Mysteries/Thrillers, Part 2

 Mysteries and thrillers are two popular genres, so I'm often asked for my recommendations for mystery and thriller books.  I’ve previously written about some of my favorite mysteries and thrillers, but it’s been a few years, and it’s definitely a genre I get asked about a lot, so it seemed like it was high time for an update!  Some of the authors I had just discovered in 2018 when I wrote those entries have become favorites, and I’ve discovered some new authors and books since then as well.  

Must Read Authors

As befits someone who reads a lot and is constantly amassing new books to read, I have a long, long list of must read authors.  I thought it would be fun to try to narrow it down to not just authors I love, but authors who I anticipate their books with great interest and try to read them ASAP when they come out.  Since there are actually a pretty enormous group of authors for whom that is true, to narrow it down, I'm going to give myself a few parameters:  (1)  they have to have written at least 3 books, and (2) I have to have read all of their books.  There are other authors who I love but I'm still working on catching up on all of their books - I'll cover those in a future post.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll probably recognize most of these names as I've discussed them in my posts on various genres, among other things.  A few I even talk about enough that I've already given them their own tag, so I'll start with those and go roughly in order from there.

2018, The Best of the Rest, Part 2

I've already shared my Top 10 books of 2018, and, if you missed it, part 1 of my "best of the rest" covering realistic contemporary and historical fiction. Since I still have yet more books to recommend, today's post covers other genres, including mysteries and thrillers, science fiction and fantasy, and memoirs.  These are not necessarily books published in 2018, but books I read in 2018.

Jen's Top 10 Books of 2018

I'm very excited to share with you my 10 favorite books that I read in 2018!  I read a record amount of books in 2018, so this really is the cream of the crop - and it was SO hard to narrow this list down!  The top 5 were pretty easy, but narrowing down to the remaining 5 was a real challenge.  So I'm also happy to tell you that in the coming weeks you can look for "best of the rest" post(s) highlighting some of the other books I loved in 2018!

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:

GCBC - Fall Reading Roundup

As I've mentioned a few times previously, I am in a book club of sorts that consists of just me and my friend Sarah, which we call, GCBC, which stands for Grand Central Book Club (since we usually meet for lunch at Grand Central).  We used to just pick a book to read occasionally when we had plans to get together, but earlier this year we decided that since we like to read so many of the same books anyway, we might as well coordinate reading them together.  Plus we both seem to derive perhaps as much enjoyment from planning out what we are going to read as we do the actual reading itself!  And since life has been busy and thus conspiring against us getting together, most of the book discussion these days is done over e-mail, which makes it pretty easy to turn it into a blog post to share our views!  So, following is a discussion between us of 12 books we both read this fall.

GCBC - Summer Reading Roundup

As I've mentioned a few times previously on this blog, my friend Sarah and I have a book club that consists of just the two of us.  We call it GCBC, short for Grand Central Book Club, since ideally we meet in person to discuss the books, which we usually do over lunch at Grand Central Terminal.  We used to just pick a book to read together only when we planned to meet, but earlier this year we were discussing books we both wanted to read, and since we're both slightly crazy obsessive types, we compiled a list of books we both wanted to read and started aligning our reading so that we were reading more and more books at roughly the same time, as long as both of us either owned the book or could get it from the library!

So, from mid-June to the beginning of the September, we read a whopping 10 books together!  And unfortunately, various factors conspired against us so we were unable to get together for lunch to discuss.  So, we decided to do just a quick summary of our thoughts on each book, both to share with each other and for the edification of readers of this blog as well!

Anticipated Books of Fall 2018

Hard to believe when it's still so hot, but summer is drawing to a close.  Well, technically summer does not end until September 22nd, but to me, summer ends and fall begins when school starts.  For some of you around the country, that already happened weeks ago.  But here in New York, school starts after Labor Day, so my kids have just gone back to school.

With how hot and humid it has been in New York, I'm really looking forward to some nice fall weather.  But of course I'm also looking forward to fall reading!  There are lots of books being published this fall that I'm looking forward to, including some by a few of my favorite authors.  Here are some of them, listed in order of publication with the dates in parentheses representing the publication dates:

5 Star Review: Force of Nature

We're halfway through the year, and I just read my second 5 star-worthy book of the year, Force of Nature by Jane Harper.  (The first was "What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw" by Leah Stewart, and you can read more of my thoughts on that here.)  "Force of Nature" was a terrific literary mystery, and was such a can't put it down kind of book that I kept sneaking away from my family to read it, and stayed up late reading too.  I read the whole thing in about 24 hours!

Mysteries

I always enjoy reading a good mystery.  These days it seems like thrillers tend to be more popular than straight mysteries among most readers.  I've already written a post on some of my favorite thrillers, and some of the books listed in that post definitely fall into the mystery category as well.  It can be hard to define the exact difference between mysteries and thrillers, but I'd say it's that in many thrillers, especially the psychological kind, the mystery tends to be more just for the reader - figuring out exactly what is happening, what characters' secrets or motivations were, etc., while in a more traditional mystery there is generally a crime, and either a police officer or a private investigator (though occasionally a private person) is investigating what happened.

In my teenage years, mysteries were one of the genres I read the most, working my way through many an author - I think I may have actually read every book Agatha Christie wrote, as well as many of the books by Dick Francis, Mary Higgins Clark, Lillian Jackson Braun, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, etc.  But for the purposes of this post, I'll concentrate more on more recent mysteries that are a little fresher in my mind.

Here are some of my favorites:

Thrillers

Thrillers are a genre I enjoy and often get asked to recommend.  And I can promise you this - I won't call any of these books the next "Gone Girl"!  "Gone Girl" definitely started a craze for a certain kind of thriller - the psychological thriller hinging in part on the question of whether the narrator(s) are reliable, and that is definitely one kind of thriller I'll discuss here - but there are also a number of other categories of thrillers as well.  (Though I'm not going to include legal thrillers, since it's not a sub-genre I usually read.)  As I usually do in my genre posts, I'll focus on books I've really enjoyed and would recommend.  I've read a lot of mediocre and even somewhat crappy thrillers, and while I sometimes enjoy them even when their quality is not fantastic, I'm not going to include them here.  And apparently I really like this genre because I had trouble narrowing this one down.  So if you enjoy this genre, be prepared to add a lot of books to your to-read list!