It’s January which means it’s a list month extravaganza so here’s another list for you – this time on the books that I want to read in 2020. Every year I make a list of my priority reads for the year, every year the year ends with me not having read most of the books on it. This year though I am determined to read all of these – don’t rain on my parade. Each cover links to its goodreads page.
Category: Book Lists
14 Book Releases to Look Forward To in 2020
As always, I love spending the beginning of the year looking forward to see what’s being published in the coming year to discover which books excite me, which to keep an eye on, and which I definitely need to get my hands on (sorry backlog TBR!). With every year that I’m a book blogger, it brings my heart so much joy to watch the increasing amount of diverse fiction being published. This year there are so many incredible diverse books written by diverse authors being published that I can’t wait to read and champion. Here are 14 of my most anticipated 2020 releases – each book includes the Goodreads blurb and a 🔍 to signify my reason for including it on my list. Covers link back to GR.
Continue reading “14 Book Releases to Look Forward To in 2020”
Best Books of 2019
2019 was an interesting year for me in terms of books and reading. I completely smashed my Goodreads Challenge goal in 2018, reading 31 books over my goal and 55 books more than I did in 2017. Although on the surface that looks fantastic (which it was!) it was also a little misleading as 2018 was the only year where I wasn’t in education, with the exception of the last few months of the year when I started my Masters in September, which meant I had a lot more time for reading! At the beginning of 2019, I naively set my Goodreads Challenge goal at 75 books and managed to read 51 books due to a combination of academia, depression and reading slumps. Not too bad overall but I’ve definitely learned my lesson about setting unrealistic goals haha.
Although I didn’t read as many books as I had wanted to, I did read a lot of great books – books that I thoroughly enjoyed and books that I fell in love with. Ultimately that is more important to me than how many books I ended up reading – I would rather enjoy my books than reading loads of books I end up not liking. Whilst I enjoyed almost all of the books I read in 2019, I’ve picked out 10 books that really stand out to me as the ones I loved the most which have made my best books of 2019 list.
YALC 2019 | Reading List
Last year was my first ever YALC, Young Adult Lit Con, and I was hopelessly under-prepared for it. I had no idea what to expect, hadn’t really prepared for it other than picking potential panels to go to, and hadn’t read many books by authors who were attending. Whilst it was great because I got to discover lots of new-to-me authors through hearing them speak on panels, I felt that creating a reading list in advance of YALC 2019 would be a great way to prepare for this year so that I can scope out any potential authors I might want to meet!
Before we talk about YALC 2019, we need to talk about my books from YALC 2018 because I am an awful book monster who was fortunate enough to get some wonderful books through YALC via gifts from friends and giveaways but then never got round to reading them. I can’t believe that I have had some of these books for almost a year now, so it’s good that YALC is coming up again soon as it will force me to catch up with them (at least, that’s the plan…).
So far, I’ve read The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James, who attended YALC last year and will be back again this year, and these are the books I still have to read:
YALC 2019
Part of the reason that I didn’t have to do any prep reading for YALC 2018 is that there were already a fair amount of authors going whose books I had already read such as Akemi Dawn Bowman, Sara Holland, Dhonielle Clayton, Tomi Adeyemi, and Becky Chambers. This year though, a lot of the authors going are ones whose books I haven’t read so I feel like I have quite a lot of catching up to do so that I can enjoy YALC 2019 to the fullest.
As I already have quite a lot of books to catch up with from last year and given how many new-to-me authors there are this year, I’ve divided my reading list up into priority reads and optional reads as I don’t think I could get through 16 books in the next month and a half!
Priority reads:
Optional reads:
Given my reading speed and the fact that I’ve got a lot of uni work to do over the summer, it’s unlikely that I will be able to read even half of the books on this list, but it’s good to be optimistic! There are a lot more authors at YALC than the books that I’ve included here, but these ones are the books that piqued my interest the most. You can check out what authors will be attending YALC on the website if you want to join in with YALC reads too.
Let me know if you’re coming to YALC 2019 as well, and tell me which books you’re most looking forward to reading/have read.
Nine Worlds | Reading List
It’s that time of year again when I head off to Nine Worlds and we only have 3 more days to go, so in true Avery fashion, I am doing all of my very last minute organizing and posting.
On Wednesday/Thursday, I will do a post about what sessions I am doing this year, where you can find me and what other sessions I am going to! Annoyingly, it didn’t occur to me do a book blogging session (which I’m kicking myself for but there’s always next year), so to bring some bookish love to Nine Worlds I wanted to share some my 9W reading list (let’s not talk about the fact that I don’t have much time left).
Red Rocket Panda 