2016 was a pretty busy year here at TheAromaofBooks. While I only reviewed 92 books in 2015, I increased that number significantly in 2016, up to 141! I think this is mostly due to the fact that I instituted a monthly “minireviews” post of the books that were basically 3/5 reads and left me feeling a little meh. Those are books that previously just went completely unreviewed.
This is actually pretty good read/review ratio for me – according to GoodReads, I read 154 books this year! I’ve really made an effort to stay on top of noting “read” books on GoodReads, so this should actually be a fairly accurate number. That’s an average of almost three books a week!
According to GoodReads (feel free to check out my full annual summary here), Academ’s Fury was the longest book I read, at 704 pages. William Ritter’s novella, The Map, was my shortest read at a mere 57 pages. However, my average book length is 326 pages, so that seems fairly solid.
A Tale of Two Cities has been read by over a million other people on GoodReads (a good thing, I think), making it the most popular book I read this year, but only two other people have read Rutherford Montgomery’s Midnight: Wild Stallion of the West!
I’ve continued with my monthly Rearview Mirrors. According to those, here are my favorite books of 2016:
- January: The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie (reread)
- February: The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (reread)
- March: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (reread)
- April: A String in the Harp by Nancy Bond
- May: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (reread)
- June: Academ’s Fury by Jim Butcher
- July: Cursor’s Fury by Jim Butcher
- August: Money in the Bank by P.G. Wodehouse
September: Stormy, Misty’s Foal by Marguerite Henry (reread)- October: Attachments by Rainbow Rowell
- November: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
- December: P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters edited by Sophie Ratcliffe
Other 5-star Reads this year:
- The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg (reread)
- Emily’s Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary (reread)
- Captain’s Fury by Jim Butcher
- Princep’s Fury by Jim Butcher
- First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher
- Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan
- Daisy in Chains by Sharon Bolton
It’s always funny to me to look at these things – I had no idea that I’d tagged Agatha Christie for three different months’ top reads! And it’s pretty obvious that I loved Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series – it is genuinely brilliant writing! I also do have a bias towards books I’ve read before, I think, especially ones that I read as a kid – I’m not going to pretend like nostalgia doesn’t sometimes color my feelings towards a book!
Overall, my favorite books are older ones, but that’s partially because I don’t focus a lot on new books because I usually avoid the pressure of reviewing ARCs. This year, The Domino Effect was my only ARC review, and I’ve realized that that’s actually okay with me. There are way too many books out there for me to be obsessed with only reading the newest ones. While I don’t mind reading a few a year, ARCs kind of stress me out. I’d rather let the rest of you bloggers do the work, and I’ll just read the ones that sound exciting!
As far as goals for the new year – my main one is just that I would like to read more nonfiction. This year was really weak in that area. Even if I can get it up to one nonfiction book a month, that will be progress over last year! I’ve gotten super lazy about my reading.
My other big challenge for the year is to read all of Wodehouse’s works in published order. I’ve been working on this for the last month or two, and you can see my progress on the page I have devoted to his books here. A lot of these will be rereads for me, but that’s okay. It’s pretty tough to read a Wodehouse book too many times! :-D
Happy 2017 to all of you – thanks for reading, and keep your reviews coming. Here’s to many happy books this year!
The Aroma of Books 