Anyway, for many many years - dating back to a time when I barely used the internet (1999!) - I have been compiling a list of my ten favorite books read in the year just ended and sharing with my friends, first by e-mail, then by facebook, and starting last year, on this blog. It's not necessarily books published in the year I make the list, just books I read that year. Here's my list for 2018, in alphabetical order by author's last name:
The Royal We - Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
This Is How It Always Is - Laurie Frankel
Force of Nature - Jane Harper
Queen of Shadows - Sarah J. Maas
The Clockmaker's Daughter - Kate Morton
Eligible - Curtis Sittenfeld
What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw - Leah Stewart
Other People's Houses - Abbi Waxman
Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein
The Female Persuasion - Meg Wolitzer
Traditionally, I used to just send around a list with no further comment on the books. But now that I have more space, I want to tell you more about the books - first a little bit about each book itself, and then some general comments on the list as a whole. Though if you've been reading this blog regularly, I think you have actually heard about most of these books in one post or another. And I would love to hear what everyone else thought of these books, and what your favorite books of 2018 were!
Read on for more:
The Royal We - Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan - This is basically a chick lit book, about a young American student doing her year abroad at Oxford, who befriends and then falls in love with one of the (fictitious) princes of England. I read this on my summer vacation and it was a pitch perfect vacation read, light and fun and funny, but also with more emotion and depth than you might expect from that one sentence description of the plot. This certainly was not the most literary book I read this year, but I adored reading it and have been recommending it to multiple people offline to read for their vacations.
This Is How It Always Is - Laurie Frankel - I read this one with my book club, but since we read it after I published my post on best book club books, it was not included in that post. But it definitely should be added to the list of books I recommend for book clubs, since I think we had one of the best, if not THE best book club discussion ever about this book. It's a book about a family with 5 sons, and the youngest son announces - at a very young age - that he wants to be a girl. It was so thought-provoking, and also so emotional, with beautiful writing.
Force of Nature - Jane Harper - For a much longer description of this book, you can read my 5 star review of it here. Short version, this is a mystery set in Australia, where a group of 5 women from a company are forced to go on a corporate retreat involving a 3 day wilderness hiking and camping trip, but on the 3rd day, only 4 return. The book alternates perspectives between various of the women during the trip, and the perspective of the detective investigating after they return. Terrific suspenseful read with a surprising but satisfying conclusion. I read a lot of disappointing mysteries and thrillers in 2018, but this book proved to me that I'm not just sick of the genre.
Queen of Shadows - Sarah J. Maas - This is the 4th book in Sarah J. Maas's "Throne of Glass" young adult fantasy series, and my favorite of the series though it is hard to narrow it down. I read books 1-3 of the series in 2017, and in 2018, read books 4-7, plus the collection of prequel novellas - catching up with the series just in time for the publication of the 7th book. And I just received so much pleasure from reading the series this year that I had to include one of the books on the list - though I definitely recommend starting from the beginning with the first book, "Throne of Glass," if you're interested. Both my teenage daughter and I LOVED this series so so so much, and I mentioned it as my favorite young adult fantasy series in this post partly through the year. In fact, had I finished the series before I wrote my post on my favorite series of all time, I would have included this series on that list.
The Clockmaker's Daughter - Kate Morton - Kate Morton is one of my most favorite authors, and this is a multi-time period historical fiction with mystery (and a ghost), and I loved it! For more about this book, you can read my 5 star review.
Eligible - Curtis Sittenfeld - Like "The Royal We," this is another light fiction book that I have been recommending to people to read on vacation. It's a modern re-telling of "Pride and Prejudice," and it was just so charming and fun to read. Curtis Sittenfeld's books are all somewhat different from each other, but what they share is her knack for bringing characters to life. I actually didn't read "Pride and Prejudice" for the first time until 2017 and liked it but didn't love it the way some people do - so I actually liked this book even more than I did the original.
What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw - Leah Stewart - This is the third of three 5 star books I read this year. It alternates between the perspectives of a couple who have just broken up - he's an actor whose career is on an upward trajectory, and she's an actress whose career is on a downward trajectory. But there is a lot more to the plot than that, and the writing is just brilliant. For more on it, read my 5 star review.
Other People's Houses - Abbi Waxman - I read this one on a kid-free weekend this summer, and loved it. It's about four families living on the same block, and alternates perspectives between them. Just a great book about regular people, parenthood, and marriage. It's not a sequel to Abbi Waxman's first book which was on my 2017 10 favorites list, but characters from that book do make a cameo appearance which was fun.
Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein - This is billed as a young adult historical novel, but nothing about it is really young adult, especially because it was a somewhat dark book. It starts as an account a young British female spy is writing after being captured by the Nazis occupied France, where she is supposed to be sharing her knowledge to avoid further torture, and later also has the perspective of her best friend. It starts out a little slow but becomes an absolutely amazing book along the way - left me a total wreck in a puddle of tears. I read this one with my teenage daughter, and with my friend Sarah of my 2 person book club. Allison and I loved it, but much to my chagrin Sarah did not.
The Female Persuasion - Meg Wolitzer - This novel is about a woman named Greer, from the start of college through her young adulthood, along with a few other characters in her orbit, including the fictional feminist icon Faith Frank (described in the book as a less famous Gloria Steinem). Meg Wolitzer is a terrific writer, and this book had a lot of interesting and thought-provoking things to say about feminism and being a woman. I did a virtual book club on the blog on this one with my friend Jennie.
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A few other notes on these books:Genres - This list consists of two historical novels, a mystery/thriller, a young adult fantasy, and the other 6 were all pretty much contemporary women's fiction books.
Repeat authors - There were a lot of repeat authors on this list - Jane Harper and Abbi Waxman were both on my 2017 ten favorites list, Meg Wolitzer was on my 2014 ten favorites list, Leah Stewart was on my 2006 ten favorites list, and Kate Morton is on this list for the 4th time - she previously was on my 2009 ten favorites list, 2010 ten favorites list, and 2015 ten favorites list!
Most favorite favorites - if you're curious, my top 5 of these are the 3 books that I gave 5 star reviews to on the blog (What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw, Force of Nature, and The Clockmaker's Daughter), Other People's Houses, and Code Name Verity. As I mentioned, it was hard to pick the other 5 - not because I couldn't find 5 more books I liked but because there were so many other books I loved that it was hard to eliminate them!
Other random statistics - As usual, these books were all pretty recent. Code Name Verity was the oldest, as it was published in 2012. The Royal We and Queen of Shadows were published in 2015, Eligible was published in 2016, This is How It Always is in 2017, and the other 5 were published this year.
I received two of these books from Netgalley - What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw and Eligible, though I promise getting them for free did not influence my opinion. The rest were either from the library or my own personal collection.
Many of these books were pretty widely read, with the most read on Goodreads being Queen of Shadows, with more than 163,000 ratings. What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw was the least read on Goodreads, with only 923 ratings. Queen of Shadows is also the one with the highest average rating on Goodreads, with a 4.58, and What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw was the lowest rated with only a 3.28 average rating, which I just can't understand since I loved it so much! Almost all of the books were also Goodreads Choice nominees, and Queen of Shadows won Goodreads Choice for young adult fantasy in 2015.
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Note that I give all these posts the tag "Top 10," so you should be able to click on the label "Top 10" at the bottom of the post and see all my other Top 10 posts. And if you just want to see all my old Top 10 lists, you can also click through to my Goodreads profile - I have a separate shelf for each of my old lists.
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