Shooflypie

This was an interesting year of reading for me. While I read 46 books this year, I feel like I really didn't read that much. 10 of those books were for my English classes - one focusing on Jane Austen and the other on British novels. I read 7 that weren't fiction, which is actually a lot for me. I also started and stopped many books this year, partly because I had to return them to the library and partly because I had a lot of "not the right book at this time" experiences. In the end, I did really like most of what I read and isn't that the goal? Here are my favorites... The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway - This is my favorite novel of the year, period. It came out in 2008 and I heard about it through the Bookrageous podcast. It is inventive, full of amazing sentences, and just flat-out fantastic. It also has a big twist that I was expecting but made perfect sense. I highly recommend this novel and can't wait for Harkaway's new one, which comes out in...

While I've spent the last 3 days tearing through The Cut by George Pelecanos, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the previous two books I read (outside of Robinson Crusoe , which we just read in my British Novel class and about which I need to write a paper by Wednesday)... I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians around the time it was published two years ago. In fact, I wrote a little about it here . While I liked the novel and found the ideas to be interesting, I didn't love the main character, Quentin Coldwater. That concern completely disappeared in the just-published sequel, The Magician King . King Quentin has actually matured since the events in the first book and while he isn't perfect, he was much more readable. The new novel also alternates the action in the present with chapters of Julia's story, which runs concurrent with the first book. The Magician King just felt stronger overall and it not only makes me ready for the third book in the s...