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.

‘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.