Every year is a great year for reading, right?
I was just looking over my reading list for the year on goodreads, and it made me smile.
First, let’s look at some trends:
This was the year of fantasy for me. Ironically, even though I’m a predominately a fantasy writer, I haven’t historically read a lot of it. Part of this is a numbers game: most of the fantasy I do read ends up being really, really long (like Wheel of Time), so I don’t make it through fantasy books as fast as I do shorter books.
But this year was a bit of a change. I predominately read fantasy and loved almost every minute of it.
Additionally, I’ve found that my average rating for books was pretty high this year. On goodreads, it tells me that my average rating is four stars, which seems a little high to me. I think there’s a few things happening. First, I’m looking at my public author profile. I typically only rate and review books that I enjoyed. Not every book is for me, and I don’t really have any desire to publicly declare my disdain for some of the books I didn’t like. However, I was comparing my public and private ratings, and my private ratings are only a little lower. Which means, I think, that I’m also mostly reading a lot of books that I really enjoy. Looking back through my list, I can only see maybe a half-dozen books I didn’t really like. Out of more than fifty, that’s pretty great.
This year was also the year I started reading Malazan. In January, I fully anticipated finishing the series, but that turned out to be false. I’m currently on number six, and happy with my progress. It’s a series that deserves to be savored.
Let’s do some favorites, with the caveat that these are really hard to claim – there’s a ton of books I really, really loved, and picking just two seems arbitrary, but here goes anyway:
Favorite nonfiction: Sex at Dawn and Stillness is the Key
Favorite Fantasy: Deadhouse Gates and Beyond the Shadows
Favorite Sci-Fi: Cibola Burn and Altered Carbon
Here’s to 2020!
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