My 2018 Bookish Wrap Up

I love the end of the year. It’s like ending an experiment and reviewing all the data to find trends on what happened. Is that too nerdy? It might be too nerdy. Every year, I put together a list of my favorite books from the year.

But when it comes to my reading life, I want to make sure I don’t have any gaps in my reading. I want to read vastly and balanced between all the genres I love to read. It’s hard when you’re a mood reader to keep up with one genre or another. So luckily, I can look at my numbers over the year and see what I can improve upon next year.

Anyway, let’s get to it!

• Number of books read this year: 93
• Number of books written by an author of color: 32/93 or 34%
• Number of nonfiction books read this year: 7/93 or 7%
• Favorite new (to me) author: Christina Lauren
• Most read author of the year: Marissa Meyer (on account that I read the entire The Lunar Chronicle series).
• Author I fell in love with: Octavia Butler, Helen Hoang, and NK Jemisin!

My top 15 favorite books of 2018

It was really tough to try and pair down my reading list from 93 to 15 favorites. I started this list with 30 books and I’ve been able to dwindle it down by half. I definitely struggled with finding my top 15 and I think this is the best list I can make. I hope you enjoy these books yourself!

• Kindred by Octavia Butler
• Misery by Stephen King
• An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
• All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by Nicole Chung
• There There by Tommy Orange
• Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester
• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
• A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza
• The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
• Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Aweala
• Love and Other Words by Christina Lauren
• The Astonishing Color of After by Emily XR Pan
• The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory
• Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik
• The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin

My end-of-year insights

This year, I read more books than I’ve ever read in my entire life. I started the year with the goal of reading 50 books. When I hit 50 books, I increased my reading challenge to 75. After that, I shrugged my shoulders and decided “heck, let’s try for 100.” While I didn’t quite make 100, I’m completely fine with it. I think it’s because my intention for this year was to read 50 books and I read that. Everything after 50 was just a bonus and it was a bonus that got me close to 100 books.

Like I mentioned before, this is the most I’ve ever read in my life. This also accounts for the years I was in college. I don’t even think I read this much in college. Every book was so unique and differently. While not everything was a favorite, many were. I think it says something when you have more books you loved in a year than you didn’t like.

I continued my exploration into speculative fiction. I’ve got to say that science fiction and fantasy are two of my favorite genres. This year, I wanted to find more authors of color representing these genres. I was so glad to find some authors and I can’t wait to explore others in the future, but I still feel that genre fiction is dominated by white male authors. I do hope that this changes in 2019.

There were a lot of books I didn’t read this year too. I wanted to bring light to this because despite all of my efforts to read what I have, I didn’t. I think this is something I can work better on in the future and I honestly feel like it’ll be a challenge with the number of books I receive on the daily, but I’m devoted to getting my TBR under control.

You can see all the books I’ve read on Goodreads.