Books of 2019- Installment #23

111. Murder and Mendelssohn by Kerry Greenwood
This is the last of my beloved Phryne Fisher books, and it was hard to pick up and hard to finish because I knew it was the end. Was it a wonderful book? Of course it was! Am I happy the series is over? No, of course not even though I 100% agree a series can't go on forever!! I don't think I would have picked it up if I hadn't felt like I was in a bit of a reading slump. It's the end of the year and I've picked up about 7 books that seemed like they would be amazing and completely failed to grab me. Oh, to be feeling uninspired by my books! Terrible! So I relied on that indomitable Phryne Fisher to get me out but with a bit of a heavy heart!

112. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
My friend was talking about this book, and it reminded me of the Anne Hathaway film Colossal. The resembles is really only applicable to the first couple of pages, but that was enough to get me interested! I quite enjoyed this YA science fiction book.

113. Wicked Fox by Kat Cho
I love learning the myths and folklore of other countries, especially Asia, so I had to read this book. A year or two ago I had a Japanese student who was telling me about kitsune- or nine-tailed foxes, and this story is about gumiho, which is the Korean nine-tailed foxes. Clearly I needed to read this one! It's a cute YA romance starring a gumiho.

114. The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden
This was the conclusion of the trilogy and it was delightful!! Very satisfying!!!

115. Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh
Oh, how I loved this novella!! So good!! So satisfying!! I feel like it was so beautifully rendered and I'm even more pleased that there will be a second one!! I don't want to say too much because I thought one thing when I started and learned I was wrong...

116. In the Shadow of Spindrift House by Mira Grant
Seanan McGuire! Oh, how I love you!! So this isn't a Scooby Doo story, but it's much more like what I wanted from Meddling Kids than what I got from that. You can guess from the title and cover that the house is really significant and possibly some water.... After that, I couldn't say (well, I could but where would the fun in that be!!). You gotta read this little novella for yourself!!

I read 116 books  and 83 were by woman, 29 by men, 1 book by a female and male author, and 3 anthologies with both female and male authors- two of which were mostly female authors. My year of reading lots of women was strong!!!

Books of 2019- Looking to 2020

So the end of 2019 is nigh and overall it's been a pretty shit year. But books have been good to me. Books have always been good to me. Even when I'm reading something I don't particularly enjoy, books are good to me. So I've been thinking about what I want 2020 to be in terms of books and I've decided I'm going to try to read a lot of books in translation. We'll see what actually happens. I get distracted by the proverbial shiny book all the time.... Still in keep with my aspiration of reading books in translation I ran across this incredible listing of speculative fiction in translation from this year!!! So I'm sharing it here, bookmarking it here, reminding myself about it here.

Some of the books that sound interesting to me are:

Frontiers of the Imperium by Jan Kotouc (translated from Czech by Isabel Stainsby)

The Nine Cloud Dream by Manjung Kim (translated from Korean by Heinz Insu Fenkl)

The Book of Disappearance by Ibitisam Azem (translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon)

Harbart by Nabarun Bhattacharya (translated from Bengali by Sunandin Banerjee)

Shadows of the Short Days by Alexander Dan Vilhjalmsson (translated from Icelandic by Alexander Dan Vilhjalmsson)

Mars by Asja Bakic (translated from Croatian by Jennifer Zoble)

Ha Ha Hu Hu: A Horse-headed God in Trafalgar Square by Viswanatha Satyanarayana (translated from Telugu by Velecheru Narayana Rao)

The Night Circus and Other Stories by Ursula Kovalyk (translated from Solvakain by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood)

2019 Finalists for the Trixie and the Moai Book Award

I want to recognize the amazing books and authors that I read every year, so in 2016 I started a tradition of giving an award to the 5 best books I read that year. This is a completely arbitrary award with no meaning to anyone but me. But it's a tradition I quite like and look forward to it each year!! 

One of the things that I like about this process is that I'm sometimes surprised by the ones that I pick. Sometimes a book that I loved in the moment doesn't stick with me as time passes. Other times a book that I actually kind of hated doesn't leave me and makes me rethink it. This year a book that I kind of hated in the moment but put on this list is The Poison Thread. I did not think that would make it on my list at all!!

Here are the finalists for the fourth annual Trixie and the Moai Book Award!