2018 Year In Review

Happy New Year! 

I hope everyone’s new year got off to a better start than mine did.  I’ve actually been sick since the last week of December and the weeks prior to that were super busy for me at work, which unfortunately affected my reading in a negative way.

For my Goodreads challenge, I had originally committed to reading 60 books in 2018, but in the end, I came up short and was only able to get through 57 books.  While this was 1 book more than I was able to read the year prior (in 2017), it still didn’t quite meet the goal. 

Despite not meeting the goal, I would still say that overall, I had a pretty good reading year in that many of the books I read this year were enjoyable reads, with majority falling into the 3 to 4 star category and only 3 books falling below that (2 star level).

This past year was also when I really started increasing my participation in ARC sites such as NetGalley and Edelweiss, which was both good and bad in that I was able to expand my reading significantly by having access to a lot of great new books prior to publication, but the unintentional “tradeoff” to this was that I couldn’t get to many of the older books that I either own or have been on my TBR for ages.  The other thing I didn’t expect was that I would request way too many ARCs, more than I could reasonably get to (it’s hard when there are so many books out there that all sound SO GOOD!), which resulted in me trying to play “catch-up” most months with my ARC list. 

Given the above, one of my goals for 2019 is to do a better job of managing my ARC list by making sure I read and review all ARCs I get within the same month as publication so that I clear out my list each month and avoid falling behind.  Of course, this means that I will need to have better self-control and refrain from requesting so many ARCs to the point that I overload myself each month.  Another related goal is to go back and clear out the older ARCs I have, as many of those books I requested but didn’t get to are ones that I’m still interested in reading.

Now that I got all that off my chest, onto the exciting stuff:  the STATS!  I decided to format the stats this year similar to last year (with the exception of a few added categories) and forego some of the “fancier” stuff I was planning to do, since I fell way behind on year-end wrap-up stuff due to illness as mentioned earlier.  Hopefully next year will be better and I’ll be able to do something a bit more advanced at that time….

Ratings breakdown:

5 Star Reads:  9

4 to 4.5 Star Reads:  31

3 to 3.5 Star Reads:  14

2 to 2.5 Star Reads:  3

Genre / Category breakdown:

Fiction:  49

-          General Fiction:  5

-          Classics: 1

-          Historical: 11

-          Mystery/Thriller/Suspense: 12

-          Literary Fiction: 9

-          Short Stories: 1

-          Contemporary Fiction: 10

Non-Fiction: 8

-          General Non-fiction: 4

-          Memoir/Biography: 4

ARCs / Review copies

NetGalley:  36

Edelweiss:  11

Penguin First to Read: 8

** Total of 55 books out of 57 read were ARCs.  The remaining 2 consisted of 1 book borrowed from the library and 1 book purchased at a store.**

Favorite Reads of 2018

Below is my list of favorite reads this year (in no particular order) – all of these books I rated 5 stars:

Everything Here is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee

Rosie-Colored Glasses by Brianna Wolfson

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton

Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers

Rust & Stardust by T. Greenwood

Bruce Lee: A Life by Matthew Polly

A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza

Book Love by Debbie Tung

The following books I rated 4.5 stars, which for me means that they were all excellent books in their own right, it’s just that they didn’t give me the 5 star “vibe” due to a minor flaw or two:

A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne 

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

The Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain

Not Her Daughter by Rea Frey

A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua

Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton

The following books I rated 4 stars but they were particularly enjoyable reads for me so I figured I would mention them as well (again, in no particular order):

What Alice Forgot by Liane Morirarty

The Recipe Box by Viola Shipman

The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti

Yo-kai Watch vol. 9 & 10 by Noriyuki Konishi

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

The Rain Watcher by Tatiana de Rosnay

The Night Before by Wendy Walker

Sold on a Monday by Kristina McMorris

The Family Tabor by Cherise Wolas

Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier

The Lost for Words Bookshop by Stephanie Butland

** Note:  To read my reviews for any of the above books, please click on the name of the book in the sidebar to the right of this blog.  Thanks!**