Lauren B. Lentini

Slightly belated new year’s wishes to you all!

By virtue of never getting invited anywhere, Jerald and I have come up with the greatest new year’s tradition this introvert could imagine: a quiet, uneventful night at home with a bottle of champagne and a few snacks. It’s the perfect opportunity to recover from all the extroversion required by Christmas, as much fun as it is. If we’re bored around midnight, we’ll watch a ball or a high heel or something like that drop, but this year I was too absorbed in playing Skyrim to notice the hour was upon us. A perfectly good way to end a decade.

I’ll resist the urge to recap, whether the events of the last year, the last decade, or the last time I blogged. If you’ll indulge me, though, here’s an incomplete recap of the books I read in 2019. (I had to guess about my audiobooks.)

One-offs

• Station Eleven
• Dark Matter
• I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
• The House of the Spirits (reread)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Of these, I’d say Dark Matter was the worst and The House of the Spirits was the best (even though I listened to it and didn’t care for the narrator). I declared THOTS my favorite book in high school, but reading it now and trying to remember who I was back then did not compute. How did they get away with teaching that book in a high school in Georgia?

His Dark Materials

• The Golden Compass (reread)

Yes, I decided to reread this because of the TV show. I have a hold on The Subtle Knife ebook, even though the whole series is sitting downstairs on my shelf. Ebooks and audiobooks have been really important to my reading revolution.

Dresden Files

• Storm Front
• Fool Moon

I keep hearing that this series gets better after book three, or book six, or… I’m enjoying it enough to find out, even if Fool Moon took me forever and a day to finish. I like Harry a lot, but I’m waiting for him to have an epiphany about women.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

• To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
• P.S. I Still Love You
• Always and Forever, Lara Jean

This series was downright adorable and impossible to put down. It’s obviously quite different from the stuff I usually read, but I was enchanted by Lara Jean and her wholesome high school life.

The Broken Earth trilogy

• The Fifth Season
• The Obelisk Gate
• The Stone Sky

This series was beautiful and haunting and I look forward to rereading it someday. Jerald started listening to it first, and before I’d even finished The Fifth Season, he’d listened to all three and bought hard copies to add to our library.

The All Souls trilogy

• A Discovery of Witches
• Shadow of Night
• The Book of Life

I devoured these three books in record time (granted, I read one of them on vacation) and the new one is calling to me from my queue. Discovery is like Twilight for grown-ups that doesn’t suck. I can see how some people didn’t enjoy the rest of the series as much, but it still worked for me.

Threshold universe

• The Fold
• Dead Moon

The Fold wasn’t as good as 14, the first book in this series, and Dead Moon was downright bad. I like Peter Clines, and I have another of his books in my queue, but I’ve decided I don’t like it when he writes zombies.

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I’m damned proud of that list. Considering I didn’t start my ebook habit until June, my 20-book goal doesn’t seem too ambitious. I’m working on my plan, though (and showing off my bullet journal).

In no particular order, I’ve got books I’m currently reading (Little Fires Everywhere, Midnight Riot); continuations of series I’ve already started (Time’s Convert, The Subtle Knife, Record of a Spaceborn Few, Grave Peril); books I already own (Paradox Bound, Quiet); and books I’ve been intending to read for years or even decades (Dune, Altered Carbon).

The other half of my list is blank, and that’s important. The “I shouldn’t read anything new until I finish what I already have” attitude killed my motivation to read anything for a long, long time. So half of the books I read this year will be whatever strikes my fancy at the time. I’m looking forward to the surprise.

I’m a sucker for this “20 in 2020” concept, so I may have to come up with more of these lists. 20 watercolor paintings? 20 new adventures? 20 new recipes? What 20 in 2020 goals should I make? And what are yours?

Preview of my next post: My word for the year is “enough.” Bonus points if you guess what that means to me or where it comes from!