Daily December #6 - books & me

sperrywink asked me about some favorite books from the past year, and you know, when I went and looked at my goodreads account, this has been a pretty good year for books and me.

In the romance genre, if I had to pick a single favorite, I’d have to go with Courtney Milan’s The Countess Conspiracy (and this counts having read a fair amount of Eloisa James and some new to me Heyers.) The third of her Victorian-era Brothers Sinister series, this one focuses on an older couple, with baggage and issues that affect them separately and together, and like the others in the series, goes far beyond the usual focus on the London Season, this time with a focus on a period-appropriate biologist. I was super-happy that the couple in question found their HEA (which doesn’t happen as often as you might think.) In the contemporary romance genre, I have to go with A Bollywood Affair, by Sonali Dev. It had the feel and pace of an excellent Bollywood movie and, again, made me very happy that the couple in question ended up happy.

For fantasy, Uprooted, by Naomi Novik – I’m not sure if it was the Eastern European feel to the world-building (half my family is Italian, the other half is Russian/Polish) or whether I just needed a book to get lost in, but I read this in a day. There’s a picture somewhere of me sitting in the middle of Beach Week chaos (18 people yelling at each other, trying to get organized to go out to eat and figuring who was going to be the designated drivers) with the book up in front of my face, ignoring all the noise because I was going to finish the book before we left. The Raven Boys was a close second, but Uprooted edged them out because it’s a stand-alone story so I’m not waiting to see how it all turned out.

Non-fiction favorite goes to As You Wish, Cary Elwes’s memoir of filming The Princess Bride, because it is as delightful and charming as the movie itself, and was a lovely way to spend a rainy spring Saturday.

I feel like I should mention The Martian (Andy Weir) just because it was a rollicking good adventure with solid science and one of those books where the movie adaptation didn’t make me cringe. Also, Matt Fraction finished off his Hawkeye run, and going back and reading the whole arc from the start is really a case study in how to create something pretty cool within the very well trodden (tread?) formula of super-hero comics.