January 14, 2020

2019 Book Discoveries

Today's Top Ten Tuesday topic is Bookish Discoveries Made in 2019.

I don't have 10 things I can think of that I discovered last year, but I did find a few.

  1. YA Contemporary - I had basically written off YA contemporary as either too fluffy (YA romance) or overly dramatic (YA hard-hitting contemporary). Hopefully those genres are easily figured out. I just preferred YA Fantasy and Sci-Fi because the romance took a back burner and the problems weren't particularly real. Over the last year I had to read a bunch of contemporary books for my award reading, and found out that I don't hate it. The fluffy romances usually are very well-written and hit the spot for cuteness. The hard-hitting contemporaries weren't all about teen pregnancy like I had assumed. They encompassed problems teens in my day didn't even have, like surviving a school shooting.

  2. A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kimmerer - I will not stop yelling about this book. It is officially the best book I read in 2019. It is YA fantasy, but the main characters are well-rounded and the girl is not your basic teen girl. She is disabled and has a lot on her plate. I say I discovered it because I was the first one in my reading group to read it. Now, everyone in the group has read it and they all love it, too.

  3. Reading Planning - About halfway through the year, I figured out a new way to be slightly obsessive about books. That would be by planning my reading. I bumped up my monthly reading stats by a ton when I switched to this system. I started out by reading a pre-measured section of each of my books a day. I could read 4-5 books a week this way. It only worked for a few months, but I'm still planning and tweaking my organization and I'm still reading more than I was during the first half of last year.

  4. Shoujo Manga - Right at the end of the year, I did a recommendations list for a customer and discovered this type of manga. It's a fluffy, Japanese graphic novel style book that tells stories about romance in high school. They are sweet, and light, and innocent, and adorable, and make for a great palate cleanser between all the Important YA Books I read so often.

So there you go. That's what I discovered in 2019. What did you discover?