Hannah's Year of Rest and Relaxation

[Hannah]

Book 47: The Obelisk Gate 12/07/2022
ATY Prompt: #24. A book related to inclement weather
Rating: ✭✭✭

I wasn't sure if I was going to continue with this series, because I had really mixed feelings about the first book, The Fifth Season. But I decided that it would fit this prompt so well, and I didn't have a ton of other options that I was really excited for, so I would give it a go. I ended up also having mixed feelings on it, but in a slightly different way than the first book, so that was interesting. I really love the concept of this world and this book did explore some of the ideas that I was most interested in. But I find the writing style a bit difficult and the pace very slow. If I got through them more quickly, I think I'd finish the series just to see how it ends, but they just feel like kind of a slog to me.

This whole book takes place during a cataclysmic event: a rift opening in the middle of a large continent that results in a climatic change seemingly rather like a volcano: ash, climate change, clouds blocking out the sun. Basically the most inclement weather imaginable.

[Hannah]

Book 48: Such a Fun Age 12/09/2022
ATY Prompt: #47. A book with handwriting on the cover
Rating: ✭✭✭✭

I enjoyed this, I really flew right through it. This type of book (I call them "domestic dramas") has historically not been my thing, but lately I've found several that have worked for me. For this one, I found a lot of it extremely relatable, being roughly the same age as Emira and only recently come out of my aimless, post-school wandering (though mine featured more sitting around during the pandemic and less partying with my besties, sadly). And I was intrigued by how morally complicated the characters of this story were (for most of it — it went a bit more black and white at the end)

I really thought that I was going to read The Sympathizer for this prompt, but I finally admitted it just wasn't happening after picking it up and putting it down several times. But actually this was kind of the perfect book for this prompt, as handwritten letters were a very significant element of the story.

[Hannah]

Book 49: Severance 12/19/2022
ATY Prompt: #28. A book that won an award from Powell's list of book awards
Rating: ✭✭✭✭

This was a really interesting, compelling story. I particularly enjoyed the tone, which reminded me a bit of Bo Burnham's "That Funny Feeling." It's a kind of surreal portrayal of apocalypse and capitalism, juxtaposing elements of modern life against the eerie specter of disease and pandemic. Of course, it was especially interesting to read now, post-pandemic, with particular details ringing especially true.

Severance won several awards, most significantly the Kirkus Award for fiction, and it was a good choice for this prompt because it definitely originally showed up on my radar because I heard about it being an award winning book. Originally, I was thinking about reading The Luminaries for this prompt, but opted out of it because I'm getting to the end of the year and it's so long and I'm feeling rather intimidated by it. But I'm really glad I went with Severance.

[Hannah]

Book 50: A Christmas Carol 12/26/2022
ATY Prompt: #25. A book less than 220 pages OR more than 440 pages
Rating: ✭✭✭✭

I have watched the 1951 film version of A Christmas Carol quite possibly every year of my life and I completely adore it. I'm so familiar with it that I had almost convinced myself that I had read the book, but I actually never had. This Christmas turned out to be the perfect time to pick it up and I was able to read it out loud to my mother over the course of the holiday. We had such a great time with it, both the parts that were word-for-word the same as in the movie and the parts that were different.

I was initially planning on using this prompt to read The Secret History by Donna Tart, the very last book on my personal list of top 10 priority books for the year. Sadly, I was foiled by my library and wasn't able to get a copy in time to fit it in! When I realized this was going to happen, I had a momentary panic, until I realized that I own a lovely tiny copy of A Christmas Carol and that it would be the perfect thing to fit into the last week of the year. How handy to have a prompt with such an easy swap-out for the end-of-year rush!

[Hannah]

Book 51: The Overstory 12/30/2022
ATY Prompt: #48. A book posted in one of the ATY Best Book of the Month threads in 2021 or 2022
Rating: ✭✭

Aaargh, I had such high hopes for The Overstory, but ended up not enjoying it nearly as much as I thought. I actually am starting to believe that I might not actually like a genre I previously thought I loved (passionate books about trees — there have been some that I've loved, but lately it's seemingly like more misses than hits). I really liked the first section of this book, which was like a collection of unrelated character vignettes, most of which I found very beautiful and clever in how they connected to trees. But my enjoyment dropped off quite quickly after that, and I found most of the rest of the book a frustrating slog.

I guess it's fitting that I'll use this to fill the prompt for the ATY best book of the month, even though I didn't like it, since I wanted to read it because so many people I know did love it!

[Hannah]

Book 52: How High We Go in the Dark 12/31/2022
ATY Prompt: #51. A book published in 2022
Rating: ✭✭✭✭

This was really lovely and extremely readable — Nagamatsu's writing style is very easy and flowing and while I thought that the structure of this one, with the loosely connected stories, might break up the narrative a bit, I found it really didn't. This read like a novel and kept a quite consistent tone that I really enjoyed. I was a bit surprised, since I had heard many people say that this book is very bleak, that I found it much more hopeful than I expected (Severance, which I read a few weeks ago, felt much more bleak for a plague book). There was a lot of loss and grief in this story, but I think the narrative stayed just a little detached from it. I'm not sure if I mean that as a compliment or a criticism, though. Maybe I would have liked a little more emotional depth, or maybe these themes would have been entirely overwhelming if they had cut a little deeper.

Coming in just under the wire, I've completed my challenge! I really enjoyed this last book I read, so that's an extra positive end of the year omen. The "book published in the current year" prompt is always a bit tricky for me, because it usually takes me quite a few months of hearing buzz about a new book before I'm motivated to pick it up. So it was good to save this one for the very end (and it was literally the only book published in 2022 that I read all year!)

Coming soon will be my end of year stats and then it'll be time to migrate over to a new thread for a new year!

[Hannah]

2022 Reading Stats and Superlatives

Totals:
64 books (8 more than last year)
21,359 pages (almost 2,000 more than last year!)
64 ATY Challenge prompts filled (52 from this year + 12 leftover from last year)
4 rereads
38 books crossed off my TBR
20 of those from my backlist (added to TBR before 2021)
26 books chosen spontaneously
10 books in translation (2 Swedish, 2 Japanese, 2 Spanish, 1 Italian, 1 Hungarian, 1 Polish, 1 Korean — this is two more than last year and I wasn't even focusing on this. Super happy with this stat!)

Author Stats:
62 authors read this year
61% female, 39% male (this is practically identical to last year)
37% POC (Up 9%! More every year!)
60% American authors (this grew 10% from last year, sadly — I liked it at 50/50)
21% British authors, the rest an assortment of one or two books per country with 14 countries total (standouts include my first Cypriot, Chilean, Argentine, Haitian, and Polish authors)
40 new authors discovered this year (exactly the same as last year!)
22 previously read authors

Authors I'm most excited to read more from: China Miéville, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Kazuo Ishiguro, Olga Tokarczuk, and Ki Longfellow

Setting Stats:
These stats are not comprehensive, because I read some books set entirely in fantastical or science fiction locations. However, I added 48 books this year to my reading map, including some fantasy stories that were set or partly set in real countries. Of those 48 books (some of which are represented on more than one continent, so percentages won't add to 100%):

44% were set in North America (mostly U.S., also Haiti and Puerto Rico — I'm really pleased this is below 50%!)
31% were set in Europe (featuring the U.K, Iceland, Greenland, Sweden, France, Italy, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Romania, and Bulgaria)
15% were set in Asia (featuring South Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, China, and Japan)
6% were set in Africa (featuring Botswana, Ghana, and Egypt)
And 4% set in South America (featuring Chile and Argentina).

Of note, the most common setting was New York City, with 6 books set there. That's 12% of my reading!

This was the first time I had added a book set in Iceland (Burial Rites), Puerto Rico (The Sparrow), Haiti (Krik? Krak!), Chile (The House of the Spirits), Argentina (Elena Knows), Botswana (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency), Ghana (Homegoing), Kuwait, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan (Salt Houses).

Genre stats:
8 nonfiction books, 56 fiction books (That's double the nonfiction of last year!)
Most read genre: Science fiction (22%)
Best read: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
17% Literary or Contemporary Fiction
Best read: The Door by Magda Szabó
16% Historical Fiction
Best read: The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante
14% Fantasy
Best read: The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien
9% Informational Nonfiction
Best read: Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert
6% Mystery
Best read: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
6% Classics
Best read: Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
3% Memoir
Best read: In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
3% Thriller
Best read: We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
1 Adventure/Survival story: Walks Away Woman by Ki Longfellow
And AGAIN (for the third year in a row!), exactly 1 romance: Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

I wanted to explore contemporary and literary fiction this year and I did! I feel like I figured out what I really like in the genre (I read a bunch of books about stubborn and eccentric older women) and I'm excited to keep reading. I was also pleased about reading more nonfiction than ever before. It's no surprise that science fiction is at the top and I really feel like I've found my niche there (first contact sci fi swept my favorites this year!)

Next year, I'd like to dig into fantasy, especially trying some noteworthy fantasy series. I'm also kind of interested in exploring a bit of light horror.

Rating Stats:
5 Star Reads: 16%
Most memorable: In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
My favorite book of the year. In the Dream House was so unique, so perfectly suited to my interests, and so incredibly well written.

4 Star Reads: 42%
Most memorable: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
This was such an odd and interesting book. It took me a little while to settle into it fully, but once I did I was swept away.

3 Star Reads: 25%
Most memorable: The Archive of Alternate Endings by Lindsey Drager
I found this a bit too fractured when I was reading it, but I have to admit it's really stuck with me. I think I'll give it a reread someday.

2 Star Reads: 11%
Most memorable: Atonement by Ian McEwan
I liked the meta-fiction element of this book, but was really annoyed by the shock-value storyline.

1 Star Reads: 3%
Most memorable: When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
I agree with the premise of this book, which made it all the more frustrating how much I disliked it!

Recommendation Stats:
Out of the 60 new reads of this year:
18% were continuing a series or were another book by an author I love
16% were from Youtube videos
13% had been on my TBR for too long for me to know where I had first heard of them
12% were from ATY Discussion threads
8% were recommendations from friends and family
7% were specifically sought out to fill a challenge prompt
5% were from Reddit
5% were from the Rory Gilmore booklist
3% were from the Little Free Library, picked up on a whim because I recognized the title
3% were recommended by the StoryGraph algorithm
and 1 book was from an author I follow on Tumblr, 1 book was recommended in another book's Goodreads review, and 1 book was on a bookstore's recommended shelf.

I'm really happy with one particular stat here: the continuing with series and authors one! I made a deliberate effort to do more of that this year and a lot of my 4 and 5 star reads came from that category.
I also got a lot of my top reads from Youtube. I don't watch a lot of Booktube, but I feel like I've found a couple of people with similar reading taste to mine and I get a lot of great ideas from them.

Superlatives:
Longest book: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr at 640 pages
Shortest book: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens at 117 pages

Newest book: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (January 2022)
Oldest book: A Christmas Carol (1843)

Most recent addition to TBR: Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat (October 2022)
Longest on TBR: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (November 2016)

Lowest Average Rating: Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Steyngart at 3.45 stars (but I gave it a 4!)
Highest Average Rating: Braiding Sweetgrass at 4.57 stars (but I gave it a 3)

Most Popular Book: The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides was read by 1,308,461 people
Least Popular Books: Beanstalk: The Adventures of a Jack of All Tales by E. Jade Lomax was read by only 340 people.

Book I was most surprised by
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
I wasn't sure about this book for the first half (strange capitalization, lots of astrology), but I was captivated by the second half and read it practically straight through. A really odd and interesting book.

Best book outside of my comfort zone
Walks Away Woman by Ki Longfellow
Usually a mystery/thriller gets this spot, but this year it goes to a...Survival...Adventure story? I'm not sure what genre this book is, but suffice to say that I would have said that any book in that general area is probably not for me. The writing style of this one was what made me love it.

Biggest disappointment
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Based on the summary and reviews, this seemed just right for me. I love the themes and ideas explored here and I love fiction about science. But it really, really didn't work for me.
Runner up: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell — just as much of a disappointment, but I feel like I could have guessed I might not like this.

What was I thinking?
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
I don't tend to like mysteries much to begin with and I should just stay far away from any books described as "simple and sweet," not to mention books about sweet and simple people from "foreign" cultures.

Series I'm most excited for
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
A perfect fit kind of book, I expected to love it and I did. I hope the sequels hit the same spot for me!

Couldn't stop reading
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
Top favorite book of the year. I tore through this book because I was just so enchanted by Machado's writing style and the incredibly unique, innovative way she wrote this memoir.

Can't believe I waited so long to read
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Usually I give this spot to a classic, but this time it has to go to The Sparrow. Not only has this book been on my TBR for so many years, but I saw it referenced and recommended in SO many places before I finally read it and loved it (of course).

Favorite reread
Dracula by Bram Stoker
I reread this through Dracula Daily and it was such a fun new experience for me. It's super cool to reread something in a totally different format!

Most thought-provoking book
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert
This book has come up in many conversations I've had since reading it. Kolbert's work is always sobering and awe-inspiring to me at the same time somehow.

Most challenging book
Embassytown by China Miéville
The prose and structure make this not an easy read, but it was so worth it — I loved how weird and different this book was, while still being a variation on my favorite theme of linguistics-based sci fi.

Sleeper hit
Severance by Ling Ma
This was only a couple weeks ago, but I can already tell how much this book is lingering in my mind.

Favorite character
The titular Elena from Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro.
I read a lot of books this year about stubborn old women, but Elena in particular stood out. She was so real, so flawed and so sympathetic.

Favorite relationship
The protagonist and Emerance of The Door by Magda Szabó
An incredibly strange relationship, but so compelling that it easily filled this whole book.