2019: My Reading in Review

If you’ll allow me to be cliched for a moment, can you believe 2019 is almost over?! It’s been a long one, a tough one, but also one with another lush moments to get me through.

If I’m honest, it’s the year that reading took a back seat for me but I think that’s ok too. I stopped forcing myself to read just because, focused on quality rather than quantity and fully embraced the DNF mentality. I didn’t want to force myself to read just because and fall o it of love with it.

All in, I read about 50 books in 2019 which, though significantly less than last year, is still a respectable number in my eyes. This was the year that I read a real variety, both in terms of genre and format. This year I even embraced kindle and audiobook format, which really helped me out. I’ve been listening to the Harry Potter books while I do errands a lot recently and I’ve really loved it.

I really embraced quality over quantity this year, as I mentioned earlier. It was wonderful for my reading habits but certainly made picking my favourite books of the year a challenge. I’ve just about managed to whittle it down to my absolute favourites, though if you’ve been keeping on top of my reviews, you’ll know that there are a fair few more that could have made it!

Without further ado, my 2019 favourites:

(This isn’t all of them because of aforementioned kindle usage and the frequency of which I thrust books upon my friends).

• Melmoth by Sarah Perry
• England: Poems from a School edited by Kate Clanchy
• Crowfall by Ed McDonald
• Our Stop by Laura Jane Williams
• Meat Market by Juno Dawson
• A Girl Called Shameless by Laura Steven
• Poems to Live Your Life By illustrates by Chris Riddell
• Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
• On Writing by Stephen King
• Almost Love by Louise O’Neill
• The Girl Aquarium by Jen Campbell
• Circe by Madeline Miller
• Green Dawn at St Enda’s by Tracey Iceton

And there you have it! I’ve raved about these all before, either in a full review or on social media so I’ll keep the fangirling to a minimum now! I have attached the links to reviews however so if you want to know why I loved a book so much, you can.

Here’s to another year of great books!

Kelly x