In 2018, I had my lightest reading year since I started tracking my books in Goodreads in 2010. But it was a busy year, with my promotion, election campaign, and numerous personal endeavors! I read 3.5 books in December to close out the year with 64 books read. That’s still more than one a week, so not too bad even if it’s not my usual 100.
However, I am redoubling my efforts for 2019, and am committing to read (a book, not my email or blogs) for at least a few minutes every night before I go to sleep. I’d like to aim for 100 books again, but we’ll see how that goes as the year progresses. I’m already a little behind in that, being only 1.5 books in, but I’ll see how it goes. No beating myself up if I don’t make it again, as long as I’m being consistent about my reading!
4 stars:
Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, by Deborah Fallows and James M. Fallows: This took me forever to get through, but it had so many fascinating insights about what makes small (and big) towns special and successful. I am excited to take many of the ideas I uncovered and see how I can make them work in my own town.
The Garden of Small Beginnings, by Abbi Waxman: I loved this sweet romance! It reminded me a little bit of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books in how it was sweet but realistic – and she’s one of my favorite authors, so that’s a huge compliment. Nothing groundbreaking but it was still really enjoyable, and I liked the gardening tips that opened each chapter.
3 stars:
A Spark of Light, by Jodi Picoult: Jodi Picoult is one of my favorite authors of all time, so I found this book to be a big disappointment. While her books are usually thought-provoking and make me consider an issue from multiple perspectives, this felt rather one-sided to me with mostly lip service paid to the pro-life viewpoint. But where this book was really a miss for me was the reverse chronology – since I already knew what was going to happen, I was less interested in all the backstory and was just wishing we could get back to what was going to happen next in the present-day cliffhanger. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed to find that we didn’t come back to the unfolding story until the last ten pages, which meant I was waiting a long time and the author didn’t have nearly enough time to wrap each character’s storyline up. Big disappointment for me from the usually unfailing Jodi Picoult.
Any book recommendations for me? Follow me here on Goodreads to keep up with what I’m reading in real time.
I was also disappointed with Picoult’s latest. I usually love her, but this one wasn’t as good… and I saw the “big surprises” coming a mile away. Too bad
Glad that at least I wasn’t the only one with this opinion!