- My favorite read of the year was: The Swimmers and Mad Honey
- My favorite sci-fi (sortof) read of the year was: Light from Uncommon Stars
- My favorite Fantasy read of the year was: Lonely Castle in the Mirror
- My favorite uplit read of the year was: Remarkably Bright Creatures
- My favorite nonfiction read of the year was: You Could Make this Place Beautiful and Four Thousand Weeks
- My favorite Historical Fiction read of the year was: Song of Achilles
- My favorite Mystery read of the year was: The Twist of a Knife
- My favorite graphic novel read of the year was: Everything is Okay
Here are all 279 books I’ve read this year. You can see my goodreads reviews here.
- Mixed Signals
- Forever Hold Your Peace
- How Far the Light Reaches
- It Won’t Always be Like This
- Exiles
- The Collected Regrets of Clover
- We All Want Impossible Things
- No Two Persons
- Light from Uncommon Stars
- You Could Make This Place Beautiful
- We Are the Light
- The Villa
- All the Dangerous Things
- Romantic Comedy
- The Lightkeeper’s Daughters
- The Family Game
- The Minimum Method
- The Plus One (A Brush with Love, #3)
- Earthlings
- Savage Wilder (Sinners and Saints, #4)
- Earth’s the Right Place for Love
- The Immeasurable Depth of You
- Gone for Good (Detective Annalisa Vega, #1)
- Painting Perspective, Depth & Distance in Watercolour
- Watch Over Me
- Marigold and Rose: A Fiction
- Ready to Paint with Terry Harrison: Watercolour techniques, tips and projects for the complete beginner
- The Watercolour Companion: Techniques & tips to improve your painting
- The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne and Horowitz Mystery, #4)
- Skye Falling
- You’d Be Home Now
- Things We Do in the Dark
- The Shamshine Blind
- Autoboyography
- Lavender House
- The Go-Giver Marriage: A Little Story about the Five Secrets to Lasting Love
- Maureen (Harold Fry #3)
- Hello Beautiful
- A Hard Day for a Hangover (Sunshine Vicram, #3)
- Mad Honey
- The Atlas Paradox (The Atlas, #2)
- The Drift
- Ana Takes Manhattan
- Our Missing Hearts
- A Map for the Missing
- Roadside Picnic
- No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
- Imposter
- Spells for Forgetting
- The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything
- A Very Typical Family
- How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water
- The Key to My Heart
- The Matchmaker’s Gift
- Touch
- The Sun Walks Down
- The Atonement (The Arrangement, #3)
- The American Roommate Experiment (Spanish Love Deception, #2)
- The Amendment (The Arrangement, #2)
- The Spanish Love Deception
- All That’s Left Unsaid
- The Half Moon
- Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom
- Lighter than My Shadow
- The Answers Are Within You: 108 Keys to Unlock Your Mind, Body Soul
- Killers of a Certain Age
- The Marriage Portrait
- The World of Urban Sketching: Celebrating the Global Revolution of Drawing on Location – New Inspirations, Approaches, and Techniques for Seeing the World One Drawing at a Time
- Honor
- Wild is the Witch
- The Gravity of Us (Elements, #4)
- People Person
- Bookworm
- Wrong Place Wrong Time
- The Placeholder
- Carrie Soto Is Back
- You Are Not Alone: The NAMI Guide to Navigating Mental Health
- Love on the Brain
- Daisy Darker
- Look Closer
- The Eighth Life
- Tiny
- A Tidy Ending
- The Soulmate
- Horse
- Thank You for Listening
- Things We Never Got Over (Knockemout, #1)
- The Last Housewife
- The Lioness
- Hamnet
- The Ferryman
- The Violin Conspiracy
- Jar of Hearts
- Little Secrets
- All the Acorns on the Forest Floor
- The Couple at Number 9
- Fighting Words
- A Month in the Country
- A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk & Robot, #2)
- People Who Knew Me
- Professor Everywhere
- These Silent Woods
- The Museum of Rain
- When She Was Good (Cyrus Haven, #2)
- The Every
- A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1)
- Good Girl, Bad Girl (Cyrus Haven, #1)
- Lonely Castle in the Mirror
- Seven Days in June
- And Yet: Poems
- Someone Else’s Bucket List
- Maame
- Small World
- Tiny Buddha’s Inner Strength Journal: Creative Prompts and Challenges to Help You Get Through Anything
- The Guest Lecture
- A Flicker in the Dark
- Happily Ever After & Everything In Between
- When We Were Friends
- Quiet Girl in a Noisy World: An Introvert’s Story
- Book Love
- Fresh Water for Flowers
- The Art of the Travel Journal: Chronicle Your Life with Drawing, Painting, Lettering, and Mixed Media – Document Your Adventures, Wherever They Take You
- The Appeal
- Everything Is OK
- A Shoe Story
- Vacationland
- The Dead Romantics
- Metropolis
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
- Crying in H Mart
- The Long Answer
- I Let You Go
- Kaleidoscope
- Naughts & Crosses (Noughts & Crosses, #1)
- After You’d Gone
- The Picture of Dorian Gray Penguin Twentieth Century Classics
- Tell Me Three Things
- Body Grammar
- Gilt
- Georgie, All Along
- All My Puny Sorrows
- Delilah Green Doesn’t Care (Bright Falls, #1)
- Twice in a Lifetime
- Everything for You (Bergman Brothers, #5)
- The Measure
- The Song of Achilles
- The Sea of Tranquility
- Never Coming Home
- 56 Days
- The Argonauts
- Wilderness Watercolor Landscapes: 30 Eye-Catching Scenes Anyone Can Master
- Small World
- Stunning Watercolor Seascapes: Master the Art of Painting Oceans, Rivers, Lakes and More
- Find Your Peace: A Workbook for a More Mindful Life
- The Singularities
- The Netanyahus
- Insomnia
- Crossroads
- The Great Book of Journaling: How Journal Writing Can Support a Life of Wellness, Creativity, Meaning and Purpose
- In the Weeds (Lovelight, #2)
- Can’t Look Away
- Aurora
- Counterfeit
- The Latecomer
- Loving the Dead and Gone
- Disorientation
- Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting
- A Dangerous Business
- Heartstopper: Volume Four (Heartstopper, #4)
- Delphine Jones Takes a Chance
- Nevada
- The Wilderwomen
- Find Your Calm: A Workbook to Manage Anxiety
- A Quiet Life
- Nuclear Family
- The Urban Sketching Handbook Spotlight on Nature: Tips and Techniques for Drawing and Painting Nature on Location
- The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle
- Chef’s Kiss (Chef’s Kiss, #1)
- The Book Woman’s Daughter (The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, #2)
- Nora Goes Off Script
- Billie Starr’s Book of Sorries
- Now Is Not the Time to Panic
- Signal Fires
- Four Treasures of the Sky
- The Winners (Beartown, #3)
- The Overnight Guest
- I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working
- Ugly Love
- Meant to Be
- The Old Place
- The Homewreckers
- You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
- Notes on an Execution
- The Humans
- Something Wilder
- Adult Assembly Required
- Lucy by the Sea (Amgash, #4)
- I’m the Girl
- Heartstopper: Volume Three (Heartstopper, #3)
- Heartstopper: Volume One (Heartstopper, #1)
- Heartstopper: Volume Two (Heartstopper, #2)
- See You Yesterday
- Acts of Violet
- Other Birds
- One of Us Is Dead
- Mindful Sketching: How to Develop a Drawing Practice and Embrace the Art of Imperfection
- Remarkably Bright Creatures
- Three Kisses, One Midnight
- The Bodyguard
- Cult Classic
- Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives
- Funny You Should Ask
- Part of Your World
- Trust
- Book Lovers
- The No-Show
- Home or Away
- Answers in the Pages
- True Biz
- Big Feelings: How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay
- The Paris Apartment
- In My Dreams I Hold a Knife
- When You Get the Chance
- Cover Story
- Below Zero (The STEMinist Novellas, #3)
- Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance
- In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
- Required Reading for the Disenfranchised Freshman
- I Kissed Shara Wheeler
- Recitatif
- The Story of You Workbook: An Enneagram Guide to Becoming Your True Self
- One Italian Summer
- For You & No One Else (Say Everything, #3)
- Calm Your Anxiety Journal: Guided, Gentle Prompts for Soothing Stress and Quieting Your Anxiety
- Things to Look Forward To: 52 Large and Small Joys for Today and Every Day
- The Book of Cold Cases
- The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.
- Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
- Radically Content: Being Satisfied in an Endlessly Dissatisfied World
- Under Lock & Skeleton Key (Secret Staircase Mystery, #1)
- The Unsinkable Greta James
- Ain’t Burned All the Bright
- A Far Wilder Magic
- The Cartographers
- Ghost Forest
- This Golden State
- The Love of my Life
- Stuck with You (The STEMinist Novellas, #2)
- The Last Time I Lied
- One Night on the Island
- Rubyfruit Jungle
- Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
- Feel Your Way Through
- The Swimmers
- Under One Roof (The STEMinist Novellas, #1)
- Upgrade
- When We Let Go
- The Kingdoms
- The Nineties
- The Arc
- Golden Boys (Golden Boys, #1)
- Monstrous Beauty
- Plus One
- The Candy House
- Black Cake
- Greenwich Park
- How High We Go in the Dark
- The Lies I Tell
- The Last Flight
- Weather Girl
- Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead (Finlay Donovan, #2)
- Olga Dies Dreaming
- The High House
- Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children, #7)
- Ways the World Could End
- Lovelight Farms (Lovelight, #1)
- This Time Tomorrow
- These Precious Days: Essays
- The Sign for Home
The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“But the secret to a beautiful death is a beautiful life.”
Clover is a death doula. She sits with people as they die and she makes sure they are not alone. And yet, she’s mostly alone. She has one friend who is 76 and that’s it.
This is the story of how through the help of a new client, some unexpected friends and some tough but real words she slowly starts to change her life.
This character driven story is beautiful and is full of reminders that life is for the living. It’s for taking chances, it’s for being cautiously reckless and it’s for living the moments we’re given to their full capacity.
with gratitude to netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
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We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read this beautiful story on friendship in one breath. It’s so so good. It’s funny and sweet and heartbreaking all at once. It’s short but poignant. Recommended š
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No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“It was something she would tell her son later, when he was learning to read himselfāhow your first read of an extraordinary book is something you can only experience once.”
This book is a premise that I hadn’t read before. It’s a story of ten different people. The first one writes a book to help cope with deep sorrow in her life and the nine others experience the book in their own unique way, through the lens of their own lives and get affected differently.
Some of them are connected to each other in small ways, some in bigger ways, and some not really. And yet this book flows through their life and doesn’t leave them the same as a result.
“It was probably six hours later when Theo met the love of his life. There were no fireworks, no steamy glances across a room. Just two human beings, falling together like puzzle pieces, which made sense because both of them were broken, their edges not the smooth arcs or straight lines of others, which fit easily into so many situations. No, there was only one place each of them belonged, and that was with the other. It sounded dramatic, but wasnāt. More like an animal finding its natural habitat.”
Some people will say it’s cheesy and it’s more like interconnected short stories than it is a novel. And some of the characters have a lot of telling vs showing. And yet I loved it. I loved the broken characters. I loved waiting to see how they’d be connected. I loved waiting to see when and how the book would show up and I loved seeing how it would change them. I felt connected and invested in each of these characters.
“Different from sleeping, where you had no choice where you went. Picking up a book was a decision: Iām going to go away. The exciting possibility: I may not come back the same.”
I am not the same because I read this beautiful book. Because, books, they change you. And I am so grateful for that.
with gratitude to netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review
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Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I found this book randomly recommended by a person I was taking an online class from. I have a habit of reading everyone’s favorite books and she said this was her favorite of 2022. I am so glad I read it. I was absolutely absolutely excellent. Unlike anything I’ve read and that’s incredibly rare for me. I will not forget this book for a long, long time. One of my favorites from 2022 for sure!
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Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
And if I was looking at that, would I pick you out from everyone else and say, āThatās the most gorgeous woman Iāve ever seen?ā If Iām being honest, no. But human beings arenāt static images. Weāre dynamic and kinetic, and itās like I said beforeāright away, I wanted to talk to you, and every time Iāve talked to you since Iāve always wanted to keep talking to you.ā
This story took me a while to get into. Even though I really liked learning all about the details on what it felt like to work on a show like SNL, I found it hard to connect with the story for some reason. I couldn’t dive into it and I wasn’t sure I cared about the characters in anything more than a superficial way.
But of course, Curtis Sittenfeld doesn’t do wrong by her readers and soon enough I was completely engrossed in Sally’s story. Sittenfeld is such a smart writer and I loved reading all the little bits and pieces that made me chuckle.
But most of all I loved Noah’s character. I loved him and Sally and I loved how it was a wonderful, feel-good romantic comedy filled with smart characters and delicious, memorable quotes. Love love loved this one.
āWell,ā I said, āI once heard a smart person point out that itās hard to determine where the dividing line is between cheesiness and acceptable emotional extravagance.ā He grinned again. āI didnāt tell you at the time, but I know exactly where the line is. When itās happening to other people, itās cheesy. When itās happening to you, itās wonderful.ā
with gratitude to netgalley and Random House for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
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We Are the Light by Matthew Quick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I loved this book about the aftermath of a shooting and the deep deep grief and healing a town goes through. Quick is such an excellent writer especially when it comes to fractured characters. I read this book compared to A Little Life and while it was heart-wrenching I don’t think it was anything near that one.
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The Villa by Rachel Hawkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the story of Emily and Chess who used to be best of friends and had a falling out years ago. Chess is now a very famous self-help writer and she’s rich. Emily is a struggling author going through an ugly divorce and has no money. Chess invites her to spend six weeks together in a Villa in Italy. This exact Villa was the home to a brutal murder in 1974.
The chapters alternate between the story now and the one in 1974. I felt like the contemporary one was more interesting until the very end. There are some twists along the way but I loved the very last twist the most. It was an ok story but not the best of Hawkins in my opinion.
Julia Whalen’s narration made the book considerably more enjoyable.
with gratitude to netgalley and Macmillan Audio for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
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All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really enjoy Stacy Willingham’s novels. They manage to be both character and plot driven. The pacing is unlike any other and there are always awesome twists that don’t make you feel stupid. I think that combination is very hard to achieve.
This is the story of Isabelle whose baby is taken from their house a year ago and she hasn’t slept since then and has been desperately looking for him. She has been doing everything she can to scour every opportunity to talk about it and even agrees to do a podcast to see if it will help find the person who took Mason.
She and her husband are now separated and he’s with someone new. So she’s going through the loss and betrayal all at once. The book also alternates between the present and the past where she has suffered another terrible loss so Isabelle is not sure if she can trust herself.
The insomnia in this book is almost a character. It makes isabelle so hazy and sometimes we can’t tell if she’s an unreliable narrator or not. We can viscerally feel her doubts and worries as she experiences them.
I loved this book and highly recommend Willingham’s books. They are also fantastic on audio!
with gratitude to Macmillan Audio and netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
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The Family Game by Catherine Steadman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
3.5 stars
well that’s some messed up family. it was totally twisted and kept me on my toes the whole time. I really liked this story and the twists even if all the characters were so unlikeable!
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The Minimum Method by Joey Thurman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I requested this book on a whim because I’ve read so many other books on this topic and the idea of thinking about how to optimize your time and streamline a way to think about your health really appealed to me.
This book is broken into different chapters tackling different areas from meditation to breathing to exercise to nutrition etc. I liked that it was more holistic and really leaned into getting more sleep and building a well-rounded way to be healthy and whole.
I also liked that he had different next steps depending on your starting point and how hard you want to tackle some of these topics. You can pace yourself according to where you are and what feels feasible to you.
As we got into the exercise and nutrition chapters, I started feeling like the book was losing me. There was a lot of great information across the board in the whole book. But then it got so detailed and so much information and so many different things I had to keep track of that I got overwhelmed and couldn’t get through the chapters anymore.
It definitely didn’t feel minimum at that point. I know the author was trying to give options and more information but I specifically chose this because I wanted simple. To be fair, he does still give you a simple starting point for movement (7minute + 2 walks) and for nutrition (eat whole) but it all just left me more overwhelmed than inspired in the end.
with gratitude to edelweiss and benballa books for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
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The Plus One by Mazey Eddings
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
3.5 stars.
I really enjoyed reading this book even though I hadn’t read the first two books in the series. Even though this is a romance book and it’s light on the surface, there are some serious topics covered in this story. Especially PTSD.
At its heart this is a little bit of an enemies to lovers trope and fake it till you fall in love trope. Jude and Indira have known each other forever since he’s her brother’s best friend. And they can’t stand each other. They are stuck living in the same house with Indira’s brother and his partner. But they decide to fake being together so Indira doesn’t have to suffer through watching her ex with his new partner alone.
And what do you think happens?
I loved all of the characters and enjoyed all the moments I spent with this book.
with gratitude to netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
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projects for twenty twenty-six
projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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