Hi there, friends! It's time to put together the list of the books that I read in 2019. I really thought I would break the cycle and get all of my reviews finished before the end of the year but I didn't take into account how much busier my new branch was going to be. [Spoiler alert: It's super busy and my reading really reflects that.] Once again, I'm going to list out the rereads and I'll try to get another post out about the books that I did not finish (DNF) of which there are quite a few (if I can remember their titles). Without further ado, here's the list!

1. My Side of the Mountain
2. Warren the 13th and the All-Seeing Eye
3. The Library Book
4. Warren the 13th and the Whispering Woods
5. Elfquest Archives: Volume 3
6. Strange Magic
7. The Thirteenth Tale
8. I'll Be Gone in the Dark
9. New Kid
10. Remember, Remember
11. Notes from a Small Island
12. HiLo Book 5: Then Everything Went Wrong
13. Once Upon a River
14. Elfquest Archives: Volume 4
15. Three Things About Elsie
16. Adulthood is a Myth
17. Big Mushy Happy Lump
18. Herding Cats
19. Excellent Books for Early and Eager Readers
20. The Dreamers
21. Dread Nation
22. The Saturdays
23. Lumberjanes: Beware the Kitten Holy
24. Lumberjanes: Friendship to the Max
25. Lumberjanes: A Terrible Plan
26. Lumberjanes: Out of Time
27. Lumberjanes: Band Together
28. Like Pickle Juice on a Cookie
29. The Doll People
30. Redwall
31. Born to be Posthumous
32. Toys Go Out
33. Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reverso Poems
34. Locomotive
35. Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder
36. The Right Word
37. The Birthday Ball
38. The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy
39. Amphigorey
40. Amphigorey Again
41. Amphigorey Too
42. Ready Player One
43. A Discovery of Witches
44. Strange Sight
45. The Hidden Witch
46. The Witch Boy
47. Our Uninvited Guests
48. Stranger in the House
49. When the Children Came Home
50. Jambusters
51. The Gods Themselves
52. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
53. Cool Japan Guide
54. Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates
55. The Star Diaries
56. So You Want to Talk About Race (review pending)
57. The Invited (review pending)
58. 5 Worlds Book 3: The Red Maze (review pending)
59. Solaris (review pending)
60. Exhalation (review pending)
61. Will my Cat Eat my Eyeballs? (review pending)
62. Disappearing Earth (review pending)
63. The Hunting Party (review pending)
64. We Were Killers Once (review pending)
65. The Poet and the Vampyre (review pending)
66. It Takes One (review pending)
67. The 7th Victim (review pending)
68. When Life Gives you Pears (review pending)
69. Kindness and Wonder (review pending)
70. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (review pending)
71. The Toll (review pending)
72. The Ride of a Lifetime (review pending)
73. Miss D & Me (review pending)
74. Fair Play (review pending)
75. Inside Out (review pending)
76. Cat Diary: Yon & Muu (review pending)
77. When I Arrived at the Castle (no review - I just didn't like it)

I've once again included the links for the reviews of each of the titles but you can always use the search feature to look up any genre, subject, etc. to find your next book to kick off 2020. :-) Happy New Year!!

Another year has gone by and it's now time to compile the list of books that I read in 2018. Like last year, some of these books haven't been reviewed yet so you'll need to keep an eye on the blog to see what I thought of them. I'm including rereads in my count once again because I want to be able to keep a running record (digitally) of everything I've read in a given year. Here we go!

1. Einstein's Dreams
2. The Killings at Badger's Drift
3. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
4. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers (longest read of the year)
5. Quackery
6. HiLo 4: Waking the Monsters
7. Norse Mythology
8. Rest in Pieces (one of my faves of 2018)
9. I've Got This Round
10. The Last Black Unicorn
11. Gorillas in the Mist
12. Citizen: An American Lyric
13. From Here to Eternity
14. Ghostland
15. Fly on the Wall
16. How to Love the Empty Air (one of my faves of 2018)
17. The Murderer's Ape
18. Golda Meir: A Strong, Determined Leader
19. Yes Please (one of my faves of 2018 and best audiobook I've ever read)
20. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (one of my faves of 2018)
21. Grace & Style 
22. Death of a Hollow Man
23. Ghostbusters (movie tie-in)
24. The World According to Mister Rogers
25. Tiny Beautiful Things
26. The American Way of Death Revisited (loved it so much I bought my own copy)
27. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (one of my faves of 2018)
28. Short
29. The Royal Rabbits of London
30. Nnewts
31. Graveyeard Shakes
32. The Intuitionist (one of my faves of 2018 - Great American Read list)
33. The Bad Guys
34. The Read-Aloud Handbook (necessity for Children's Librarians)
35. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
36. The Outsider 
37. The Figure in the Shadows
38. The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring
39. One Step at a Time (picture book)
40. Invisible Man
41. Comics Squad: Recess
42. CatStronauts: Space Station Situation
43. Dear Madam President
44. Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary Ordinary Family
45. Recovery: Freedom from Addictions (one of my faves of 2018)
46. The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath
47. Unruly Places
48. When Breath Becomes Air
49. Being Mortal
50. The Science of Superheroes
51. Only Human
52. Founding Mothers
53. Mary B. (one of my faves of 2018)
54. The Ghost in the Mirror
55. So Close to Being the Sh*t, Ya'll Don't Even Know
56. CatStronauts: Robot Rescue (for some reason I didn't review this?!)
57. El Deafo
58. Cici's Journal: The Adventures of a Writer-In-Training
59. Sunny Side Up
60. 5 Worlds Book 1: The Sand Warrior
61. Tucker Grizzwell's Worst Week Ever
62. Peanuts: Volume Nine
63. Star Trek Destiny #1: Gods of Night
64. Robot Dreams
65. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Vol. 1
66. Star Trek Destiny #2: Mere Mortals
67. The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
68. 5 Worlds Book 2: The Cobalt Prince
69. Afterlife With Archie Vol. 1 
70. Star Trek Destiny #3: Lost Souls
71. Calypso
72. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing 
73. The Bear and the Nightingale
74. ElfQuest Archives: Volume One (review for this coming in 2019)
75. The Compleet Molesworth 
76. Space Dumplins
77. Sanity & Tallulah
78. The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
79. The Science of Supervillains
80. ElfQuest Archives: Volume Two (review for this coming in 2019)
81. Tales from the Inner City
82. Dear Sister

I decided to include the review links again (not sure why I keep torturing myself) for each of the titles but you can always use the search feature to look up any genre, subject, etc. to find your next book to kick off 2019. :-) Happy New Year!!

2017 was an excellent reading year around here.  I had four five-star reads, not counting re-reads, which is a very high total for me, out of some 90+ books read.  One was a novel - 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson, and three non-fiction: The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf, and two by Ruth Goodman, How to be a Tudor, and How to be a Victorian.  Wonderful re-reads included Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, several Mary Russell novels by Laurie R. King, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (which I think I read in about 1978, but remembered nothing).

The best historical novel I read in 2017 was The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson, and the best new mystery Racing the Devil, by Charles Todd.  I read a decent amount of non-fiction, all of it good, from The Glass Universe (about the ladies of the Harvard Observatory) to Michelangelo's Ceiling (Damn it, your holiness, I'm a sculptor, not a painter), The Sun and the Moon (the Man-bats, or America's first great "fake news" story), and A is for Arsenic (Agatha Christie knew her poisons).

I had some reads that were just pure fun, like Jennifer Crusie's Agnes and the Hitman, Deborah Harkness' trilogy on witches, or Anne Bishop's novels about The Others.

It did have down moments.  Calamity in Kent's plot boiled down to "Scotland Yard inspector decides his tabloid journalist friend, Jimmy, is the best choice to solve a locked room mystery, and tells Jimmy to go for it."  Um.  OK?

The one which angered me, however, was my sole 1-star read of the year, The Ashes of London, which was billed as a thriller set during the Great Fire of London.  It is set *after* the fire, did not have very good historical detailing (it could have been pretty much anywhere and anywhen in the past that had suffered a large fire), and had two narrators, neither interesting.  And then it offended me with a touch of "let's start the characterization of the woman by having her evil cousin rape her" and I was out.

But most of my reading year was wonderful.  I hope yours was, too.

Another year has gone by and it's now time to compile the list of books that I read in 2017. Like last year, some of these books haven't been reviewed (yet in some cases and never in others) so you'll need to keep an eye on the blog to see what I thought of them. I'm going to do something slightly different this year. I've decided to include rereads in my count because I want to be able to keep a running record (digitally) of everything I've read in a given year. Here we go!

1. Ms. Bixby's Last Day
2. Have You Seen Elephant? (picture book - no review)
3. Duck, Duck, Dinosaur (picture book - no review)
4. Sidekicked
5. Vampire Academy
6. Dead Wake
7. Hark! A Vagrant
8. South Riding
9. Wonderful, Wicked, and Whizzpopping
10. The Burning World
11. Cry, Heart, But Never Break
12. The Dungeoneers
13. Frostbite
14. Lady Pancake and Sir French Toast
15. Henry & Leo
16. Frog on a Log?
17. The Last Shadow Gate
18. Terms & Conditions
19. I Work at a Public Library
20. A Freudian Slip is When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother
21. I Don't Want to be Big
22. The Unfinished World
23. Frindle
24. Waking Gods
25. I Don't Want to be a Frog
26. The Secrets of Gaslight Lane
27. Trio for Blunt Instruments
28. Lunch Witch: Knee-Deep in Niceness
29. The Grumpface
30. How to Build an Android
31. Fortunately, the Milk
32. The Shadow Land
33. Emmy and the Incredible Shrinking Rat (for some reason I didn't review this?)
34. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
35. The House of Months and Years
36. The Wild Robot
37. Grandpa's Great Escape
38. The Deadly 7
39. The Phantom Tollbooth
40. Book Uncle and Me
41. Roller Girl
42. The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle
43. The Marvels
44. Some Writer!
45. The Invention of Hugo Cabret
46. The Mysterious Benedict Society
47. Wildwood
48. The Cabinet of Curiosities
49. One Day We'll Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
50. Under Wildwood
51. Stories of Your Life and Others
52. Do Not Say We Have Nothing
53. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
54. The Trouble with Goats and Sheep
55. The Book That Changed America
56. Wildwood Imperium
57. Comics Squad: Detention
58. Wonderstruck
59. The Imaginary
60. HiLo (graphic novels 1-3)
61. Ghost Waltz
62. Bluffton
63. The Storm in the Barn
64. The Red Badge of Courage
65. Science of the Magical
66. The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey
67. A Wrinkle in Time (reread)
68. A Wind in the Door
69. A Swiftly Tilting Planet
70. Many Waters
71. Grendel
72. The Great Questions of Tomorrow
73. Find the Good
74. Thornhill
75. Woolly
76. everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too
77. Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
78. Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories (not reviewed yet)
79. The Importance of Being Earnest (not reviewed yet)
80. A Veil of Shadows
81. Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult (not reviewed yet)
82. The Goldfish Boy (not reviewed yet)
83. Close Enough to Touch (not reviewed yet)
84. Deep Dark Fears (not reviewed yet)
85. Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (not reviewed yet)
86. The Unreal and the Real (not reviewed yet)
87. The People's Republic of Amnesia (not reviewed yet)
88. The Little Virtues (not reviewed yet)
89. The Creeps (not reviewed yet)
90. World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures (not reviewed yet)
91. Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores (not reviewed yet)
92. My Friend Dahmer (not reviewed yet)
93. Scythe (not reviewed yet)
94. Mine Own Executioner (not reviewed yet)

And the reread books:

1. The Rubber Band
2. The Red Box
3. Pride & Prejudice (every year)
4. Star Trek Into Darkness
5. Murder on the Orient Express
6. The Neverending Story (every year)

That brings our total count to: 100 books.

You can always use the search feature to look up any genre, subject, etc. to find your next book to kick off 2018. :-) Happy New Year!!

Thanks to Halloween Bingo, I upped my reading game and got a lot in. I'm also a bit exhausted, lol. Time to leave the horror show behind and move on to some holiday themed reads :) There's another game on BookLikes and I'm going to try and participate in it as much as I can. The 16 Tasks of the Festive Season and the Rules. October was also my Start a New Series month and while some series might keep me from reading further on, others have me searching for the rest in the series. (Those selection books will be denoted with ***book cover***) November is back to Random Generator Month where I let the good ole' RNG decide which book off my GRs tbr list gets picked. The thrill, the excitement, the anticipation! I lead an exciting life I tell you. Hope you all had great reading months and can't wait to hear about your winners and losers.

*Click on book cover to be taken to my review or if I didn't write one, the book's Goodreads page