From the Top 10 Archives - Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2013

Since I started this blog, I've been periodically looking back at my old top 10 lists from years past and seeing how I feel about them today and other random things about them - and I'm getting close to catching up!  If you don't remember the details, I've kept lists each year of my ten favorite books all the way back to 1999.  In the early days I only shared the list with a small group, but over the years the distribution list got larger, plus I started sharing first on Facebook and then on this blog.  The lists comprise books I read in a particular year, not necessarily books published that year.

Here's my list from 2013, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

Life After Life - Kate Atkinson
Bitterblue - Kristen Cashore
Wonder - R.J. Palacio
Night Film - Marisha Pessl
Eleanor & Park - Rainbow Rowell
The Song Remains the Same - Allison Winn Scotch
The Rosie Project - Graeme Simsion
The Lotus Eaters - Tatjana Soli
The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker
The 5th Wave - Rick Yancey

For more about these books, read on!

How Does This List Hold Up Over Time?

What a list! Not surprisingly, as we get closer to the present day, I remember the books on these old lists more and more.  But this list is also a pretty stellar collection of books, with 5 books that I gave 5 stars to at the time.  I'm going to say my favorites are Life After Life and Wonder because they are still two of my favorite books of all time.  All these books are great, but the ones that are the least vivid in my memory are probably The Song Remains the Same and Bitterblue.

Genres

This list has three young adult books (a fantasy, Bitterblue, a realistic one, Eleanor and Park, and a dystopian, The Fifth Wave), two historical novels (Life After Life and The Lotus Eaters), a middle grade book (Wonder), two contemporary novels (The Song Remains the Same and The Rosie Project), a mystery/thriller (Night Film), and a final book that's hard to characterize - let's call it a literary coming of age/family drama with a slight touch of science fiction (The Age of Miracles).

Popularity

There are a lot of popular books on this list - 5 of the books have six figures worth of ratings on Goodreads which is a fair amount.  I thought for sure the most popular would be Wonder, but it's actually Eleanor & Park with almost 735,000 ratings.  The least popular is The Song Remains the Same with only 2,015 ratings.

Other Random Stuff

The highest rated of these books on Goodreads is Wonder, with a very high average rating of 4.45, which doesn't surprise me as everyone I know absolutely loved it.  The lowest rated was "The Song Remains the Same" with an average rating of only 3.39.

This is Kate Atkinson's 3rd appearance on one of my lists, following 2006 and 2010.  It's the second appearance for both Marisha Pessl (previously on in 2007) and Allison Winn Scotch (previously on in 2008).

None of these books were major award winners, but Life After Life was the Goodreads choice winner for historical fiction for 2013.

I guess I was still making the transition to reading on my kindle at this point in time - I think half of these books I read on my kindle, half I read in hard copy.  As a result, I also read more of these closer in time to when they were published since I wasn't waiting for them to come out in paperback - half of these books came out in 2013, 4 in 2012, and one in 2010.

Just as a note to anyone who actually considers reading all the books on my lists - Bitterblue is the 3rd book in a series, so don't start with that one!  And The Fifth Wave is the first book in a series, but the rest of the series is pretty bad which was a bummer after such a stellar first book.

The other thing that stuck out to me looking back at this list is that in the last few months, I've read books by 3 of these authors - Karen Thompson Walker, Graeme Simsion, and Marisha Pessl.  Not at all surprising that I would continue reading books by authors who wrote some of my past favorites, it just was funny that I'd read so many recently.

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Note that I'll 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 now without waiting, you can also click through to my Goodreads profile - I have a separate shelf for each of my old lists.