My favorite reads of 2009

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had great celebrations - ours was quiet at home since I can't really do much, being as huge as a whale... :-) although we like spending our evenings at home these days anyway so it's not like we would have been out partying if I wasn't pregnant.

Here are my favorite books of the year, in no particular order. If you want to read my thoughts about them, all the links are on this page.

Fiction:
Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Out by Natsuo Kirino
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant
Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Fables volume 1 - Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham
A Break With Charity by Ann Rinaldi

Non-Fiction:
The Good Women of China by Xinran
Night by Elie Wiesel
Waiting for Daisy by Peggy Orenstein
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Special mention:
The Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella
The Southern Sisters mystery series by Anne George
The Undead series by MaryJanice Davidson
Anything Buffy-related :-)

I had a great reading year and for the first time ever actually got past the 100-book-mark.

Books read: 107
Audiobooks: 7
Graphic Novels: 8
New-to-me authors: 70
Non-Fiction: 13
Classics: 19

I completed 30 challenges and didn't finish 29. Hmm... that's interesting, half-half! I guess I can keep signing up for challenges, but I do want to put less pressure on myself this year, as I think that my reading time will be more limited with a newborn in the house! I'll be off to look at what I want to sign up for in the next few days, I'm sure.

Thanks blogging friends for a wonderful reading year and for making this community so special. Although I missed out on whole chunks of time this year due to life stuff, I'm still so very happy to have found all of you. I assure you that I'll be sticking around, even if my participation continues to be patchy.

All the best for 2010 - may all your dreams, big and small, come true!!!

2008 in review

Well. I didn't make my goal of reading 100 books, I only got to 97. But - I missed January and this is definitely more than I have ever read in any one year anyway so I still feel good about it. Plus I discovered so many great authors. Plus I made some good friends around the world. I loved my first year of blogging!

As I said, I read 97 books in 2008. Here are some end-of-year stats:

Total read: 97
Fiction: 87
Non-fiction: 10 (I really want to work on this)
New-to-me authors: 77
By women: 60
By men: 37
In translation: 7 (I clearly need to work on this)
In Polish: 6
Classics: 12
Favorite discovered authors: MaryJanice Davidson, Joseph O'Connor, Markus Zusak, Laurie Halse Andersen, Joanna Harris, Jane Yolen

And my top-20 for 2008:

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Chocolat by Joanne Harris
The Lollipop Shoes by Joanne Harris
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
Hunting and Gathering by Anna Gavalda

It's been a great reading year and I am looking forward to 2009!

Happy New Year everyone!