Yearly Recap for 2023

2023 was a weird year for reading for me. I didn't actually read almost any books--I listened to almost everything on audio this year. And obviously, one major change was that I didn't keep track of my reading here on this blog, for the first time in a decade. I just don't have the time or energy for this any more. But I do still track my reading on Goodreads, and I'm writing down the titles I read in a notebook to keep track. 

Since I didn't read a lot of hard copy books, I read only 91 books this year--still a lot of books, but not a lot compared to the 150 I read a few years in the past. But I still read some really great things this year that I loved. This was a year of listening to a lot of Greek mythology, and I really loved it, so I chose my favorites from that genre this year too. 

Favorite Fiction: Maame by Jessica George, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakroborty, Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal, Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

Favorite Nonfiction: Die with Zero by Bill Perkins, The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter, Know My Name by Chanel Miller

Favorite Greek Mythology: A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, Mythos by Stephen Fry

Favorite Mysteries: The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood, The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey, The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman

Favorite Romance: Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

Best of the Best for the Year: The Change by Kirsten Miller

Yearly Recap for 2022

I did some good reading this year. The first third of the year wasn't as great with my morning sickness and general exhaustion, but I made up for it and still read somewhere around 120 books. Quite a lot of them were audiobooks and a huge chunk of the rest were ebooks. I read the fewest hard copy books that I have ever read this year. I'm not sure why that is or what has changed, but I sure hope that's not a lasting, forever change in my reading habits. 

Best of the year: Cloud Cuckoo Land

Best Fiction: Anxious People, The Remains of the Day, The Scholomance trilogy

Best Nonfiction: Empire of Pain, Hunt, Gather, Parent, Four Thousand Weeks

Best Mystery: A World of Curiosities, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, The Bullet that Missed

Best Middle Grade: The Last Cuentista, The Hero and the Crown

Best Romance: Book Lovers, Nora Goes Off Script, Thank You for Listening, The Bodyguard

2021 Yearly Recap

This is my tenth yearly recap of my reading on this blog. Amazing! I have lost a lot of steam with blogging over the last year or two, and I haven't done a great job of staying up-to-date with my reading blog. But I love, love, love having this record of the books I've read and I don't want to lose it in any way. So I definitely plan to keep it up and to be better at it in 2022. 

I read significantly less this year than I did in 2020. Probably because I wasn't trying to escape my life and the stress of the pandemic as much? I still read over 120 books (not sure exactly how many--I had 112 blog posts for this year but several of them represented 2-3 books), so it was definitely still a respectable number. I read some really, really good books this year. And some not so good books too. 

Best of the year: The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice

Best fiction: Sparks Like Stars, A Deadly Education, Americanah, Malibu Rising

Best memoir: Crying in HMart, Dancing at the Pity Party

Best romances: Better than the Movies, Love at First, The Countess Conspiracy

Best mystery: The Madness of Crowds

Best read-alouds: By the Great Horn Spoon! and all the Harry Potters

Least favorite: One Hundred Years of Solitude

2020 Yearly Recap

This is my best reading year, by just the numbers, that I've ever had! I almost hit 150 books--Goodreads has me at 147 for the year. I'm really impressed and proud of myself. If I hadn't stopped doing audiobooks for a lot of the year--dang Covid--I would have gone over and above that 150 mark. Of course, a lot of these books this year were middle-grade novels or books I read to the boys, so many of them were super quick and easy, but I'm still taking it. 

I also love that I really loved a lot of the books I read. Some years I look back and I think, I really didn't love anything I read this year. Not so for this year. This was a great reading year in all aspects. I'm not sure what made it so great--partly that I had a lot of time to read with a new baby and lots of nursing, partly that I read a lot of books suggested by the Modern Mrs. Darcy Summer Reading Guide and they are usually winners, partly that I felt free to read whatever sounded good and didn't try too hard to read anything too hard or fancy since there was a global pandemic happening and my stress levels were high a lot. For whatever reason, this all worked. 

I'm hoping to continue this trend for the new year--although I do want to work through that stack of books on my bedside stand I've been meaning to read all year!

Best of the year: Stamped from the Beginning

Best non-fiction: The Library Book, The Priesthood Power of Women

Best fiction: The Dutch House, Lovely War

Best romance: Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors, The Happy Ever After Playlist, Beach Read, Things You Save in a Fire

Best mystery: Truly Devious trilogy

Best middle-grade: A Long Way from Chicago, Merci Suarez Changes Gears, When You Reach Me

Best audiobooks: Sleeping Giants, Daisy Jones and the Six

2019 Yearly Recap

I feel like I had a good reading year this year. The last quarter was not as productive, and it wasn't as filled with good books (a lot of them were mediocre). But I am super pleased with everything I accomplished this year. One of my goals for the year was to read 5 plays by Shakespeare, and I did that--I read Hamlet on December 30 to finish it off. I haven't read much Shakespeare (other than the sonnets) on my own, and it was such a pleasure to read those this year. I hope to read some more in 2020.

Here are my favorites for this year:

Best of the year: A Gentleman in Moscow. I listened to it once and read it another time. I just loved it so much and have been trying to get everyone to read it.

Best non-fiction: Being Mortal, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (I didn't read much non-fiction this year, but these two were excellent)

Best classics: Count of Monte Cristo, David Copperfield, All Creatures Great and Small, A Little Princess, Little Women (okay, basically all of the classics)

Best read-alouds to the boys: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (of course!!), The Penderwicks

Best audiobooks: The Mother-in-Law, The Bookshop on the Corner, Pride, One of Us Is Lying (all of these were great books and great audiobook productions)

Best fiction: Station Eleven, Unaccustomed Earth, Oathbringer

I was feeling a little bit blah about my reading for this year until I went back and saw all of these really excellent books I read earlier this year that I forgot about. Almost all of these were from the first half of this year, which shows how I've been in a sort of slump and choosing all sorts of lame books to read lately. I'm excited to read some more high quality stuff next year. I'm setting a goal to read 25 Newbery award winners next year, so hopefully there are some really good middle-grade books to add to my list.

2018 Yearly Recap

At the end of last year, I decided not to keep track of the number of books I read this year because I didn't want to feel obligated to read more and more. And it turns out that I read just as many as I did in 2017, almost exactly. I am kind of surprised by that, but it makes me happy. I read a TON in the first half of the year, but not as much in the last quarter. I don't know what it is about the holiday season, but I feel so busy that I can't let myself sit down and read (or at least that's how it was this year).

But in looking back at the books I read this year, I'm super happy about everything I got to read and listen to. There were some really, really good ones. I re-read a lot of classics that I loved (all of the Betsy-Tacy books, and I'm in the middle now of all the Anne of Green Gables ones) and I've found that those are the ones I gravitate to when I am in the need of comfort or just being comfortable.

It's interesting--most of these books that made the list (other than the obvious classics) were audiobooks that I listened to from the library. Thank you, Frisco library!

Best Fiction: My Plain Jane, The Great Alone, Unequal Affection, Dark Matter

Best Classics: Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca, Emily of Deep Valley, Cheaper by the Dozen, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Best Non-fiction: Educated, 1776, Shoe Dog, The Read-Aloud Family

Best YA/middle-grade: Okay for Now, The War that Saved My Life, Echo

Best children's/read-alouds: All-of-a-Kind Family, all of the Betsy-Tacy books but particularly Betsy's Wedding and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, James and the Giant Peach


I have several goals for this year. We are talking about going to England in August for our tenth anniversary, so I want to read a lot of British books and histories. I can't wait. I also want to re-read a bunch of Shakespeare's plays as well, and some Jane Austen? And I'm going to continue working my way through some favorite series, including Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter (as both of those are British series, they fit in well with my other goal). So many good things to look forward to for this year.

2017 Yearly Recap

Well, I'm pretty sure I will never, ever, ever, ever top this past year for quantity. I am pretty astonished that I read 132 books in one year. Of course, some 40 of those were audiobooks--which in and of itself is an accomplishment as well! I finally figured out how to download audiobooks onto my iPhone (which wasn't that hard, it took about ten minutes to figure out how to use the library apps) and it's obviously helped my reading a ton this year.

Without any further ado, these were my favorite books this year (and I have so many good ones to choose from this year! It's so hard to choose--I'll say three for each category and try to put them in order starting with my very favorite.

Best Fiction: A Man Called Ove, My Lady Jane, The One-in-a-Million Boy, Jane of Austin

Best Classics: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Blue Castle

Best YA/middle-grade: To All the Boys I've Loved Before trilogy, The Wednesday Wars, Counting by 7s, These Broken Stars trilogy

Best Mystery: Obviously--the Armand Gamache series. My favorites were: A Beautiful Mystery, How the Light Gets In. Also, I loved Murder as a Fine Art

Best Historical Fiction: Hattie Big Sky, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

Best Nonfiction: Grit, French Kids Eat Everything, This Is Where You Belong

Best Memoir: Everything You Ever Wanted, Hillbilly Elegy, When Breath Becomes Air

Worst Book of 2018: Barefoot. It actually got a DNF from me.

This is going to be shocking--I'm actually going to try to read less in 2018. I feel almost a little burned out on reading SO MUCH this year. And I feel like I have lots of other things I need and want to do other than just reading. I want to just read books that make me happy in 2018--including some re-reads of old favorites from when I was younger or a teenager. So I will be focusing on just reading really good books that I already love--and a few other ones, like some biographies that I've been meaning to read for forever.

2016 Yearly Recap

Ha--57 books this year. I was trying to see why I didn't read much this year, and I realized why. The second half of the year really messed with me--we had too many trips over the summer/fall, I got thrown into morning sickness, Dane got sick and went into the hospital, and we were really busy the last few months with the holidays and I felt so much pressure to get everything ready/done well. I just couldn't mentally handle a lot of reading. I also didn't spend any energy trying to decide what to read or finding good books that I was actually excited about, so the books I did read were only moderately interesting to me (at least the last six months or so). Almost all of the books that were my favorite this year were from the first half of the year. I feel like it's been forever since I've read anything really GOOD. So, here's to hoping next year's reading will be better--in quality (since I'm sure it won't be better in quantity, adding baby #3 to our family).

Best Fiction: All the Light We Cannot See, The Chosen, Mistborn series (1, 2, and 3)

Best Quick Read: Death Comes to Pemberley

Best Non-fiction: How Will You Measure Your Life?

Best Parenting: No-Drama Discipline, The Collapse of Parenting

All the Light We Cannot See was probably the best book I read this year, followed closely by the Mistborn series (which were so so good)! And I also loved How Will You Measure Your Life? and think about it a lot.

I hope to read some good books that I really love this next year. Here's to hoping!

2015 Yearly Recap

I'm a little disappointed in myself this year. I read only 60 books this year--that's a new low for me since I started keeping track. I know it's not the quantity that matters, but more than that, I know that I wasn't spending my time reading because I was doing less-interesting things. I think with having a baby this year, I threw myself into a "I need to relax and veg" phase (and relaxing and veg-ing by watching shows in the evening), but I never really came out of it when I was capable of it. Graham is now nine months old and I am BACK into regular life, and I am not going to watch TV any more (unless folding laundry or exercising). I want to be a READER again.

There were a few redeeming books of this year:

Best Quick Reads: Intertwine and Divine

Best Non-Fiction: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

Best Self-Help: How to Raise an Adult, Better than Before, Bird by Bird

Best Classic: Middlemarch. Hands down.

Best of the best of the best: The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. I loved these books so much. They are totally out of my normal comfort zone for reading, and not my usual genre, but totally worth it.

I had a goal last year to read some fifteen classics that I'd never read--and I only made it through five (well, four and a half, since I technically didn't finish On the Road, and GOOD RIDDANCE). So I want to try and make my way through more of those this year. But I also am going to work on the Modern Mrs. Darcy reading challenge from this year and last year. I figure I can easily make it through two of those since they're each only 12 books, and it will be interesting to get me reading a variety of books. I printed out the pages and will hang them up by my desk! And I am going to start my first book of 2016 now.

2014 Reading Recap

I can't believe I read 96 books this year. By about November, I realized how close I was getting and really wanted to get to 100 (which has seemed like this mythical number that I've never been able to cross over the last few years), but it turned out that moving mid-December and traveling for Christmas proved too much for me and I just could not do anything more. So I will be proud of my 96 books for this year and realize that I probably will not read more than that for a very long time.

Without further ado, here are some of my favorite books from this year. I can't narrow it down any more than this and some of the categories overlap, but I don't have to worry about that because this is my own blog.

Best Quick Reads: On the Fence, Blackmoore, Virtuosity

Best Fiction: Dear Mr. Knightley, Crossing to Safety, Eleanor and Park, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Best History: Mornings on Horseback, One Summer: America, 1927

Best Nonfiction: 168 Hours

Best Mystery: In the Woods

Best Memoirs: Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, Truth and Beauty

I have been putting off this annual review of my books for a while now (I am writing this on January 6, although posting it so that it will still show up in December 2014). For some reason, I haven't been looking forward to it like I usually do, and I think it is because I didn't love love many books I read this year. There were plenty that I enjoyed, but I think that I didn't give myself time to savor them (trying to reach 100!) and that I read a lot of books that weren't necessarily very noteworthy (particularly towards the end of the year). I want to change this for myself for 2015. I want to read books that I really love and to not rush through them in order to check them off a list. My reading goal for 2015 is the opposite of last year's--I'd like to focus on reading a few GOOD BOOKS in hopes that I love them and find some new favorites.

This is my classic book list (all of which I haven't yet read) that I'm hoping to tackle in 2015:

• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Waverley by Walter Scott
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

There are only 14 on here because I know I'm going to find many other books I want to read throughout the year too. But if I can read these I will feel like I've accomplished something this year, and I know I'll enjoy it and get something deep out of reading these.

2013 Reading Recap

Well, 64 books in 2013 isn't too shabby! Not quite up to the 80+ that I read last year but I was definitely more busy (than last summer when I was doing nothing and the fall when I was sitting around nursing an infant all day every day).

Here are my favorites from this year:

Fiction: An Assembly Such as This and These Three Remain, The Grand Sophy and Frederica, the LOTR trilogy

Memoir: Global Mom

Non-fiction: Team of Rivals, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking

And least favorites: Someday My Prince Will Come, Ella Minnow Pea, The Age of Miracles

If I had to choose a #1 favorite for this year, I would unhesitatingly give it to Team of Rivals. It blew me away by how awesome it was, how I couldn't put it down even though it was a BIOGRAPHY, people! Highly recommend it to anyone remotely interested in history.

I am really proud of myself for reading War and Peace and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, two classics I had never gotten around to but always wanted to. They were also the books that took me the longest to read, because I kept putting them down and procrastinating reading them. I enjoyed them, but they felt more like voluntary homework than fun reading. (I'm still in the middle of a few other books like that that I didn't finish before 2013 was over--hopefully I'll be able to write about them soon!) I do LOVE many classics, but I also love books that are quick reads since I rarely have long chunks of time to read huge heavy books like that any more.

I think I'll keep the same goal that I had for this year: at least one book per week. I'd love to reach 100 every single year, but I feel like I go through stages of wanting to read a lot and then stages of needing to do other things. I'm looking forward to what good things I read in 2014.

2012 reading recap

Well, I had a goal to read 100 books in 2012--and that definitely didn't happen. It was pretty obvious that it wasn't going to after I didn't read like crazy all summer like I was expecting to. I got to 83 though--and I'm pretty sure that's just about where I was last year too. But I feel like it was kind of cheating because I counted the Hunger Games trilogy, the Harry Potters, and the books I read about childbirth over the summer! Still, I'm not sure I'll read quite as many this year--or maybe I will! Somehow, I always end up reading too much when I feel like I should be cleaning or taking care of other projects. It's always hard to find a balance.

For my own benefit, my favorite books of 2012 were (and of course, I couldn't choose just one for each category):

Fiction: A Town Like Alice, Gone with the Wind, and Bel Canto.

Memoir: Great With Child, The Happiness Project (more for the idea than the actual execution, perhaps)

Non-fiction: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, The Millionaire Next Door

I don't think I need to narrow it down more than that. Looking back over the year, I really did read a lot of books that I loved this year. And I also read a bunch that were good, but not amazing. It was a great year for reading.

I am so happy that I started this blog (and even happier that no one else reads it!) so that I can look back at what I read and remember how much I loved them. It also makes me feel more accomplished, like I actually did something by finishing another book, when I write it down and write my feelings about it. All in all, a great decision on my part in the beginning of 2012. I'm excited to keep it up for 2013. I don't think I'm going to set a numerical goal for books this year, because who knows what this year is going to bring with Dane changing so much every week (every day!). I will try to read at least one per week, I think--somewhere between 50 and 83, my accomplishment of this year. I think that's doable.

Books Read in 2011

I found a document on my computer with all the books I read in 2011, the year before I started this blog. I WISH I'd thought of writing reviews of these books, instead of just recording that I read them, but I didn't want to forget about them altogether. So I'm going to keep them here, where I won't lose them! I skimmed this list and bolded the ones I know I loved the most. (Also, don't mind that they're all in lowercase--that was back when I wrote everything without any caps at all, haha!)

Books read in 2011 (starting at the bottom in January and on throughout the rest of the year):

-crossed by ally condie

-matched by ally condie

-animal, vegetable, miracle by barbara kingsolver

-the bourne identity by robert ludlum

-a short history of nearly everything by bill bryson

-mormon women: portraits and conversations, edited by james n. kimball and kent miles

-i know why the caged bird sings by maya angelou

-mockingjay by suzanne collins

-catching fire by suzanne collins

-the hunger games by suzanne collins

-the mother in me, edited by kathryn lynard soper

-mennonite in a little black dress by rhoda janzen

-the help by kathryn stockett

-the new york regional mormon singles halloween dance by elna baker

-the printing revolution in early modern europe by elizabeth eisenstein

-the gutenberg elegies by sven birkerts

-half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide by nicholas kristof and sheryl wudunn

-wives and daughters by elizabeth gaskell

-the mysterious mr. quin by agatha christie

-the seven dials mystery by agatha christie

-bossypants by tina fey

-stones into schools by greg mortenson

-north and south by elizabeth gaskell

-letter to my daughter by maya angelou

-cheap: the high price of discount culture by ellen ruppel shell

-eat pray love by elizabeth gilbert

-nurtureshock by po bronson and ashley merryman

-the sign of the four by sir arthur conan doyle

-a year of living biblically by a.j. jacobs

-the return of sherlock holmes by sir arthur conan doyle

-the immortal life of henrietta lacks by rebecca skloot

-googled: the end of the world as we know it by ken auletta

-the memoirs of sherlock holmes by sir arthur conan doyle

-the things they carried by tim o'brien

-my antonia by willa cather

-the optimist's daughter by eudora welty

-east of eden by john steinbeck

-the great gatsby by f. scott fitzgerald

-the life of pi by yann martel

-the secret of chimneys by agatha christie

-where i was from by joan didion

-the casebook of sherlock holmes by sir arthur conan doyle

-murder at the vicarage by agatha christie

-harry potter's world wide influence, edited by diana patterson

-oliver twist by charles dickens

-travels with charley by john steinbeck

-fast food nation by eric schlosser

-pride and prejudice and zombies by seth grahame-smith

-superfreakonomics by steven leavitt and stephen dubner

-the story of my life by helen keller

-the old man and the sea by ernest hemingway

-a study in scarlet by sir arthur conan doyle

-a passage to india by e.m. forster

-origins by annie murphy paul

-at home by bill bryson

-the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy by douglas adams

-cleopatra: a life by stacy schiff

-a walk in the woods by bill bryson

-his last bow by sir arthur conan doyle

-in defense of food by michael pollan

-the wisdom of crowds by james surowiecki

-the valley of fear by sir arthur conan doyle

-old new york by edith wharton

-what the dog saw by malcolm gladwell

-the poisonwood bible by barbara kingsolver

-ethan frome by edith wharton

-the hound of the baskervilles by sir arthur conan doyle

-persuasion by jane austen

-outliers by malcolm gladwell

-house of mirth by edith Wharton

-john adams by david mccullough

-unbroken by laura Hillenbrand

-edith wharton: a biography by r.w.b. lewis

-little women by louisa may alcott

-eden's outcasts: the story of louisa may alcott and her father by john matteson

-northanger abbey by jane austen

-the age of innocence by edith wharton

-the scarlet letter by nathaniel hawthorne

-the time traveler's wife by audrey niffenegger

-the adventures of robin hood by roger lancelyn green

-treasure island by robert louis stevenson

-adventures of huckleberry finn by mark twain

-pudd'nhead wilson by mark twain

-love in the time of cholera by gabriel garcia marquez

-american pastoral by philip roth

-clear and present danger by tom clancy