Must Read in 2019: Final Update!

Thanks to Carrie for hosting this fun challenge on her blog. Even though I kind of crashed and burned on my list this year, it was still a great way to see other lists, and if anything I can re-commit to some of the great books that I missed out on this year from my list.

I just re-read my fall update for this list, and I mentioned that I had become distracted by other books, but was hoping to re-focus on these books and read another 15 or 20. At the time, I had read 31/64 on the list. I did not really re-focus until mid-December and ended up reading 10 more for a total of 41. That is not as many as I had read in past years so I have to decide if I needed a smaller list or if I was just distracted by too many ARCs that I did not know about when I originally made this list. My goal was to get to at least 50, so I fell short of that but it was a great reading year otherwise. Here is what I read since the last update!

A book often compared to Wonder, which makes it tough, but is different and good in its own way. Stewart has to live inside a specialized hospital room to avoid germs and illness. This is one of those books that has all the feels.

Being a huge Jennifer Nielsen fan, this one was a given on my list. I did not enjoy this as much as Resistance, but what bibliophile wouldn’t enjoy a story with a girl fighting to allow for book access, and the setting (Lithuania) was something different that I enjoyed. This was an exciting book.

A very intriguing third book in a fascinating YA series. I really can’t explain this book, but having read the first two, it was certainly a “must-read”.

This one is the start of a really interesting series, again a YA series. When I was the target age for this series, I would have loved reading this just a few years before I read William Gibson or Neal Stephenson’s books featuring near future, virtual reality plots. I should probably find the rest of this series.

This is the third in the series, this time with Joseph Bruchac co-writing. It was funny, and filled with some interesting cultural traditions explored within the setting in the territory of the Muckleshoot Tribal Nation.

City of Ghosts was a really popular book that I missed out on the year it was released. It will be a great book for me to hand to a student looking for a scary book. I also enjoyed the setting of the book, being in Edinburgh.

This was my oldest daughter’s pick and it is an inventive dystopian novel. I enjoyed it, but I not sure if it was enough to make me seek out a sequel.

Another great read from Neal Shusterman this year. This one is co-written with his son, and is a terrifyingly real tale of an extreme water shortage referred to as the “Tap-out.” We follow several characters as they struggle with the impact of this on California, in particular a group of teens who see the world quite differently. This was a very exciting book.

This is an ARC that comes out in 2020. I should have had it on that list, but I did get the book on NetGalley. It’s Rick Riordan approved so I thought my kids would want to read it with me, and Rebecca Roanhorse has written an exciting book steeped in Navajo culture. We are enjoying it. That’s right, we are not actually done. But we will finish in 2019.

I also pledge to finish this book before 2019 ends. It is another sequel and I am enjoying it quite a bit so far.

 

Thanks for checking out my progress on this goal. I went 0 for October, and was generally way too distracted over the last half of the year.