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 | #8

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).

March was an unexpected ARC month for me as I had a lot of new release ARCs due for release this month. Thanks to January’s Late-a-thon providing me with a way to catch up with a lot of my overdue ARCs, I was able to get my ARC reading (mostly) back on track just in time for many of my new releases. Thankfully, this month’s reading was went much better than last month’s reading as well so it was a great reading month all around!

As of the end of March I am also going on a new release ARC break, with the exception of the four new releases I have coming up in April and May. Although being approved for new release ARCs and getting to read them ahead of release is massively exciting and something that I am always, always incredibly thankful for I have found it making reading a bit stressful lately as well as taking over my TBR’s. I want to start focusing more on the books I own as well as books from the library.

WWW Wednesday | 6th March 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?

ARC Review: You Asked For Perfect | Perfection is Served

TITLE: You Asked for Perfect
AUTHOR: Laura Silverman
SERIES: N/A
RELEASED: March 2019; Sourcebooks Fire
GENRE: YA Contemporary
FORMAT: eBook

KEY INFO: Academia, friendships, romance, anxiety
REPRESENTATION: bisexual Jewish MC, gay South Asian Muslim MC, lesbian Korean (side), Jewish family, anxiety

Content Notices

hospitalisation, anxiety, panic attacks, forgetting to eat, descriptions of skin blisters from over-practice

 

amazon // book depository // goodreads

State of the ARC | #7 The Dreaded Reading Slump

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).

Whilst January was a great start to the year for me in terms of catching up with my ARCs, my February reading hasn’t even come close either in terms of my ARCs or my reading more generally. As of today, I have only read two books and am less than 20% of the way through my third book (which I’m definitely not going to have finished by the end of the month, which is tomorrow!)