Book Report - 2017

Not quite the end of the year, so I'll probably add two or three more books to these totals. But since I met my goal of 80 books in 2017, at least 20 of which being non-fiction, I thought I'd take a moment and celebrate.

Touchdown! Okay, enough excessive celebration. Below I'll highlight some of my favorite reads from this past year.

First off, the numbers: I read 84 books - 23 non-fiction and 61 fiction. Of the 23 non-fiction, 17 were Christian/theology and 6 were writing/publishing related.

I abandoned 6 books - Goodreads counts them as  read, but I do not. This is unusual for me. In the past I've felt I've had to slog through even terrible books I've started. But life is too short. If I'm not into it by a quarter way through I'm out of there.

GR also counts short stories as books, so my totals look inflated. I read about 50 short stories these past few months but only recorded about 30 at GR. I'll do a lot more short story reading in 2018 as I want to write more short stories. Makes sense, eh?

Of the 61 fiction books, they roughly fall into 5 genres - 27 were thriller/mystery, 19 were SF/F, 11 were classics, 3 romance, and 1 western. That one western suprised me. I used to read a lot more western - a few years ago my most read authors were Grisham, Asimov, and L'Amour. Still representative of my favorite genres. ;)

Here's a format breakdown. Out of the 84 books I read (both non-fiction and fiction), 27 were ebooks, 28 were paperbacks, 18 were hardbacks, and 11 were audio books. I can't recall exactly but at least a dozen of the paperbacks/hardbacks were from the local library as were almost all the audio books.

So my favorites? Here's a sampling in no particular order (super favorites in bold).

Fiction (6 of 8 are classics I finally got around to reading!):
+ A Separate Peace by John Knowles
+ Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
+ Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
+ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
+ Animal Farm by George Orwell
+ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
+ Camino Island by John Grisham
+ The Spy by Clive Cussler

Non-fiction (7 are theology, 1 writing):
+ The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher
+ No God but One: Allah or Jesus? by Nabeel Qureshi
+ The Jesus Prayer by Frederica Mathewes-Green
+ Your Mind Matters by John R.W. Stott
+ A Case for Faith by Clark H. Pinnock
+ The Great Omission by Dallas Willard
+ The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
+ Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card

Books I "should" have liked but did not:
+ The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (hated this one, actually, lol)
+ Grendel by John Gardner
+ The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
+ Allegiant by Veronica Roth

Books that were just plain bad, imo (did not list my abandoned books):
+ The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz
+ 10th Anniversary by James Patterson
+ The Last Mile by David Baldacci
+ The Athena Project by Brad Thor

That's about it. What were some of your favorites? Some duds? Feel free to comment.

And good reading in 2018.