Reading Reflection: 2020

 

Well, 2020 sure didn't go as planned, did it? I remember starting off the year with so many hopes - places I wanted to go, things I wanted to do, and books I wanted to read. Pretty much everything, except for the reading, fell through. Thank goodness for my reading goals! Being stuck inside isn't so bad when you've got a nice big stack of novels by your side. I always knew that I loved literature, but it ended up being my absolute saving grace this year. You know that old quote about reading giving you a place to go when you have to stay where you are? It has never been more true. 

Now that 2020 is finally drawing to a close, it's time to reflect on how each of my goals and challenges went. Here's the breakdown:

My Goodreads goal was to read at least 50 books in 2020. This was a conservative goal and I expected to surpass it. I ended up with a grand total of 91 novels read. I have always wanted to get to 100 novels in one year, but with the amount of ridiculously long classics I read, that probably won't be happening anytime soon. In any case, I'm quite happy with this number. You can view my year in reading here.

I needed to read at least 20 books from my Classics Club list this year to stay on track to finish, and I ended up reading 22. I'm very pleased with the amount that I got through, especially because this was the year I conquered the two series that I put on my list - The Lord of the Rings and the Little House books. Next year is the final year of this five year challenge, which leaves me just 18 to go. It's not going to be easy though, because I have quite a few long classics left. 

I did finish the Back to the Classics Challenge for the sixth year in a row. It was as fun and enriching as always. My final wrap up post is here.

I also finished my True Books 2020 challenge. I ended up reading a total of 14 nonfiction books throughout the year, smashing my previous record of 10. I really enjoyed most of them and I think it was a good thing to get out of my reading comfort zone. I don't think I will be repeating this challenge next year, as I want to focus more on mood reading in 2021, but I will still try to reach for some nonfiction from time to time. 

I did end up finishing my Then vs. Now Challenge as well. It took me all the way until December, but I made it! Each month this year, I read one of my favorite novels and compared it to a different book by the same author. My results in each match up were mixed. I really enjoyed some of the new books I read, but my two worst reads of the year (Imaginary Friend and The Last Man) came from here too. I did like getting a chance to reread a whole bunch of my favorites and I'm happy to have reviews for more of these here on the blog now.

There were a few instances where rereading a novel made me like it a little bit less. I wasn't so blind to Eleanor and Park's issues with race this time around, and I found myself cringing at some of the slurs in We Need to Talk About Kevin that I somehow glossed over before. It's interesting to me that it's so risky to reread a favorite. The first time you read a novel that you truly love is special and impossible to recreate. As we get older, we change quite a bit; who knows how the newer version of us will interpret an old favorite? This was an interesting experience and I can see myself wanting to do it again somewhere down the road.

The last challenge I took part in this year was the StoryGraph Onboarding 2020 Reading Challenge. The point of it was to test out the StoryGraph website and see if its personalized book recommendations were accurate. There were a total of 12 prompts, and I finished all of them.

Completing this challenge led me to read several novels I would not have picked up on my own, and I enjoyed most of them. I also ended up discovering that the StoryGraph recommendations are definitely superior to Goodreads. I'm excited to continue using this site in the future to find books. 

And that's it for 2020! I'm pleased with how much I accomplished this year. With the scary and monotonous atmosphere that COVID caused, reading was an invaluable escape from reality. I've always read for pleasure, but this year it felt necessary to do so. Thank goodness I had books to turn to!  I'm ready to embark on a new set of challenges in 2021.

December Wrap Up

 

It's hard to believe that December is already over, but here we are. This very strange year is coming to an end. This month was different from my usual Decembers - no family visit, socially distanced school, and no holiday events to attend in the community. A huge snowstorm and subsequent high winds even prevented driving around to see Christmas lights. It was still a nice holiday though because I had a lot of time to sit around and read. I made it through an impressive amount of books this month, and managed to finish both my Then Versus Now Challenge and my StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge, which I didn't think I'd have time to do. Here's the breakdown: 

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The Familiars by Stacey Halls

The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf

Transformation by Carol Berg

The Woman in the Wall by Patrice Kindl

The Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare

The Governess Game by Tessa Dare

The Wallflower Wager by Tessa Dare

Romancing the Duke by Tessa Dare

I enjoyed most of these, and even the ones I didn't like so much weren't terribly bad. My favorite of the month was probably The Handmaid's Tale. It was a reread, but definitely one of my favorite dystopian novels of all time - just masterfully written. I also really enjoyed the Girl Meets Duke trio of books, which were pure guilty pleasure reading, but so much fun. 

My least favorite of the month was definitely Transformation, which was competently written, but dreadfully boring. 

Next month will be the start of my 2021 reading challenges. I have a bunch of posts lined up to explain what I am planning. For now, here's what I am hoping to read:

From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis

At least two books chosen from my owned-not-read list based on my mood

I'm really excited to read my annual Jules Verne novel and to get started on all my new reading goals. Let's hope that 2021 is a happier year than the last and is filled with good reading!

Romancing the Duke by Tessa Dare

 

My last read of 2020 was another guilty pleasure pick and the final book in my little romance-reading streak. Romancing the Duke is the first book in Tessa Dare's Castles Ever After series, a set of  four historical romance novels in which each of the protagonists either own, inherit, or marry into a castle. I know. It's a cheesy concept. It does appeal to my love of fairytales though, so I make no apologies for my choices.

The plot of the novel follows Izzy Goodnight, a young woman who has recently fallen on hard times. Her father, a celebrated author, passed away suddenly without leaving a current will. His money and property were passed off to the next male heir in his line, a cousin who promptly disinherited Izzy. Her only glimmer of hope is a mysterious inheritance left to her by her godfather, which she is traveling to acquire as the story begins. When she arrives to the location specified in the letter the solicitor sent to her, she is surprised to discover that the bequest isn't money, as she was expecting, but a gigantic castle. There's only one problem--there's already a duke living in it.

Ransom Vane, the Duke of Rothbury, recently returned to this castle after sustaining a serious injury that robbed him of his vision. Bitter and determined to shut the world out, he's isolated himself within the walls of what has always been his family's property. When Izzy arrives to claim ownership, he is certain that there must be some sort of mistake. He agrees to let her stay until it can be proven that he is still the rightful owner of the property. As they begin to investigate though, they uncover some suspicious financial activities in Ransom's papers that he knows nothing about. It appears that someone is embezzling money from him, and Izzy is just the partner he needs to figure out who. As they begin to work together to get to the bottom of it, they find themselves falling for each other. However, both are hurting and are hesitant to risk being vulnerable. They both must decide whether to open their hearts to the possibility of love and remain in the castle together, or solve the mystery and go their separate ways.

This was another fun bit of fluff, and I did enjoy it. It's a typical historical fiction romance, full of classic tropes and steamy love scenes. The book doesn't really do anything different with the genre, but it does the basics well and it is comforting in its familiarity. It's a safe and sexy read when you're in the mood for a romance. I liked Izzy's character and I thought the backstory about her father being a famous author was interesting. She manages to achieve a lot from being kind and helpful to others, which I always like to see in a protagonist. Ransom was fine as well, although I didn't end up liking him as much as the men from the Girl Meets Duke books. I thought his backstory was a little thin and his personality didn't stand out in my mind. Even so, he was inoffensive and didn't impact my overall enjoyment of the book.

I don't have much to say beyond that. This was a really fun read and perfect for my current mood. Overall, I enjoyed Tessa Dare's Girl Meets Duke series a bit more, but there was nothing wrong with this one. I can definitely see myself picking up more books in the Castles Ever After series next time I'm in the mood for some guilty pleasure reading.

Challenge Tally

Total Books Read in 2020: 91

The Governess Game and The Wallflower Wager by Tessa Dare

As I am still on a romance novel kick and I've had a lot of time to read lately, I managed to finish the two remaining novels in Tessa Dare's Girl Meets Duke series. As my feeling on both are pretty similar, I decided to combine my reviews. 

Book number two in the series, The Governess Game, follows a young woman named Alexandra Mountbatten. She works to support herself as a clock setter in London, but her true passion is astronomy. She hopes to work in that field one day, but first, she needs to save up for her own place and a good telescope. When she loses her chronometer in an accident one afternoon, she is forced to take a job as a governess to make ends meet. Her new employer is a dashingly handsome man named Chase Reynaud, who has recently become the guardian of two orphaned little girls from his family line. His reputation as a rake worries Alexandra, but she's desperate enough for work that she takes the position. She's facing a big challenge - her two charges are quite difficult, she has no previous experience as a governess to draw from. She's determined to do her best to help her girls, however, and make even help Chase reform some of his wild ways.

Book number three, The Wallflower Wager, follows Lady Penelope Campion. Despite having a title and big dowry to match, she hasn't had any luck in romance and tends to stay close to home. She loves animals and has quite a menagerie of rescued creatures to care for, including a two-legged dog, a goat, an otter, and a hedgehog. She lives with all her pets quite happily, but her family doesn't consider her hobbies and solitary life to be appropriate. Her older brother is threatening to move her into his home with his family and force a more traditional life onto her. Her aunt offers to help her put him off, but only if she engages more in society and finds homes for all her animals. She finds an unlikely ally in Gabriel Duke, an infamous wealthy businessman that purchases the house next to hers. He intends to renovate the house and turn a big profit on it, but Penelope's zoo and spinster-like behavior reduces the desirability of his property. He agrees to help her rehome the animals and reenter the social scene, but things become more complicated for both of them when they start developing feelings for each other.

Much like the first book in this series, these two stories were utterly charming. Once again, the writing was funny and emotional in turns, the characters were unique and well-developed, and the steamier scenes were very sexy. Everything was in good balance. The romantic elements and relationship-building took center stage, but there was enough story to make the novels feel different from each other and move at a good pace. These books aren't direct sequels, but characters from each one appear in the others, and I enjoyed seeing them pop up across the series. I was surprised how much affection I ended up developing for them - I was especially happy to see Lord Ashbury from The Duchess Deal again, as I ended up having a major soft spot for him.

These are the kind of books where you know what you're getting when you pick them up. They are full of romantic tropes, impossible attractive people, angsty misunderstandings, and happy endings. It's nice sometimes to read something that's pure junk food for your brain. There will be a fourth book in this series, but Amazon is saying that it won't be out until January of 2024, so I will have a long time to wait. Until then, I will definitely be checking out Tessa Dare's other works whenever I'm in the mood for a guilty pleasure romance.   

Challenge Tally

Total Books Read in 2020: 90

The Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare

 

When I was a teenager, I used to belong to the Harlequin Romance book club. Every month, I would get four historical romance novels in the mail, and I devoured them. My high school years were basically characterized by daydreams about handsome dukes and dashing rakes. Eventually, I became more interested in other genres and started reading different things, but every once in a while I get a strong urge to pick up a romance again. Since that mood was striking me this week, I decided to give The Duchess Deal a try.

The plot of the novel follows a young woman named Emma living in Regency-era England. She is working to support herself as a seamstress after her father disowned her years ago and is barely getting by. She comes across a chance at a more comfortable life when she meets the irascible Lord Ashbury, a wealthy duke who has recently arrived home from the war. He was disfigured in the fighting and is covered in burns on half of his body. This has left him quite bitter and hurt. People react to his new appearance very negatively, which has led him to give up on the idea of ever having a normal life. He still needs to find a wife though, to ensure that he has an heir to pass his property and title onto. When he meets Emma and discovers her reduced circumstances, he immediately proposes a marriage of convenience. Believing that it would be foolish to refuse, Emma agrees.

At first, Lord Ashbury is insistent upon not growing too close to Emma. His plan is to bed her until she conceives an heir, then move her out to a house in the countryside until the child comes of age. However, he didn't anticipate how attracted he would be to his new bride. Similarly, Emma can't deny the connection she feels to her husband. She decides to try and slip past his defenses to form a real relationship, but it won't be easy to earn his trust and convince him that his injuries aren't an impediment to a happy marriage. 

This novel was pure guilty pleasure reading and it was so much fun. Tessa Dare's writing was easy to read and genuinely funny and clever. You know you aren't exactly getting high literature when you pick up a book like this, but it was an excellent offering for this genre, and exactly what I was looking for. I really enjoyed the banter between Emma and Lord Ashbury, and the angsty moments in the story were well done. It was very easy to get sucked into this novel. I was totally engaged the whole time I was reading and I finished it in just a few days.

I think you can't really review a romance novel without commenting on the steamier scenes. Without going into detail, I will say that they were numerous and extremely sexy. Things have certainly come a long way since my old Harlequin romances.

I went into my reading hoping to scratch that itch I felt to read a romance, and this was the perfect pick. This is book one in a four book series, and since they are such easy reads, I'll probably go through a few more of them with the rest of 2020. It will be a nice break before my classics reading starts up again next year. 

Challenge Tally

Total Books Read in 2020: 88

The Woman in the Wall by Patrice Kindl

 

For the last book in my StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge, things took an unexpected turn. My final prompt was to read a book corresponding to my least preferred mood. According to StoryGraph, that mood is "relaxing," Honestly, that sounds about right. I like my books to be emotional or suspenseful more than relaxing. Anyway, I used StoryGraphs filters to search through my recommendations for a book tagged as relaxing. The first one mentioned was Anne of Green Gables. I want to use that for a future challenge though, so I went with the next one down - Tom's Midnight Garden. When the time came to actually sit and read it though, I made the odd discovery that the book wasn't available to download onto my Kindle and it was too close to the end of the year to order the paperback online. So, back to StoryGraph I went to find another selection. I scrolled around until I came across The Woman in the Wall, and here we are now.

This middle grades novel follows a young girl named Anna, who lives with her mother and two sisters in a sprawling Victorian mansion. Anna is extremely shy, to the point where she never leaves the house and prefers to remain out of the sight of others as much as possible. She entertains herself with many solitary hobbies like reading, sewing, and repair work around the house. She's never been to school and is terrified at the idea of doing so. When her mother starts to force the issue, she retreats into the walls.

She uses the knowledge she gained from making home repairs to create several passageways and hiding spaces within the walls of the house and begins living there. She watches her family through various peepholes and enjoys her solitude. She stays that way for several years, long enough for her family to start wondering whether she was a figment of their imagination all along. Eventually though, her quiet life is upended by the appearance of a note from a stranger stuck through a crack into one of her hiding places. Intrigued, she answers the note and receives a reply in return. Her secret correspondence soon brings her to a crossroads. She will need to decide whether to emerge from her hiding place and rejoin her family, or stay hidden and risk losing them entirely.

This was an odd little novel, and I mostly enjoyed it. The first half of the story was fantastic. As a quiet kid myself, I could strongly relate to Anna's shyness and desire to hide away within her house rather than face the outside world. Of course, her actions aren't realistic; no young child could carve out a series of passageways in a home and no mother would accept their child disappearing into the walls for several years. However, Kindl gets around this by imbuing the story with a dreamlike quality, almost like a fairy tale. Anna isn't just small and shy, she's nearly invisible. People have a hard time seeing her even when looking directly at her. Her mother and siblings have difficulty discerning her from the wallpaper sometimes. At one point, a visiting character mistakes her for a doll and puts her in her purse. There's not true magic in the story, but something about Anna feels magical, so it's easy enough to suspend your disbelief and go along with the story as she disappears into her secret rooms within the house.   

As the story goes on however, things deteriorated a bit for me. Once Anna starts communicating via the notes stuck into the wall, the dreamy qualities of the writing shift to become more realistic. Things become ordinary and move too quickly towards a rather bland ending. It's a shame, because I felt like the first part of the story was so quirky and unique. I wish the second half had held onto the magical realism it started off with. I'm sure the traditional ending was there for the book's intended middle grades audience, so I can't complain too much. It did seem like a shame that the plot concluded so conventionally though. It just didn't match up with the promising beginning.

So overall, I liked this novel well enough despite my disappointment with the conclusion. I suppose it did match its tag of being relaxing too, as it wasn't particularly challenging and was easy to read. Perhaps my dissatisfaction with parts of it were because it aligns with my least favorite mood. I was hoping for a bit more excitement I suppose. In any case, it was quirky enough that I did enjoy my experience with it, and I think other quiet, young readers will like it.

On a side note, with this novel, I am officially done with the StoryGraph Onboarding Reading Challenge! I didn't think I'd get a chance to actually finish each of the prompts, but I managed it in the end. I was pleasantly surprised by how well StoryGraph matched books to my reading preferences - they weren't all winners, but most of their recommendations were pretty good. I will definitely be continuing to use this website in the future.

Challenge Tally

StoryGraph Onboarding 2020 Challenge: 12/12 - Complete!

Total Books Read in 2020: 87

Transformation by Carol Berg

For my past few reads, I've been steadily making my way down the remaining books on my StoryGraph Onboarding Challenge list. My second-to-last book was Transformation by Carol Berg. The prompt that led me to this one was to read a book that I'd normally want to remove from my Find A Book page. I scrolled through my recommendations and when I got to this one, I knew I'd found my pick. Just look at that cover. It's got to be one of the most unappealing book covers I've ever seen. I mean, I'm sure some people think it's cool, but it's not to my taste at all. Aside from that, the plot summary revealed that it focuses on mostly male characters hunting a demon, which didn't sound all that compelling to me. I'd normally skip this one based on those factors (actually, I'd probably never pick it up due to the cover art alone), so that made it perfect for this prompt. It was actually placed pretty high on my recommendations list at number 23, so I started my reading interested to see if I would end up liking it anyway, despite my first impression.

Transformation is an adult fantasy novel. The plot follows a man named Seyonne, who is a slave in the Derzhi Empire. He used to be a powerful, magic-wielding demon hunter in his homeland, but he doesn't allow himself to think of his past at all. He survives by living in the present moment and not thinking too far into his past or future. He has gotten along this way for years and endured multiple abuses at the hands of his masters, including undergoing a process that stripped him of all his magic, leaving him in his weakened, easily subjugated state. All this changes in an instant, however, when he is assigned to work as a scribe for the young, brash Prince Aleksander. 

Aleksander is cruel, rude, and impetuous. He abuses his slaves, his advisors, and his subjects in equal measure, but as he is the heir to the Derzhi empire, no one dares to speak up against his wild ways. Seyonne serves him as best he can and tries to blend into the background as much as possible. He finds it impossible to remain silent, however, when he recognizes a demon lurking at court. Feeling compelled to warn Aleksander of the danger, he must find a way to earn the prince's trust and defeat the demon before it completely infiltrates and destroys the entire realm.

Unfortunately, my first impressions of this book held up throughout my reading. I was correct that this book was too male character-heavy for me. There was a lot of male angst, drama, and bonding throughout the story and I was often bored by it. The writing was not a problem at all; Carol Berg is clearly a gifted writer and knows how to tell a story. However, the plot of this particular tale just didn't appeal to me. This is purely a matter of taste. I personally don't enjoy novels that focus on mostly male characters. So for me, this felt very long.

I also grew tired of the brutality of Aleksander and the Derzhi Empire in general. The abuses they inflict on Seyonne and the other slaves were overly violent and unrealistic from a practical standpoint. Slaves that are continually beaten starved, burned, whipped, maimed, etc. can't work. The injuries the slaves regularly sustained were horrific. You can't run an empire this way. All the people doing the work would be dead or permanently crippled. Elements of this are realistic of course, but the degree of the violence here was incredible. It came to feel ridiculous as the story went on. It's clear that Berg was trying to stress that the Derzhi, and Aleksander, were very cruel. Mission accomplished there, but it did feel comically over the top at times.

Another element of the story that I didn't love was Aleksander's character. He was incredibly unlikable at the start of the book, and while he does change over the course of the novel, it was hard to get over that initial impression. I think Berg was a little too successful at showing him to be awful, because I could never bring myself to like him later, even once he learns the error of his ways. Seyonne was a bit better for me, although I often grew frustrated at his blandness. I understand that this was deliberate; it was his survival strategy as a slave to blend in. However, even after he shifts back into being a demon hunter, he was still pretty uninteresting. 

One thing that I kept expecting throughout the story and was actually disappointed not to see was a romantic relationship between Seyonne and Aleksander. There were so many moments of them being close, having intensely intimate conversations, seeing each other in various states of undress, and saving each other's lives that it felt like their growing friendship was something more. They become so close over the course of the story that it seemed almost weird that their interest in each other didn't go further. This isn't the direction that Berg wanted the novel to go, and that's fine, but it certainly would have made a lot of sense and made the story much more interesting (at least for me). I noticed that some other reviewers on Goodreads made this same point, so I'm not the only one that noticed some potential sparks between the two. 

There just wasn't much that grabbed me in this novel, although I fully understand that many readers will feel differently. Transformation was a well-written novel with a complex friendship and worthy themes about redemption and sacrifice at its center. I think this novel will be especially good for those who dislike romance in their fantasy, as there is very little of it here. Most of my StoryGraph suggestions throughout this challenge have been pretty successful, but this one missed the mark for me. I picked this book because I ordinarily would have passed it by, and in this instance, my instincts were right.   

Challenge Tally

StoryGraph Onboarding 2020 Challenge: 11/12

Total Books Read in 2020: 86