I read 26 books this year, which sounds low compared to other years. But I didn't have as much time for reading, knitting, etc this year. Still, there were some good books.
I'll Take You There by Wally Lamb. I love Wally Lamb books, I usually can't put them down! ("She's Come Undone" will always be a personal favorite.) This one was a little strange and a bit of a slow starter, though. I enjoyed how he revisits some previous characters, and I liked the premise of the ghosts and watching his life unfold as a movie, only to see what was REALLY going on at the time.
Hungry Heart by Jennifer Weiner. Oh my goodness, this was incredible. A biography of her life and how she came up with the ideas for her stories, and some of the best advice I've read in a long time about loving yourself and making peace with your (plus-size) body. It also makes me want to hunt down my copy of "Good in Bed" and read it again!
I'm mentioning this one not as an award, but a reminder. Turbo Twenty Three by Janet Evanovich. The 23rd book in the Stephanie Plum series and what I believe will be the last for me. I stuck it out longer than anyone else I know, hoping that it would recapture the fun of the beginning of the series, or at least end and we'd know who Stephanie ends up with: Morelli or Ranger. I don't think that's ever getting resolved, and the books are just getting sillier as we move along. Next!
The German Girl by Armando Lucas Correa has to be one of the heart-wrenching books that I have ever read in my life. Based on a true story, it's about a girl and her family fleeing the Nazis on the St. Louis. The story goes back and forth, from the girl's point of view to her great-niece's present day view and then they come together in the end. I've read plenty of stories about the World War II era and this one punched me in the gut. Another WWII era book that I read was The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, and that was a rough one as well. I honestly needed something fluffy to read after finishing.
So for pure fluffiness, I read the Winter Street Series by Elin Hildebrand. They were enough to keep me interested, but by the third one I was sick of them. And the shameless plug that the author put in the third one for one of her books just annoyed me. Another "fluffy" read was another vampire book called Nice Girls Don't Have Fangs by Molly Harper which was funny and unlike any other vampire novels that I've read. It has a sequel that I may or may not go back to read.
The last one that I finished for the year was The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street by Susan Jane Gilman. It's about an ice cream heiress, Lillian Dunkle, and basically is her life story, about how she came to this country from Russia in the early part of the 20th century, the horse and wagon accident that left her unable to walk, and about opening her ice cream brand, Dunkle's Ice Cream with her husband. It was fiction, but very well-researched and felt like reality a lot of the time.
So there you have it. I'm starting to think about books that I want to read for 2018,too. See you next year!
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