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.

State of the ARC | #12

State of the ARC is a monthly meme at Avalinah’s Books meant to motivate you to finish up all your long overdue ARCs (Advanced or Early Reader Copies)

If you read my August wrap up you’ll already know that August was pretty much a complete non-event for me for blogging and reading. If you didn’t already know then you do now! Although I knew I wouldn’t have much time for reading in August, I had still hoped to have enough time to read 3 ARCs but didn’t get round to reading any of them. In addition to not reading any ARCs, I also broke my ARC request ban in a moment of dissertation induced weakness… So yeah, August sure was a time.

Saturday Smalls: 24th August 2019 | Silkpunk, Latinx Poetry, WW2 & NSFW Graphic Novels

Welcome to Saturday Smalls, a weekly review feature which was originally created by Destiny at Howling Libraries!

Each Saturday Smalls will include a handful of mini-reviews for books that I’ve read but didn’t get a chance to review at the time and, once I catch up, I will then use it to review books I don’t feel I can commit to doing a full review for. A huge thank you to the lovely Destiny for letting me adopt Saturday Smalls.

This week’s mini-review round-up includes:

1. Adult Fantasy/Silkpunk novel
2. YA Contemporary/Poetry
3. Adult historical fiction novel
4. Adult graphic novels

Saturday Smalls | 3rd August 2019 | Appropriative Magic, Fascinating Algorithms, & a Kick-Ass Latina

I’ve been eyeing up Destiny’s brilliant Saturday Smalls feature for a while now but didn’t get round to introducing it on my blog until now given all of my unintended hiatus’ these past few months. Now seems the perfect time to pick it up though as I have so many books I’ve read that I never got round to reviewing so I’m hoping that Saturday Small can help me to catch up.

Each feature will include a handful of mini-reviews for books that I’ve read but didn’t get a chance to review at the time and once I catch up, I will then use it to review books I don’t feel I can commit to doing a full review for. A huge thank you to the lovely Destiny for letting me adopt Saturday Smalls.

This week’s mini-review round-up includes:

1. YA historical fiction/magical realism/horror novel
2. Adult non-fiction book
3. YA contemporary novel

YALC 2019 | Book Haul

Hey friends, it’s been a while!

I’ve been absent for pretty much the entire month for various reasons which I’ll go into another time, in another post. The weekend just gone through was YALC weekend, one of my favourite times of the year, and I had an amazing time. I’ll be doing a follow-up post talking about the actual event itself like I did last year for YALC 2018, but for now, I wanted to start with something joyous – my YALC 2019 book haul!

This year I got a little bit wild with my book acquisitions despite promising my partner I wouldn’t be getting many books due to financial constraints. However, I was lucky enough to get a good amount of books via the wonderful book swap area as well as win a few in the giveaways run by the publishers. That coupled with the incredible deals (I mean, could you really turn down a 3 for £5 deal?!) meant that in total I acquired 21 books at YALC this year (and still came in under budget)!!! I got about 3-6 books a day which then got taken back to our hotel room so I didn’t realize just how many books I had until I had to pack them all up to transport home. Thankfully my lovely partner was able to help me carry them home and I spent a good few hours yesterday rearranging my bookshelves to make them all fit.

Here’s a look at the books I got from YALC 2019 ❤