Books

Currently finished 10 books and currently on my 11th

Favorite reads: “The Glass castle” hands down. My fiancé recommended it to me when we first started dating and I incorrectly assumed it was a romance novel (as that is all she normally reads). Hit very close to home for both of us since our immediate families are both chaos.

Least favorite reads: I haven’t finished it yet but I would say the book “Authority” from the southern reach trilogy has been the most difficult to get through. I’m about 60% through and I feel as though I haven’t learned much about the Southern reach.

I’m 21 books in for 2023 so far. I didn’t really set a goal or anything, I go through phases of reading a lot then not. In March I got hooked on the Dresden Files and read all 17 of the main books back to back lol very addicting reads.

At the beginning of the year I was on a sci-fi horror kick which was new for me and super enjoyable! Some standouts were:

Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

All of them were what I would call fun and entertaining reads if not anything ground breaking.

I've not read nearly as many books as I would've liked so far this year (four total, five if you count the graphic novel Maus). I just finished Cloud Atlas by David Michell (highly, highly recommended) and now it's on to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I read a bit of Atlas Shrugged out of curiosity as well and that book squarely holds down this year's 'least favorite' position for the moment. It's clear that I'm not the demographic that Ayn Rand is writing for. I don't have any releases I'm particularly looking forward to, but I'll be shamelessly stealing everyone else's ideas from this thread.

I'm up to 20 read and I'm currently working on 21, 22, and 23. I know it's a bid odd to read three books simultaneously (especially for a slow reader), but I've got my books in different contexts. One is my bed time book, Book 5 of Mistborn, which I'm slowly warming up to after devouring books 1-3. My living room book is House of Leaves, which just takes time to get through and can't easily be binged. My commuting book is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which is excellent but also bums me out (the perfect going into work book).

Right now my favorite for the year is probably Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It's not exactly revealing new ideas but more it's expanding upon those ideas into terrifying new depths. Excellent book and well worth a read.

I'm excited to finish the Mistborn series this year and I'll hit my goal of 25 books easily. I've already got books 24, 25, and 26 planned out. I'd love to hit 40 books this year but I'm not sure that will happen. I've not read that many books in one year since before middle school.

I've been really bad about tracking stuff this year. I just went back and added ~150 from this year. I don't really set goals; I don't track rereads and I don't want to be nudged in whether I should read something old or new when I finish a series.

My favorite new reads are CJ Archer. Her Glass and Steele and After the Rift series were both really enjoyable. I guess I'll also mention Karen Rose's Cold Blooded Liar. I think she's done great character development and story telling with a new pair of partners in every book, but this looks like a departure where she'll be following one character (pair?) through multiple cases and slow playing the development. I look forward to seeing how that plays out.

I'm looking forward to Beneath Dark Waters. It's the first Karen Rose arc where I couldn't just read the city straight through and I'm fiending for her to give me the next one.

Goal was 12, current count is 24. My favorite book so far was Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. First time I read the Farseer trilogy, it was very good the overall ending felt weird but I enjoyed it well.

My least favorite book was Edge of Shadows by Brent Weeks. I just couldn't get myself to care about it for some reason. The coolest part from book 2 was solved shorty after the start (Kylar's hand restoration) and afterwards I was very meh on it. Got to chapter 30 and set the book down it's dnf and I don't see myself going back.

I am currently reading Robots and Empire by Issac Asimov. This is the conclusion to the Robots series, it's very weird in that there is a large time jump between book 3 and 4. So transition of the main character is hampering my enjoyment a little bit. But it is still Asimov and it is fun.

I started reading again last month after several years completing another degree, so I only set a goal for myself of 10 books. According to my StoryGraph goal, I'm at 7 so far... I should probably increase my goal.

Here's my year in a spreadsheet.

https://i.imgur.com/zncjTUB.png

• At 22 books, shooting for 40 so I'm barely on track.

• Favorite reads: Definitely Demian by Hermann Hesse and Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I knew I was going to like Grapes, as I loved East of Eden and I'm a leftist so Grapes is a match made in heaven for me. But Demian was a big surprise at how much I loved it. It just... scratched a certain itch in my soul I didn't know I had. It also kind of reminded me of The Picture of Dorian Gray is a weird way? Which is one of my favorite books of all time.

• Least favorite reads The Unbearable Lightness of Being was not a great read for me. Occasionally there were moments of philosophical profundity and some pretty prose but for the most part I found the themes a bit pretentious, the characters all awful, and a non-engaging plot. Shoutout to Anthem. I despise Ayn Rand as a person, and The Fountainhead was the worst book I've ever read, but Anthem wasn't terrible? It was probably bottom 5 for the year, no doubt, but I didn't hate it.

I've read 13 and my goal was 9. Three of those were Stormlight Archives books, which are all over 1,000 pages. Three were Star Wars Canon books (Thrawn) and the 3 I'm currently reading are the legends Darth Bane series. I also read Project Hail Mary, No Country for Old Men, Essex Dogs (LOVED it), TMNT The Last Ronin, LOTR Fellowship of the Ring, Stephen King's Fairy Tale (probably the least favorite of my read list this year) and the third Expanse book.

According to my stats on Storygraph, my goal was 25 books for the year and I'm sitting at 38 books read. I shouldn't have been so conservative with my goal I think.

Favorite? Probably "The Book that Wouldn't Burn" by Mark Lawrence. The worldbuilding and character work are just phenomenal. Another best book is The Crippled God (started Malazan last fall and finished it early this year).

Least favorite? Babel. I don't even count it as read since I couldn't get beyond chapter 4. I loved Poppy War and my book club was reading Babel but it was just so flat. One-dimensional characters and too preachy and on-the-nose. I don't mind messaging in books but this wasn't even nuanced or natural.

New Release? I backed Sanderson's Kickstarter, so I am waiting for my physical copy of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter so I can read that in print. I read the other 2 secret Projects in ebook form but this one I want the new book smell experience.

I've read 9 books so far this year. I used to read a lot as a kid/teen, but barely read anything since I started working (For example It took me over 1.5 years to read Dune, which I finished this year). In march I decided to start reading more again. My goal is 12 books a year, so I'm on track. I no longer take my smartphone with me when I go to sleep and that helped a lot, less distraction.

Favourites this year:

• Started reading the Discworld novels (City watch series). The series as a whole is fantastic, but my favourite so far is Jingo.
• A non-fiction dutch book called Terroristenjager. It's about someone who worked in the special forces of Belgium and how everything changed with the terrorist attacks in Brussels a couple of years ago.

Least favourite

• I've only read classics this year, they were al very good, no clear winner (or loser) here..