Wednesday 23 January 2019

A Year in Books 2018

I'm very late even starting to look back at 2018, which is quite apt really. I had a bad reading year, and a slow blogging year in 2018. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy things, I just didn't get all that much done. I did delve (possibly too much) into the fabulous world of Booktube, which made me excited about lots of books and audiobooks but didn't leave me with much time to get them read or listened to. I need to temper that this year. 

Goodreads tells me that I read 55 books and 10,650 pages in 2018, although I suspect this doesn't include the 600ish pages I read of Les Mis as I failed to finish it. That is perhaps my biggest disappointment of 2018- that I didn't finish the Les Mis Chapter A Day Readalong. I will still finish Les Mis some day, I'm still just not sure when. I love it every time I pick it up again, I just don't pick it up all that often at the moment, and certainly not every day. I need to try to get back to that habit again, and get it finished. Then I'm tempted to listen to the audiobook...

Also, many of the books I read were audiobooks. I slipped easily into the arms of audiobooks as my actual reading dwindled. A lovely way to keep "reading". 

I also had a bad year of rating my reads, so this is year in review is made all the trickier. I like to wait until I do my review to rate, but then if I don't do the review, the rating doesn't happen and then it all falls away like grains of sand. So what were the books that I gave 5 stars to? Or those that I think I should have given 5 stars to if I had bothered to rate them at all?

The Pigeon. Patrick Suskind




Les Misérables. Victor Hugo




The Latecomer. Dimitri Verhulst




Claris: The Chicest Mouse in Paris. Megan Hess




Big Little Lies. Liane Moriarty. Audio




The (audio)book, the TV series, the soundtrack. I love it all. 

Migration. Mike Unwin. Jenni Desmond




Poo: A Natural History of the Unmentionable. Nicola Davies. Neal Layton (illustrator)




The Art of Frugal Hedonism. Annie Raser-Rowland. Adam Grubb




Life After Life. Kate Atkinson. Audio




5 stars for the audiobook performance. 4-4.5 stars for the book. 

The Art of Living Alone and Loving It. Jane Mathews




Any Ordinary Day. Leigh Sales. Audio (the tea slurping edition)



Born a Crime. Trevor Noah. Audio




Do I have a book of the year? I'm not so sure. I really liked all these books, but I'm not sure that any particular one shines more than the others. 

11 (12 including Les Mis) of my 54 reads were, or should have been, 5 stars! Not bad for a bad reading year. 

5 Aussie books

9 Adult reads

3 Picture books

0 Verse Novels

4 Audio Books

5 Nonfiction Books

8 Female Authors/Illustrators

7 Male Authors

11 New to Me Authors

I appear to have let another year slip by without reading any Jackie French. How can this be? What an egregious oversight. It must not happen again this year. 

2 comments:

Emma at Words And Peace / France Book Tours said...

I'm not sure why you use the word tempted to listen to Les Misérables. Why not? audiobook is a legit format of book, as long as you pick the unabbreviated version.
I read it decades ago, and am rereading it right now with a student who asked for it! Basically a chapter a day. Rereading it makes me see all the humor and connections I didn't see the first time

Louise said...

I used the word tempted because I've just spent the last year reading the actual book. I should have finished it already, but fell way behind, and then spent most of the year feeling guilty about it. I've listened to a theatrical BBC version previously- it was great.