A Year In Books - 2022

One of the very best things I ever did for my self was to turn off the television and turn on an audiobook. Make an effort to stop the never ending scrolling and turn a page instead. 

2022 marks the second year I have participated in Goodreads' Reading Challenge. 

Last year, I read or listened to 104 books! 

I know what you are thinking - when do you find the time to read 100+ books? To be honest, the majority of my books each month are audiobooks. I spend a lot of time in the car and when I am home doing house work, mowing the lawn, cleaning horse pens, gardening, folding laundry or working out at the gym, I listen to audiobooks. I utilize subscriptions to Audible, Scribd and get some audiobooks from the Libby App through local libraries. 

I try to physically read at least 2 books each month. One book-book and typically one on my kindle. 

Thanks to friends and family suggestions this last year, The Book Girls Guide reading challenges, and  my second year of participating in the Facebook group called The Book Hive Book Club, I managed to crush my 75 book goal I set for myself in 2022!

Here are a few of my most notable reads in 2022:

My two favorite Book Hive Books I read this year were The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner - Sophie Whalen, a mail-order-bride from New York heads west to San Francisco to marry Martin Hockings and take over raising his daughter Kat. Set in 1906, a massive earthquake rocks San Francisco and Sophie finds herself questioning what appears to be on the surface of her new husband and what secrets and lies are really the truth. A little bit mystery and a little bit historical fiction!

I also really enjoyed this domestic thriller, Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter. Three sisters, the eldest (Julia) disappeared twenty years earlier without a word or a trace. Now another girl disappears with chilling echoes of the past. Julia's sister, Clair, believes that Julia's disappearance is linked. Her discoveries are shocking and riveting. 

Thrillers are a new appreciated genre for me. Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica, was excellent and also one of my favorite reads this year. 11 years after two women and a young girl, Delilah, go missing, Delilah shockingly returns and everyone wants to know what happened to her. 

My favorite book that I read with The Book Girls this year was The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See. Wow! Historical fiction, this story is set on the Korean island of Jeju and follows Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls from very different backgrounds, as they begin working in the sea with their village's all-female diving collective, the Haenyeo. 

My Brown Eyed Girl and I listened to two audiobooks together this year. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens and Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell. I read Where the Crawdads Sing in 2021 and absolutely loved it! My Brown Eyed Girl saw the previews for the movie adaptation and said she really wanted to see the movie. Seasoned readers know - the book is always better. 

My Brown Eyed Girl and I listened to Where the Crawdads Sing as we drove to and from a horse show one weekend (all of my favorite things wrapped together with love). We finished the book the following weekend on our way up to Cheyenne, WY for a girls weekend and her first Cheyenne Frontier's Day Rodeo. After cleaning up from the rodeo, it was a date - dinner and a movie!

I also read along with my Brown Eyed Girl's required reading for school. We read To Kill A Mocking Bird by Harper Lee and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. 

Having read To Kill A Mocking Bird in my youth, I found I enjoyed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn more. Both classics in their own right, I appreciated the opportunity to read them. 

My favorite quote from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:

"Dear God, let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well-dressed. Let me be sincere- be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."

New favorite author this year - Colleen Hoover. I may have said goodbye to binge watching television episodes, but I have replaced that fix with Colleen Hoover books! I am not sure what I am going to do this year when I find I have read them all... I highly recommend November 9, Verity, It Ends With Us, It Starts With Us... I could keep going!

The last four I loved for very different reasons. 

This new dystopian book, The Measure by Nikki Erlick, was a different read for me. One day, a little wooden box arrives for each person and inside is their name and a piece of string. The length of the string is the length of that person's life. How would society cope with knowing how long everyone will live? Would you make different choices how you live your life? Would you open the box or leave it closed and ignorant to your fate? Does the length of one's life mean a more or less fulfilling one?  

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. This book is just joy wrapped up in a colorful cover! After Tova's husband dies, she began working the night shift at an aquarium. Tova becomes acquainted with a curmudgeonly giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus. The story is full of heart, charm and if you like audiobooks, I highly recommend listening to this one. The voices are fantastic!

No surprise a book about a horse made my favorites pile! Horse by Geraldine Brooks is a beautifully intertwined story about a discarded painting, an enslaved groom named Jarrett in 1850, a bay colt, a young artist, a gallery owner in 1954, a Smithsonian scientist in 2019 and a story based on the remarkably true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred named Lexington. 

After reading The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell in 2021, I couldn't wait to read The World Played Chess, also by Robert Dugoni. I absolutely fell in love with Dugoni's writing style in Sam Hell. In 1979, newly graduated Vincent is just looking to collect some beer money and enjoy his last summer before college when he lands a job as a construction laborer alongside two Vietnam Vets. It is a summer of many life lessons. 

I love historical fiction most of all. There is something especially alluring about 1800's historical fiction - wagon trains, Indians, the great wide open country yet to be navigated by the pioneers. When Winter Comes by VA Shannon is a mesmerizing story of the ill-fated Donner Party as they traveled from Cincinnati to California in 1846. Instead of following the wagon train's established route, the Donner Party takes a short cut over the Sierras, aiming to clear the mountains before the first snows descend. 

For the admirers of the Outlander series, this is a feat of accomplishment! I listened to all NINE Outlander books in one year! That's 7,880 total pages - an average of 887 pages per book. That is approximately 415 hours of audio - which I admittedly shrink that number significantly. I listen to all of my audiobooks at 1.5x the speed. 

After finishing all nine books, I rated them all 5 Stars! I absolutely love Claire, Jamie and all of the characters. I hope there is a tenth book in the future!

With a goal of 75 books, here was my My Year in Books.