337.

[straightforwardly]

My usual gaming and writing wrap-ups for the year will be coming at some point—hopefully soon?—but before then, I thought I’d drop off this book-related ask meme that I saw on tumblr. I read quite a bit, but usually do my reading-related wrap ups in real life or real life-adjacent spaces instead of over here—but this is a meme, not a full wrap-up, and it looks quite fun, so I’m making a quasi-exception.

I think everyone knows how these work, but for formality’s sake: leave a comment with the numbers of any of the questions you’re interested in knowing the answers to, and I’ll answer them! Feel free to ask as many as you like.

1. How many books did you read this year?
2. Did you reread anything? What?
3. What were your top five books of the year?
4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?
5. What genre did you read the most of?
6. Was there anything you meant to read, but never got to?
7. What was your average Goodreads rating? Does it seem accurate?
8. Did you meet any of your reading goals? Which ones?
9. Did you get into any new genres?
10. What was your favorite new release of the year?
11. What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?
12. Any books that disappointed you?
13. What were your least favorite books of the year?
14. What books do you want to finish before the year is over?
15. Did you read any books that were nominated for or won awards this year (Booker, Women’s Prize, National Book Award, Pulitzer, Hugo, etc.)? What did you think of them?
16. What is the most over-hyped book you read this year?
17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?
18. How many books did you buy?
19. Did you use your library?
20. What was your most anticipated release? Did it meet your expectations?
21. Did you participate in or watch any booklr, booktube, or book twitter drama?
22. What’s the longest book you read?
23. What’s the fastest time it took you to read a book?
24. Did you DNF anything? Why?
25. What reading goals do you have for next year?

Comments

[straightforwardly]

5. What genre did you read the most of? / 9. Did you get into any new genres?

Fantasy, forever and always! It made up exactly 42.9% of the books I read this year. As for new genres… not particularly? I did read more classics than usual, but I’ve always liked them and anyways, I feel very mixed about treating “classics” as a genre in an of itself.

12. Any books that disappointed you?

Two immediately come to mind! The first one I talked about in my reply to shadaras—A Witch's Guide to Magical Innkeeping. I was pretty excited about this book—to quote what I said in my other comment: “there was a fox on the cover and in some ways I am very simple woman, I like witches, and I’m always down for magical inn-related worldbuilding”—but ended up really disliking it. And the beginning of the novel did intrigue me! But the further I got into the book, the clunkier the writing felt, and the more heavy-handed it was with its ideas and themes, like you could see the author going through a checklist of things to include. Then, to wrap everything up, the ending featured one of my most hated tropes—which, ironically, was one of the best written elements of the novel, but it's just not the kind of plot element I could ever personally enjoy.

The second one was my only one star read of the year: Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution. When I went on my brief Les Misérables kick in November/December, it inspired me to read a couple of of the 18th/19th century France-related nonfiction books that have been lingering on my shelves for years, of which this was one. I thought I would have a great time with this one—history about women is usually always a winner for me—but that’s… not what happened. For a book whose title implies that it’s about the women of the French Revolution, very little was actually about the actual women who lived during that time—it’s a collection of essays, and the first one was about a male writer, with several more being about fictional depictions of women in novels (written by men, ofc) and art in the aftermath of the revolution… it just was very much not what I was wanting from this book. I think there was only like one essay that I genuinely really enjoyed, and the majority of them were a slog to get through.

[tinkaton]

Boooo it sucks when 'cozy' books are disappointing, like how hard is it to write some fun fluff!!

And that second book sounds like such a misleading title for what it was lmao...