Am I the only one who was bored with this book? Every scene was played out not once, not twice but several times. I guess to convey the tediousness, but it got to the point where it was too much. And for such a large book, the ending was abrupt to me. There should have been some kind of point where there's a next scene. In a small way there is but it wasn't enough for me. Average book so average rating.

Back in 2010, I was halfway through writing The Sleeping Life when I decided to embark on self-publishing my backlist, so I set it aside and distracted myself thoroughly in other worlds. I'm sure that the six-year gap led to some rather significant changes to how the book ended, but I enjoyed where I took this one.

I tell people, btw, that it's not a Sleeping Beauty re-telling, but then I point out to myself that someone is technically sort of awakened by a kiss... No spindles, however!

And, for the Touchstone fans, here's a bit of trivia that binds these two stories together:

M

I

N

O

R

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

back when I was originally writing Touchstone as a fiction blog, I had a scene where Mori is having a sleepover with Cass, after Cass has discovered she can "dream things real". And because what I was writing was "non-serious stuff I was throwing up on the internet", I cheerfully had Cass dream the facehuggers from Aliens showing up in her bedroom and leaping on poor Mori.

Because what else would a genre-savvy Earth girl dream when picturing the worst things she could inflict on a planet?

But when I came around to editing the blog for publication, I most definitely didn't want to get into any dubious copyright territory. This is the exact same reason why Cass summons a dragon instead of Superman, and why I don't include the actual text of Do Not Go Gentle.

So I cast about for something that I could use instead of facehuggers, and remembered the Kentatsuki from The Sleeping Life. And so The Sleeping Life became the book that Cass had been reading, and left in her room, the day she went for her last highschool exam. And The Sleeping Life is the book that Cass' Mum brings with her, when she finally gets to travel to Muina.

The publication dates don't work out, of course. ;)

Favorite book of the year: Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

Honorable Mentions: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson (seeing a trend here?), The Pyramids of London by Andrea K. Höst, My Heart and Other Black Holes by Jasmine Warga, and The High King's Golden Tongue by Megan Derr (all five-stars!)

Favorite series: Percy Jackson and the Olympians/The Heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordan. (Yes, I'm calling them one series. I'm okay with that.)

Book That I Didn't Expect to Like As Much As I Did:  dog songs by Mary Oliver, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Longest in pages: Freedom And Not Peace by Lightning on the Wave, at 2,226 pages (go go crazy long fanfic?)

Longest in minutes: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan at 30 hrs and 2 mins

Series to finish: The Lunar Chronicles, The Raven Boys, The Wheel of Time, Throne of Glass (and like eighty more, but these are the standouts)

Authors I'm probably going to read everything by: Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Rick Riordan, Sarah J. Maas, Tana French, Rachel Caine

Total books ingested: 316

Re-reads/listens: 41, or 12.97%

Total books read: 296 or 93.67% of my books

Total pages read: 84,348

Average pages per book: 266

Average pages per day: 231

Audiobooks ingested: 20 or 6.32% of my books

Minutes spent listening: 11,800 (just counting finished books), or 196.6 hours or 8.19 days. So more than a week. Out of 52 weeks. Or, actually, given I discovered audiobooks halfway through the year almost exactly, out of 26 weeks. Good gog.

Average minutes per audiobook: 590, or 9.8 hours.

Average minutes per day: 32, so half an hour a day (or, again, given I only picked them up halfway through the year, an hour a day I was actually listening. Good grief.)

Scores:

1: 12 (3.79%)

2: 24 (7.59%)

3: 192 (60.75%)

4: 82 (25.94%)

5: 6 (1.89%)

Did not finish:  2 (Officially marked as such--there's a crop I may never get back to, but I didn't actually decide I'd never read them, just that I wouldn't read them now. The perils of a mood reader...)

So I liked 88.58% of what I read. Pretty good odds, really.

Average: 3.14 (Pi! If ever there was a need to prove I am a geek (you know, beyond nested parentheses on the math portion of a book blog), there it is!)

Reviews Written/Published: 177, or very close to one every other day.

Sorry for all the math, but it is loads of fun.

This was a pretty good year, all told. A solid selection of five-star books, I read quite a few, I managed to get into comics and audiobooks (both of which have been on my list of things to try for years), and I accidentally got addicted to a few new authors/series/books. All in all, a year I can look back on in pleasure.