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.

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Book Tag | Three Bookish Things

I didn’t have a book tag planned for today but after seeing this one on Norrie and Kristin‘s blogs, I really wanted to do it. Sometimes book tags can end up feeling all the same but I liked that these questions were a bit different – so here are my answers!

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ARC Review: Starfish | Healing, Identity, and Belonging

TITLE: Starfish
AUTHOR: Akemi Dawn Bowman
SERIES: N/A
RELEASED: September 2017; Simon Pulse
GENRE: YA Contemporary
FORMAT: e-Book

KEY INFO: #ownvoice, coming of age, healing, family, romance, artistry
REPRESENTATION:
bi-racial, female MC, anxiety, survivor
CONTENT WARNINGS:
anxiety, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, parental racism, suicide attempt

amazon // book depository // goodreads

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Discussion | #ownvoice versus non #ownvoice authors?

Discussions around #ownvoice authors are not exactly new in the book blogging community. It’s something I’ve seen spoken about quite a lot by other bloggers but is not something that I’d especially given much thought to before. The extent of my thought process around #ownvoice authors had been that I should continue to support them and champion their work. If there was a book about an issue affecting black people written by a black author then I would definitely boost the #ownvoice author. And, in cases where a book is written by a non #ownvoice author and has problematic content in it then I speak up about why the book is problematic and recommend #ownvoice alternatives.

But what happens when a book deals with sensitive marginalized issues or is potentially problematic without it being clear if the author is #ownvoices or not? 

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