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.

WWW Wednesday | 11th September 2019

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Sam @ Taking on a World of Words! All you have to do is answers the following three questions:

What are you currently reading/playing?
What did you recently finish reading/playing?
What do you think you’ll read/play next?

I’m continuing to have quite a difficult time at the moment as my depression has taken a bit of a nosedive, likely in response to stress around my dissertation which I’ve had to get an extension for. However, I’ve actually been able to use this time to seek solace in books rather than sitting in a massive blanket puddle not doing anything and I’ve been able to get a lot of reading done this week which is great!

Book Haul | April: 27th Birthday and Easter Con

I don’t often post book hauls, in fact my last one was in November 2018, but I got some really lovely books for my birthday on the 15th April and during Easter Con last weekend that I really wanted to share with you all. I’ve been really lucky and thankful to receive so many wonderful gifts as well as have the financial means to afford to buy more books this year, so I hope you all don’t mind me sharing these with you all!

How Well Does Goodreads Know Me?

Kristen @ KristanKravesBooks shared this great idea that she got from bloggers like Caitsteelsbookworld. I’ve been using Goodreads since 2012 so I would hope that they would at least know me a little bit, but it’ll be fun to test that theory!

How it works: Open up your recommendations under the Browse tab and decide whether or not you would be interested in any of the books it’s recommended you. It will offer you recommendations according to your different shelves so if you’re like me, you will have tonnes have recommendations for alllllll of your shelves. To make my life easier I’ve chosen 3 shelves to focus on: favourites, TBR, and diverse, and picked the books that I would be interested in reading.