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.

#StartOnYourShelfathon| Sign-Up

Hey friends! Once again I’ve started a new year with no plans to join in any readathons but there was no way that I could resist this adorable and heart-warming #StartOnYourShelfathon courtesy of CW at the magical The Quiet Pond. It also coincides really well with having recently completed my ‘owned book’ section on Kal’s book blogger spreadsheet with my owned book total going up to 100 unread books, so I am definitely in need of this readathon!

CW has done a fantastic job of putting together this readathon and this lovely sign-up template. Read on to find out more about #StartOnYourShelfathon, my readathon goals and my tentative TBR!

‘We Have Always Been Here’ | 6 SF books written by diverse authors on my TBR

It is the second week of SciFiMonth 2019. Ship systems are running nominally and the journey is now well underway. Home sickness is likely to be setting in for some of our fellow traveler’s so I wanted to spend this week talking about something Earth related – SF books written by diverse authors who are on my TBR. As a diverse book blogger, I am unsurprisingly here for all of the diverse fiction but SF written by diverse authors (which include authors of marginalized genders, authors of colour, queer and disabled authors for example) have a special place in my heart not only because I love the genre so much but also because diverse authors have been continuously erased from the genre. Diverse authors writing SF is not a new phenomena, they have always been there though they have been systematically erased and obscured by straight white able-bodied cis men. There is a wonderful array of diverse SF out there which deserve to be read, discussed and celebrated.

Whenever I usually talk about diverse SF, I find myself often bringing up the same examples over and over again either as books I have read (eg: Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers and Kaia Sønderby’s Failure to Communicate) or SF books on my TBR (such as poor Everfair by Nisi Shawl which has been waiting forever to be read as well as An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon). To avoid playing the same records (even if they are are wonderful records) to many times, I thought it would be fun to share with you all some books on my TBR that I’m excited to read that I don’t often give space for on my blog. Hope you enjoy.

9 Favorite Themes & Features in SF

For those who might have missed my launch post, this month I am on a very exciting voyage into space with my fellow SciFiMonth travelers. Whilst onboard we will be reading, playing and discussing all things Sci-Fi for the entire month of November! In honor of this journey, I will be sharing some lists throughout the month of some of my favorite SF-themed things.

Today’s edition is: Favourite Themes and Features in SF. In case you didn’t already know, SF is my favorite genre so it should come as no surprise that there are lots of recurring themes and features within the genre that make me love it so much. Here I’ll be sharing some of my favorite themes and features with you. In addition to telling you a bit about each theme or feature, I’ve listed some recommendations of books, films and/or video games which deal with them. These are a mixture of books, films and video games which I’ve read/watched/played with some that I haven’t gotten around to yet. Those that I haven’t engaged with will be marked with a *. (Also fair warning there are a lot of repeats because my knowledge is still limited!) Make sure you drop a comment letting me know what yours are too!

Wrap Up | August 2019 + updates

There’s almost no point in me doing a wrap up for August because I completely fell out of the blogging and reading worlds. August truly turned out to be the month where time kind of ate itself; I remember preparing for World Con back at the start of August and then before I knew it the first day of September arrived?! I have a fairly good excuse in that preparations for and recovery from World Con turned out to be pretty all-consuming. That combined with a 5000-word report, a statistics exam and writing my 15,000-word dissertation meant I basically had zero time for anything else. I feel a lot less guilty now seeing how much I actually had to do in August written down…

August wasn’t just a complete non-event on the blogging front but I also barely read anything despite it being the NEWTs readathon. In total, I only managed to read 2.5 books before August was over which is kind of disappointing and also means I’m not behind on both my reading and my blogging 😭