Willow in Winter

Welcome back to this blog that hasn’t been updated since September!

It’s been a few months since my latest post. During this unplanned break, I’ve been to Canada, visiting all the places I have always wanted to see in Vancouver and around British Columbia, I’ve also gone to Spain to visit my family for a while, and since my return to England, I’ve been spending the dark evenings doing jigsaw puzzles with a cup of tea and watching tv shows I’ve already seen.

This year, I read 84 books, my original goal was 85, but I didn’t make it to the finish line. Goodreads says that I’ve read 29,055 pages, so yay! My average book length was 345 pages, with A Court of Wings and Ruin being my longest book, with 703 pages.

I’ve gone through the books I’ve read this year, and I’ve collected the ones I loved and others that stuck with me, and I still think about months later, even if I didn’t give them five stars at the time.

My favourite 23 books of 2023

Favourite YA

I turned 29 this year, which technically means I’m too old to read (and enjoy) YA, but here we are. I love YA novels, though the minds of teenagers can be so awkward sometimes, I love reading YA murder mysteries and fantasies. My favourites were:

• Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood
• Bring Me Your Midnight by Rachel Griffin
• The Agency for Scandal by Laura Wood
• Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross
• Suddenly a Murder by Lauren Muñoz
• The Library of Shadows by Rachel Moore

Check & Mate and Bring Me Your Midnight are in my top 5 books this year. I read Bring Me Your Midnight in the summer, and it transported me to a windy, small island where magic is real, and I never wanted to leave. Check & Mate had just the right amount of romance and teenage cluelessness.

Favourite adult fiction

I usually prefer thrillers and detective novels when it comes to adult fiction, but I don’t know what happened to me this year because most of my reads were romance. Here are my favourites:

• Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young
• You, Again by Kate Goldbeck
• Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood
• Out of the Ashes by Kara Thomas
• Happy Place by Emily Henry
• Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

Spells for Forgetting is another top 5 book for me, I loved the writing, and Adrienne Young has become one of my favourite writers this year.

I also became obsessed with You, Again. Can someone turn this into a movie, please? It’s inspired by When Harry Met Sally, and I know a movie would be perfect for this book, it had the same autumnal vibes, and I just couldn’t put it down.

Favourite book series

It was on my 2023 reading goals to read more book series this year, and I think I completed that goal. I read multiple series, and these were the best ones:

• The Luminaires and The Hunting Moon by Susan Dennard
• These Violent Delights and Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong
• Echoes and Empires and Legends and Liars by Morgan Rhodes

I loved The Luminaires, there’s a third part coming out at some point in 2024, and I can’t wait, though it’s tough for me to commit to a whole series, that’s why I prefer duologies.

These Violent Delights was a fun, action-packed read inspired by Romeo and Juliet but set in Shanghai in the 20s, which makes this story so much more intriguing. And while Echoes and Empires started strong, the ending was a bit of a letdown for me.

Favourite book covers

Sometimes, I am the person who chooses a book solely because of the cover. These are the books that I read because of that. I had high expectations because of the five-star covers, and while I enjoyed the stories, they weren’t as good as I had hoped.

• A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid
• My Roommate Is a Vampire by Jenna Levine
• A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson
• The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

Favourite non-fiction

Well, this is humiliating. I wanted to read more non-fiction this year, you know, to learn something! But I kept reaching for fiction so much that I actually only read three non-fiction books, and one of them was a re-read.

I liked Great’s book, a collection of very smart people and their thoughts on how doomed we are due to climate change. It took me ages to finish this book. I would read one essay every night because it just gave me so much climate change anxiety. I think that’s why I avoided non-fiction after that and instead hid in the comfort of fictional characters. But I promise to read more non-fiction next year.

Can you believe 2023 is almost over? This whole year has gone by so fast. I promise to stick around this blog for 2024. I have a long list of books to read, a library card starved for attention, and a Kindle with a cracked screen with reminders of how many days I’ve read in a row per week.

I’m ending the year as I started it, with a hot cup of tea, solving a jigsaw puzzle and a pile of books next to me.

Happy New Year!