This was a good year for making progress on things: I have an almost 37-weeks along baby growing, I met my word count every single day until the end of August (when the teaching load ruined it), and I got through one entire revision on a draft that still needs a lot of work. I generally end every year in a post-Christmas depression, feeling like I accomplished nothing over the past 365 days, so writing down the little successes helps me swing my bad attitude back toward the positive, at least a bit.
My main progress, though: I read 54 books this year, averaging about a book a week as I’d hoped! And that’s not even counting some of the books I re-read, like Tamora Pierce’s The Immortals quartet or the stuff I have to skim back through every year with my students, like The Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby.
According to the handy-dandy Goodreads tally, that comes out to 18,775 pages. The main genres read were YA (especially YA fantasy), mystery, and literary fiction, which is pretty normal for my reading tastes.
Here are some mini-reviews and reflections on some of my favorite reads:
My favorite book of the year was a surprise, as I went in with no expectations and then ADORED it: Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It’s a creative look at a Fleetwood Mac-esque fictional 70s rock band, written as a reflection of what happened (kind of like a “Behind the Music” episode). They hit a lot of highs and lows, but the characters are well-rounded, the song lyrics are powerful, and the redemptive ending was satisfying. It’s being made into a TV series, which makes me a bit nervous as they’re going to have to write the songs for real, but I will hope for the best!
The others are presented in order of most recently read, since I’m scrolling backwards through my Goodreads list to pull these titles:
The Starless Sea is the second novel by Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus. She writes beautiful prose (even if the run-on sentences/refusal to use a semi-colon started to drive me insane) and the world she built was so fantastic and yet so real–I love the power of imaginations like hers. It’s a dreamy, emotional story that’s difficult to explain. Though it has slow points, everything ends up woven together perfectly.
Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu was a random YA novel that I only picked up because Amy Poehler is directing an adaptation for Netflix and ended up coming to our high school to film for a week (but I never got to see her, despite my vague plans to look as Tina Fey-like as possible and stride confidently past their oodles of security). I’m so glad I got introduced to it, though. It’s a powerful story of standing up against authority and realizing, despite that weird haze of teenage identity confusion we all go through, that age does not equal intelligence and tradition does not equal right.
The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware only beat out her other latest mystery, The Death of Mrs. Westaway, by the barest of margins… I loved them both. “Key” had a bit more suspense than “Westaway” and I liked how there was plenty of foreshadowing without making the events predictable. It had a unique spooky, gothic vibe with homages to classics like Jane Eyre and “The Turn of the Screw.” The narrator was more reliable than the other mystery (/thriller, I think) I enjoyed this year, The Wife Between Us, which I appreciated because I get annoyed at mysteries that hinge on a woman’s insanity or suspicions too much.
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren was a pleasant surprise of light-hearted humor, as long as you can make it past the first chapter when an entire wedding full of people are vomiting everywhere. It’s the overdone enemies-to-lovers trope but accomplished with clever dialogue and a fun adventure, so I didn’t mind. I didn’t read it on vacation but it would be the perfect “beach read,” as they say.
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon was the biggest redemption of the year! I could not stand her first book, “The Bone Season,” which was hyped up and then soooo underwhelming. “Priory” is much more of what I had hoped for: epic fantasy, interesting magic systems, feminist heroes, love stories layered in, a well-crafted world, and, of course, dragons. It’s an enormous book (848 pages) but worth every moment.
Finally, the most disappointing read of the year, unfortunately, was The Witch Elm by Tana French. I love her mysteries–she writes loosely connected books, where each next book takes on the perspective of a supporting character from the previous novel, and are currently being developed as a series called “The Dublin Murders” on Starz–but this was a standalone. It was slow-paced, hard to root for anyone, and really didn’t go anywhere by the end of it. But we’re all allowed our sloggy books, so I’m not giving up on her writing by a long shot. And this is “most disappointing,” not “worst”; I’d gone in with high expectations that were crushed. I don’t want to write up the “worst” list because that feels too cruel. You can text me if you want to hear my complaints about the worst-written books of the year, haha (I have two specific ones in mind).
I’m a third of the way through Scott Westerfield’s The Risen Empire, but not likely to complete it before midnight. I’ll be on maternity leave for the first half of 2020; I hope baby girl will give me some time to read and write again, but judging by how exhausted I was while caring for Sam as an infant–and the fact that now he’s a toddler, still high maintenance–I don’t want to get my hopes up. But I’m going to make the goal to hit at least 52 books again next year anyway! And finish another revision each on the two main YA fantasy novels I’ve been working on! The 20-teens had a lot of lousy moments, so let’s make 2020 a good year by filling it with books.
Cathy Writes Fantasy 