the get-go, because the three of us live in different states, but we vacation together most summers (sigh) and we have nicely dovetailing taste in books. It's the first book club that so rarely feels like a chore, because we only pick books we're all excited to read, and our to-read lists have enough overlap that we'll never get through it all. 

And we chat about what else we're reading, which is usually things we all want to read, too. Sometimes we throw out two books just because we are all excited about them. It's just great to talk to L and E every two or three weeks. 

So 2020 was rough, but it was also the year of the book fairy and Camp Book Club, and the year I read three Penric & Desdemona novellas, reread the whole Murderbot series, and discovered the Innkeeper Chronicles. Whatever else is going on in the world, book-wise I can't complain.

Happy new year, everyone.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

YES! So good.

It was not a bad reading year, all things considered. I wish there was a Bujold-like series out there I hadn't yet discovered though.

Very different but highly recommend the Lumatere trilogy.

Sarah K!

EMM said...

Yay for Camp Book Club! Someday there will be vacations again! <3