All Your Compliments and Your Cutting Remarks Are Captured Here in My Quotation Marks

Since we're just finishing the first week of the new year, I thought I'd start doing my look back at 2018. I'm going to start with books.

In 2018 I read 95 books. Holy shit! I was really sick for most of January and all the dizziness and hormone issues I had that kept me from playing outside as much as I wanted to at the beginning of the year, were probably big contributing factors with my overabundance of book reading.

My favorite genre is probably contemporary fiction. Last year I tried to read a lot more classic fiction and non-fiction. I love them both, but they aren't my natural go-to. I enjoyed the classic fiction a lot, but with my attention span issues, I did have problems with so much description and how long it can take those olden day writers to get on with it. Sometimes, in order to juice things up and because I have the maturity level of a 10 year old, I would assume that they were using the modern day use of some of their words. That way sentences that went something like, "His wild ejaculations made their intercourse much more penetrating" were way more fun than originally intended.

Anyway, let's get on with the lists, shall we?

Top Six Contemporary Novels. All of these lists are in any order depending on my mood at any given time

1.) "Lincoln on the Bardo", by George Saunders

2.) "Pachinko", Min Jin Lee

3.)"Atonement", Ian McEwan

4.)  "Sing, Unburied, Sing", Jesmyn Ward

5.) "Less", Andrew Sean Greer

6.) "The Leavers", Lisa Ko

I'm also going to do an honorable mention list of contemporary fiction for books that were great, fun reads, but didn't quite measure up (as far as I was concerned) to the six above:

1.) "Underground Railroad", Colson Whitehead

2.) "Little Fires Everywhere", Celste Ng

3.) "My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry", Frederik Backman

4.) "The Round House", Louise Erdrich

5.) "Autumn", Ali Smith

I love Westerns, but this year I only read one for some reason. Lucky for me it was a good one. Western:

1.) Days Without End", Sebastian Barry

Sc Fi. I didn't read any classic sci-fi this year (I guess I could put the Octavia Butler on that list, but I'm putting her on this one instead) and the book I loved the most wasn't the one I thought it would be:

1.) "The Book of Strange New Things", Michel Faber - this book was so good.

2.) "Maddadam #3", Margaret Atwood

3.) "Dawn (Xenogenesis #1), Octavia Butler

4.) "The Book of Joan", Lidia Yuknavitch

I ended up reading a little more Young Adult fiction last year than I normally do, which made me want to read even more this year. I'm putting Children and Young Adult together here:

1.) "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", by Maya Angelou is a reread for me, but it's been forever and it still holds up so well.

2.) "Eleanor and Park", Rainbow Rowell

3.) The two Harry Potter books I read, by J K Rowling. I finished the series this year, and it put a hole in the heart of my reading list. I will never be able to read those wonderful books for the first time again.

4.) "The Hunger Games", Suzanne Collins

5.) "The Replacement: Book 1 of Replacement Series, Bianca Sierra-Luebke (my niece)

I read some great Horror/suspense fiction this year. By far, the best of all of those was "Lovecraft Country". I highly recommend it. Here's the whole list:

1.) "Lovecraft Country", Matt Ruff

2.) "His Bloody Project", Graeme Macrae Burnet

3.) "The Hunger", Alma Katsu

4.) "The North Water", Ian McGuire

5.) "The Invisible Man", H. G. Wells

In 2017 I didn't read any detective/mystery fiction, so I made a point to read some in 2018:

1.) "Murder on the Orient Express", Agatha Christie

2.) "The Trespasser", Tana French

3.) "Ill Will", Dan Chaon

4.)  "Girl in Disguise", Greer Mcallister

Besides the Maya Angelou book, I only did one other reread this year. It was one of my favorite books when I was 19, and it should stand alone:

1.)"The Color Purple", Alice Walker

Like I said above, I'm trying to read more non-fiction. So, here were the favorites I read this year:

1.) "Hunger", Roxane Gay

2.) "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", Joan Didion

3.) "Kitchen Confidential", Anthony Bourdain

4.) "I Saw Ramallah", Mourid Barghouti

5.) "Why We Run", Bernd Heinrich

I read a few short story collections last year too:

1.) "Difficult Women", Roxane Gay

2.) The Bloody Chamber", Angela Carter

3.) "Skin Folk", Nalo Hopkinson

Finally, we're at the Classic fiction I read. There were some amazing books. "Tess of the D'ubervilles" didn't make the list. It's not that it wasn't an amazing book, it was just so depressing and it made me want to go inside the world of the novel and shoot every man in the face. Here are the novels that DID make the cut"

1.) "Pride and Prejudice", Jane Austen

2.) "Rebecca", Daphne Du Maurier

3.) "The Count of Monte Cristo", Alexandre Dumas

4.) "Midnight's Children", Salman Rushdie

5.) "Vanity Fair", William MakepeaceThackeray

Now, I will make it my mission to go out and read all kinds of books for my list next year. I'm going to continue to try and read more non-fiction, and classic literature and my latest little scheme is to read all of Jane Austen's novels and follow that up with reading "The Jane Austen Book Club". The nerdiest of endeavors. I hope all of your nerdy endeavors end well for you this year too.