As with all my annual end-of-year lists, the following books were new to me this year, but not necessarily new in 2024. I hope you find a few of these recommendations inspiring for your own To Read Pile in 2025 and beyond.
All in Book Review
My Top 10 Book of 2023
As with all my annual lists, this only pertains to books new to me in 2023, with no re-reads from previous years (and there are always a handful of re-reads…looking at you, Alan Furst). Without further ado, here are my favorites from this past year, in order.
My Top 10 Books of 2022
As with all my annual re-caps, the book didn’t have to be released in 2022 to make the list, it just had to be my first time reading it. No re-reads allowed. My reading slowed down a lot in the last third of the year due to writing and revising a new novel and the holiday madness, but I’m excited to see what 2023 brings. Until then, these are ten can’t miss books that I highly recommend.
My Top 10 Books of 2021
As with all my annual lists, the books themselves could have been published in any year, but they must be new to me. I didn’t read as many as I had hoped this year, but I am happy I was able to broaden my reading world with a lot of new authors I hadn’t explored before. If you hadn’t read any of these yet, I highly recommend them!
My Top 10 Books of 2020
This has been a strange year for reading. It started out with a reinvigorated love of using the local library, and then the pandemic hit. One would think that working from home would allow me extra time to burn through more books than usual, and yet I read less this year than in previous years. I also stumbled into a stunning series of DNF (did not finish) roadblocks than ever before, a whole string of books that lost me a chapter or two in. Oddly enough, many of those books took place in libraries and bookshops, much to my heartbreak. I wanted at least one of them to be good, but they weren’t. However, these books below are the ones that captivated me the most and I’d recommend any of them.
My Top 10 Books of 2019
As with all of my annual “best books of the year” lists, these don’t have to be “new” books, but they’re all new to me, and the list includes no re-reads, only first-timers. I’m pretty happy with this year’s overall batch. These are the ones that kept me up late into the night flipping pages and reading on, and as usual, I cheated a bit and added more than 10!
My Top Books of 2018
As with every annual list of top books, I only included the books I read for the first time this year, regardless of when they were published. It was a decent year for reading, with a nice mix of new writers and old favorites, and these were my top ten favorite reads of 2018. What were yours?