2017 In Books

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season, and that you are enjoying the new year so far! I thought it would be fun to look back on what I read in 2017, what I liked, what I didn't like, and how my goal went. And if you like this maybe I'll do it again next year!



At the beginning of the year I set a Goodreads goal of 10 books, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm a bit of a slow reader, or at least slower than I'd like to be, so I thought 10 books would give me roughly 4 1/2 weeks to finish each book. Last spring with me starting school, I didn't have a lot of time to devote to reading for fun, and so I made little progress.

I did finish All I Know Now by Carrie Hope Fletcher which I loved. I know it's silly to admit it. It seems like everyone who runs a YouTube channel is coning out with books, but I really enjoy her blog so I thought I'd pick up her book, and I' glad I did. This is one of those books that I wish I had read when I was in high school. My senior year I dealt with a lot of senseless drama with some friends, and it really hurt  our relationships with each other. It hurt a lot when I was going through that, and if I had this book it would have been the kick in the pants I needed. Reading it as an adult was a great way to both make fun of the awkward people we all are in high school and feel a sense of solidarity that it wasn't just me. This book has been described as a big sister who's already been through the teen-age giving advice to her younger sister as she is about to head into it, and honestly it is! This book is filled with wonderful stories of a girl growing up in an extraordinary way with truly ordinary teenage struggles. It's like a hug in book form!

After that I picked up a bunch of different things, mostly audio books through Audiobooksync. A website that gives out two free books, every week for 16 weeks in the summer. I got a lot of audio books this year, and last, through this website, and I loved having something I could put on this summer while traveling, and back home while at work, it really helped to get me on track with my goal. One thing I liked about this website is that half of the books were young adult, mostly fiction, but they were always paired with a similar book that was either non fiction or a classic, always with a similar theme or topic. For example, The Dead House by Dawn Kurtagitch was paired with the Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde the first week, and it was cool to see these different horror stories play out back to back, and pick out the similarities in this genre. All of the audio books I listened to this year were from this website and I loved the variety in these stories. I would definitely recommend The Dead House, Bone Gap, The Red Umbrella, and Boy. They were all really good stories, and excellent on audio, though I did pick up The Dead House in paperback and I recommend reading it with both simultaneously to get the most out of that story.

I got a few of the reviews I needed to get done for a while out of the way this year with Carson Crosses Canada, When Santa Was a Baby and Hack and Whack. But I haven't finished 6th Grade Supernatural or The Fire by Night yet, and I will have those reviews out as soon as I do. Weirdly the majority of the books I got from LibraryThing were children's books this year. Partially because they seemed to be some of the more interesting titles offered this year, and partially because they are short and easy to review. I reviewed all of these books on LibraryThing, Amazon, and Goodreads, but I did post here about When Santa Was A Baby, and I'll be reviewing more books on the blog this year.

Currently I am reading 6th Grade Supernatural by J.B. Cantwell (47% complete), and The Fire by Night by Teresa Messineo (25% complete), both of which I will review here on the blog as soon as I've finished them.

And that was my year in books! Let me know how your 2017 reading goal went in the comments, and I'll talk to you soon!

~Delaney