Top Ten (Or So): Books Read in 2017

This was a small year for books. Only 33! That's the least amount of books I've read in a year since I started keeping track, and possibly since I learned to read. Of course, I had a good excuse (getting engaged!!!), but it's made making a list like this a little more difficult. Fortunately, there were a couple of amazing ones.

So without further ado, in sort-of approximate order from least to most favourite, are some of the best books I read in 2015:

Section Three--these were great, I loved these ones: the "all the good ones" section:

--Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. This is first on the list because I forget almost all the details and only remember that I enjoyed it a lot. One of my favourites in the "Yeah, it was great!" category.

--A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias. I remember this one much better, and I remember being confused at the end, and not being quite as impressed as I'd hoped to be based on reviews. Nonetheless, it made me think, it entertained me, it remained memorable, and I'd recommend it to scifi lovers, even picky ones.

--Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis. I'm surprised this one didn't end up being higher up the list, since it's Lewis. But, wonder of wonders, I've discovered I've outgrown Lewis just a little. I still loved it (thus it's on this list). Especially when he talks about Joy itself. Lewis gets Joy in a way few people do, and I've always longed for it.

Section Two--these are just so good: the section with my actual favourites of the year:

--The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. This came at a good time in my life. So many good ideas to increase happiness, plus the central idea that you have to work for it. Being joyful is a choice, in many ways, and one you can actively pursue.

--The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. This almost went in Section One, for all-time favourites. So, so close. In fact, one of the only reasons why it isn't there is because I didn't want Section Two to be too small. Because this one is great. So inspiring. Such good ideas. Such an amazing end goal, that I want so much. Yeah, she can be a bit weird sometimes and I don't always agree with her. But when does that not happen? With some caveats: Read this if you want to change your life.

Section One--life-changing, ground-breaking, or astonishing: the new additions to my all-time favourites

--The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Changed the way I thought about food, and made me interested in it for the first time in my life. Now cooking, gardening, farming, hunting, gathering, society's relationship to all those, are all in my areas of keen interest. It was so great, and so entertaining and interesting. Plus the cover is gorgeous, so that always helps.

--The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. This is MY kind of book. This is it. Any attempt to explain it is going to get at the wrong sort of idea.

--The Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster. This changed my life. Part of that is definitely because it came at just the right time, when I was longing for something to teach me about the little disciplines to make my life better. Part of that is probably because it comes from a different perspective than I'm used to. I'm Catholic, and though this book doesn't go against Church teachings at all (except maybe in a couple obvious places (like the part on Confession)), there's still some new ideas for me. Ideas that I think could be very useful for Catholics to internalize. One of the most striking for me was the idea of practical prayer. Don't want to get into it too much, but this is one of the best and most inspiring practical guides to living a Christian life I've found.


Runners Up (In No Order Whatsoever and Possibly Missing Some Good Ones Because I'm Really, Really Bad at Making Up My Mind)
--The Sunbird by Elizabeth E. Wein. Some great, great characters in this slim book.
--What If? by Randall Munroe. So funny. So informative.
--Little Sins Mean a Lot by Elizabeth Scalia. So great at making me want to be better!

P.S. See also the Top Ten (Or So) lists from previous years: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016.

Top Ten (Or So): Covers of Books Read in 2017

I don't have the time and energy to keep up this blog anymore. But the Top-Ten Lists are just so fun to do, that I can still manage to find what I need to do two of these per year. Here goes the first one.


Here they are--in only approximate order--favourite to least favourite, the best covers of the books I read in 2017. There are fewer than ten because this was another disappointing year for book covers. Maybe because I read so few books last year? Anyway, whatever. Here goes. The first two are a tie because I loved them both so much.

I don't know what it is about Jackaby. Partly the colour scheme--I love blue, and then there's that little, striking bit of red. Partly it's the look of the character on the front. Partly it's the interesting way the scene is shown inside his profile. Partly it's the reference to Sherlock Holmes and Buffy on the quote on the front.

The Omnivore's Dilemma has what I've come to learn is a not uncommon style of cover for food books. But at the time, I found it striking, and I still do. I love the experience of reading a book that looks like this. Just looking at that food on the cover, standing out in the stark, black background, makes me want to be enormously healthy and energetic and productive and knowledgable about food.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. It's just cool looking. I've always loved recursion.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is simple and elegant, like how your life can be if you follow the guidelines in this book.

What If? has a dinosaur being lowered into a wormhole with tentacles. Enough said.

I'm not totally sure why I like the cover for A Darkling Sea. It looks kind of dark and mysterious, I guess?

Archivist Wasp isn't by any means my favourite cover for the year, but it's striking. You can't deny that. It always stood out to me in book lists I looked at.


Runners Up (in No Particular Order): Food Rules and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollen, because they were cool in the same way as The Omnivore's Dilemma, but I didn't want to put three books by the same author on the list; Little Sins Mean a Lot by Elizabeth Scalia, maybe because it stood out from all the rest? It's suitable to the content of the book, too; Miss Ellicott's School for the Magically Minded by Sage Blackwood looks like the kind of Middle Grade book I'd like to read--the children look fun and the adventure looks adventure-y.

P.S. See also my previous lists: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016.

Announcement

I can't keep up this blog anymore. My life has moved past the days of incessant reading. I'm getting married soon, starting a family. I'm already way too busy--I'll be even more so then.

Plus... I don't have a laptop anymore. I got rid of it to prevent my large overuse.

So maybe one day, maybe I'll have more of a desire to pursue hobbies like this, and be rich enough to buy a new laptop. But meanwhile, I'll maybe keep up the Top Ten books and covers per year, because those are SO fun, and not too time consuming. But I'll skip reviews and awards, and just keep track of books on Goodreads.

RED Book Awards 2016

So I'd decided that my life was too full of other things to keep up this blog, and that I'd only do the top ten lists and the awards every year, and that's it. But even that seems to be too much, since it's been more than a year since I was supposed to finish this post.
Oh well. There's life for you.
I made some notes on the books for the first half of the year, so that was helpful. But the rest of them I forget so much. The RED Book Awards are too fun to skip altogether, but they are NOT going to be very accurate or insightful this year. Yet here they are anyway, the RED Book Awards of 2016:

Favourite Central Female Character: Ok, this is cheating, but Helene Hanff from 84, Charing Cross Road. Helene is a real person from a non-fiction book, but I couldn't help choose her. She is just so American in the very best sense of the word: energetic, obnoxious, kinda crazy, but charismatic as hell. She felt like a Main Character.
Runners Up:  >>Maree Mallory from Deep Secret: I don't remember her all that well anymore, but what I do remember is a grumpy, funny, delightful character, not a type nearly common enough as a main female lead. >>Miss Pym from Miss Pym Disposes: a bit older, a bit different, a bit feisty.

Favourite Central Male Character: Gonna be a tie for this one. I could have chosen, but I had so many runner up options I decided I could afford to give the winner's place to two.
Gwalchmai from Hawk of May. Very inspiring and heroic, in an interesting way instead of a cardboard cutout hero way.
Shoya Ishida from A Silent Voice. Such a realistic complex character, especially for a manga. Child bully turned depressed, lonely teenager--how many popular manga, or books in general, could choose him as a character and be so fascinating?
Runners Up: >>Cazaril from The Curse of Chalion: he's not quite as fantastic as Bujold's main hero, Miles Vorkosigan, but he still has this great arc of people slowly realizing his awesomeness as events spiral into exciting chaos. >>The whiskey priest from The Power and the Glory: he's not a good character, but he's an amazing character, if you know what I mean. Complex, real, fascinating. >>Rupert Venables from Deep Secret: basically an ordinary British guy, but with this delightful undercurrent of weirdness.

Favourite Secondary Female Character: Yuzuru Nishimiya from A Silent Voice. So feisty, so funny, so cute, so devoted a sister, so unique a character. All the characters from this manga were fantastic and complex, but she was the one I liked best.
Runners Up: Sophie from Jinx, Jinx's Magic, and Jinx's Fire: so practical and intelligent. She wasn't a very central character, but she appealed to me a lot. >>Elidan from Kingdom of Summer: honestly, I can't quite remember what I liked about her. But I have so few people for this section, and she was on a list of favourite secondary female characters I made last year sometime, so I must have liked something about her. Maybe it was her complexity and hardness or something?


Favourite Secondary Male Character: Simon, also from Jinx, Jinx's Magic, and Jinx's Fire. This is where my lack of memory really annoys me. Because I remember loving Simon so much, and him being so great a character. But I just can't remember him enough to define it. I think it was the grumpiness, the intelligence, the complexity. The fact that you couldn't really tell if he was evil or wonderful. One of the two for sure, just not ordinary.
Runners Up: >>Scholar Christopher Wolfe from Ink and Bone: fiercely intelligent, harsh yet a good teacher. >>Keir Ieskar from The Silence of Medair and Voice of the Lost: so fascinating, so controlled, so secretly emotional. >>The Bloodwitch from Truthwitch: very mysterious and powerful, and definitely my favourite character from this book. >>Nick Mallory from Deep Secret: I really don't remember this book well enough to talk about Nick, but I think he was grumpy and clever. >>Also there's some of the knights from Hawk of May, and the king from The Sand-Reckoner, but I really don't remember enough about them to write anything. I wanted to make note of them, though. Good characters.

(This was my favourite category this year. Some really top-notch secondary male characters.)

Favourite Ensemble: The group of kids from A Silent Voice. This series is getting many awards for a good reason. The reality of these kids' characters, and the complexity of their goodness. Just so great. And you got so many different interactions between them. Almost no paring (not in a romantic sense) was left unexplored.
Runners Up: >>The warriors from Hawk of May: so cool, so inspiring. >>The girls from Miss Pym Disposes: so funny, so real, so interesting, such a great contrast to Hawk of May. >>The Orkney people from Kingdom of Summer: I had a note that this was an interesting ensemble because they were "so messed up". I don't remember anything more than that, but I know I do like messed-up fictional families sometimes.


Favourite Romance: Tie again.
Simon and Sophie from Jinx, Jinx's Magic, and Jinx's Fire. They were already married, a point in their favour since this seems to be a bit rare in books. They were so different, yet suited. Some angst, some unexpected affection, yet without the drama that many romances have.
Medair and SPOILER from Medair books, The Silence of Medair and Voice of the Lost. Spoilers for the books ahead!
I was not a big fan of the primary romance (between Medair and Illukar), so I was so, so excited when my favourite character, Keir Ieskar, turned out to be a love interest, in the most weird, interesting, time travel-ly way.
Runners Up: >>Shoya Ishida and Shoko Nishimiya from A Silent Voice: not really explicitly a romance (or it might have won), but probably one anyway, and so sweet and real. >>Gwalchmai and Elidan from Kingdom of Summer: very sad, but good. A good story. >>Robert Blair and Marion Sharpe from The Franchise Affair: I liked it. Don't remember why. But look at this quote of him describing her: "[A]ll compact of fire and metal. ... People don't marry women like Marion Sharpe, any more than they marry winds and clouds. Any more than they marry Joan of Arc." >>Romeo and Juliet from Romeo and/or Juliet: of course, being a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, I didn't always like their romance, but some of the endings could be very sweet and show how awesome marriage can be.



Favourite Bromance: Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage from The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. They bond over awesome computer stuff, and up being the first programmers. It's awesome.
Runners Up: >>Jinx and Simon from Jinx, Jinx's Magic, and Jinx's Fire: ok, not exactly a bromance. More father/son. But so great, with all the gruff exteriors and hidden affection that are so fun to read about. >>Duun and Thorn from Cuckoo's Egg: again, father/son, not bromance. I don't remember this one too well, but there was some good stuff. >>Helene Hanffe and Frank Doel from 84, Charing Cross Road: she is just SO American, and he SO British. And their relationship via letter is sweet and grows so slowly and naturally. I am so glad this is nonfiction and this relationship actually happened. >>Jess Brightwell and Dario Santiago from Ink and Bone: Again, not exactly a bromance... but such a good frenemy relationship that I had to add it.


Favourite World: Curse of Chalion (also Paladin of Souls because it's in the same world, but I liked reading about this world best in the first book for a few reasons). It's the gods that get me in this one, and the people's relationship to them, and the religion in general. Bujold seems to really understand somehow how people's relationship to God tends to work (in a way that reminds me of Megan Whalen Turner and The King of Attolia).
Runners Up: >>Hmmmm, this one is hard... (Man, do I tend to forget world building) Hawk of May, maybe, cause of the Light and all that? Ink and Bone cause books? Deep Secret cause of Diana Wynne Jones craziness? Jinx cause of cool fairy tales? And All the Stars cause of cool alien/apocalypse stuff? Maybe even Speaker for the Dead or Fortress in Eye of Time or Wild Seed, although I've forgotten too much to properly add them?

Favourite Surprisingly Good Book: Let Your Life Speak. I thought it was a wishy washy New Age-y book. And you know what? Maybe it is. But it changed my life. The start of a long process of growth and change started from reading this book, and I am so, so grateful.
Runners Up: >>No Exit: I actually like Sartre's plays. Who knew? I didn't. Existentialism is fascinating, even if I disagree. >>Voice of the Lost: considering it's really only half of one book, I expected it to have a very similar feel, but actually I liked it considerably better. It put several aspects of the first in a completely different light, and had unique plot twists.



Favourite Book Not Getting Enough Awards: Fortress in Eye of Time. There were some great characters here, some interesting world building, and some great relationships (Tristen and Cefwyn, Idrys (Master Crow) and Cefwyn, whatever-her-name-was and Cefwyn). But I knew even while reading it that I was going to forget far too much to read the sequels. It needed to grab me just a bit more. But still--it was good stuff, so I'd like to acknowledge it.
Runners Up: >>Romeo and/or Juliet: because it's hilarious and amazing. >>Spiritual Formation andThe Case for the Psalms: the RED Awards are mostly about aspects only applicable to fiction, but I read a bunch of really great nonfiction this year, and it feels sad not to include them. So here's a small shoutout to them!


P.S. See also the previous years awards: 2013, 2014, 2015.