End of the Year Round-up

What’s the best book you read this year? The worst?
I already talked about my Top 5 of each here. I couldn’t pick out a single best book but I loved the Collegia Magica-trilogy. It’s both classic fantasy and does something unusual with the genre. The worst is definitely A Conspiracy in Belgravia.

Your favourite “classic” you read this year:
Confession time: The only classics I read this year were Persuasion and The Great Gatsby. And when reading I felt kind of meh about both. I didn’t hate them but I also didn’t love them. But then I happened to watched movie-adaptations of both (the 1995 Persuasion and Leonardo di Caprio’s Gatsby) my feelings about The Great Gatsby didn’t change but really loved Persuasion. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the right mood when I read it.

The book that disappointed you:
The Waining Moon Duology had a really promising premise but sadly failed to live up to it.

The hardest book you read this year (topic or writing style):
Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime dealt with heavy stuff.

The funniest book you read this year:
Durch Nacht und Wind: Die criminalistischen Werke des Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Aufgezeichnet von seinem Freunde Friedrich Schiller. Yes. RPF about Goethe and Schiller in which they solve crimes. It is very silly. And hillarious.

The saddest book you read this year (or a book that touched you):
Nothing I read was terribly sad but The Secret Diary of a Princess was a book about Marie Antoinette’s childhood that really made her come alive and well…

Were you part of a reading challenge? Did you meet it?
I set myself a goal of 52 books on GR and managed that (I had higher goals but the last two years were somewhat bad reading-wise so I aimed low). And I did take part in the 16 Tasks of the Festive Season which isn’t one you can win (unless you consider ‘winning’ as complete blackout, then I lost). But I did better than I had hoped which is nice.

Are you signed up for any in 2018?
As always the GR-one. I have not yet decided on how many.
I also don’t know yet, if I want to join others. In the past I tried a few, then suddenly felt like reading a book that didn’t fit any categories and felt bad about that. As a result I didn’t read anything for a while. But then I did quite well with the Festive Seasons one and even made some nice discoveries in my tbr-pile when I searched for books that fit a task.
I have now googled a bit but haven’t yet found any challenge that speaks to me. (By which I mean: which I can mostly solve with my tbr-pile…)

Which authors/series featured most prominently for you this year?
*Checks* Carol Berg. How surprising.
surprise3

The last book you finished this year:
I did finish Crocodile on the Sandbank. Currently I’m reading Restauration and (listening to) The Prisoner of Zenda and perhaps I will finish either of those. (For that I need to get away from my laptop…)

The first book you will finish in the new year:
Whatever I didn’t finish from the above mentioned.

The genre you read the most this year:
Fantasy. No counting required for once (usually it’s head-to-head with crime but this year I didn’t feel very murderous)

Which new releases are you most looking forward to reading next year?
The final book from The Gates of the World will come out and supposedly also the next Peter Grant-novel (though that might still change…not my looking forward to it, the release-dates of this series just jump around a lot).

Which book(s) from your tbr-pile are you planning to takle next year?
Red Seas under Red Skies by Scott Lynch and Stalking Darkness by Lynn Flewellyn. Both for the same reason: they are the 2nd book in series I read the 1st in 2017 and if I don’t read the next one soon I will have forgotten everything that happened.
Besides the Festive Seasons reminded me that I have Melanie Clegg’s entire backlist on my Kindle. I read two for the challenge and now I have two more left and want to read those, soon (a biography on Marie Antoinette and a novel about English aristocratic sisters caught up in the French revolution).
And I always want to read more classics…let’s see how that works this time.

 

2 thoughts on “End of the Year Round-up

  1. The 16 Task have been a lot of fun, haven’t they?

    As for Persuasion, I didn’t like that one when I first read it, but loved it when I tried it again and read it slowly and it small chunks.

    1. Yes, so many challenges have too many fields where I just can’t find anything either because they ask for genres I’m absolutely not into or are terribly specific (read a book that won award X in the last five years) which is very impractical when I’m trying to use the challenge to clear out my tbr-pile.
      I think I was really in the wrong mood for Persuasion. I felt so much that I know *have* to read that because I still hadn’t read much Austen and then just suffered through it…

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