Favorite Books You're Less Likely to Have Heard Of

If you look at enough book recommendations, sometimes you start to feel like you’re just seeing the same books over and over again.  No surprise, and there’s nothing wrong with that - plenty of popular books are absolutely terrific and among my all time favorite reads!  But sometimes you want a recommendation that is a little more off the beaten path - whether because you’re a voracious reader that has already read the usual suspects, or maybe you’re looking for a book that might actually be on the library shelf instead of having a miles-long waiting list.  So today I thought I’d share with you some of my favorite books that are a little more obscure, books you don’t see people talking about much.  If you have read these before, it might be because you have similar taste to me - or if you’re someone who has been following me for a long time, it might just be because you saw this book on one of my top 10 lists of old!  These are all books that I rated either 4.5 or 5 stars, and mostly books that were on one of my top 10 lists in the past, and as a criteria for “less popular,” I chose only books that had less than 5,000 ratings on Goodreads.

Anticipated books of April 2021

I’ll admit, I’m still not done reading my anticipated books of March.   (Though I've read 6 out of 10 and am in the middle of the 7th, not bad!) But March was heavy on historical fiction for me and still waiting on the library for some, so I couldn’t just read them all straight through.  Luckily April seems to be bringing a wave of lighter books!  So here are some of the books I’m most excited for publishing in April 2021.

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.  

Anticipated books of March 2021

Since people seem to enjoy my posts about anticipated books, I thought I’d start doing them more regularly - which also allows me to tell you about even more books.  Speaking of which, how am I ever supposed to catch up on the books I want to read when more books keep getting published that sound so good?  Here’s a round up of some of the books coming out in March that I’m excited about.

Contemporary women's fiction/chick lit, part 2

Although I read a lot of different genres, overall I probably read the most contemporary women’s fiction/chick lit.  I’ve previously written about my all time favorite authors in both genres, to the extent they ever are separate genres as it is hard to distinguish them sometimes!   Anyway, if you like these types of books, please go check out these posts on contemporary women's fiction and chick lit from 2018 as those authors continue to be some of my favorites whose new releases I eagerly anticipate.  But since it’s been a few years since I wrote those, it seemed like a good time for an update on some additional authors I've either discovered or read more of since then.  Since I have so many to recommend, I’m going to stick with authors who have written or from who I’ve read at least two books.

GCBC - Hello Sunshine Book Club Books - Part 2 - 2019 selections

In case you missed our previous post about Hello Sunshine, it’s the name of Reese Witherspoon’s book club.  My friend Sarah and I are in a 2 person book club composed just of us which we call GCBC (short for Grand Central Book Club, since that's where we used to meet for lunch to discuss our picks).  Among the books we read together, we generally like to read Reese's picks (one of us more obsessively than the other).  In that first blog, we discussed the Hello Sunshine picks through 2018; today we’ll tackle the 2019 picks. 

Jen's Top 10 Books of 2020

So excited to share my top 10 favorite books I read in 2020 with all of you!  Once again I read a ton of books, which means this is really the cream of the crop - basically the top 5-6% of what I read - and was super, super hard to narrow down to 10.  This year there were 4 books which I gave a 5 star rating to, and 17 books which I gave 4.5 stars to.  And that doesn't even include the tremendous amount of books which I gave 4 stars to and would still heartily recommend to you.

For anyone who isn't already familiar with my lists, I've been creating top 10 lists of books I read at year's end all the way back to 1999, long before I had a blog, and sharing them with my friends.  These are books I read in a particular year, not necessarily books published that year, though most of these books were in fact published in 2020.

Here's my list for 2020, in alphabetical order by author's last name.

Hope and Other Punchlines by Julie Buxbaum

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

The Searcher by Tana French

The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez

Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

Cleo McDougal Regrets Nothing by Allison Winn Scotch

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

Read on for more about these books!