2017 Chapter

Happy New Year!

Ok, so technically Monday was the kickoff to 2018, but this post is my traditional way to start the new year here on the blog.

As I do every year, I'm laying out everything I read and some stats from the past year. Coming on Friday, I have a post looking forward where I wax loquacious about goals and such. For today, though, I'm still focused on 2017 accomplishments.

Let's start with some highlights:

• I read 126 books. This is down from 136 last year, but I read a lot of heavy stuff this year. 
• Readership was all over the place this year. I think Google is messing with SEO algorithms. Some months were huge and some were not so much. Overall, though, I'm not worried about this. I basically don't do anything to actively seek readership. I do this for personal pleasure and am especially thankful for those of you who show up here consistently. 
• I finished the 100 Best Novels challenge! This was such a huge undertaking and I'm so proud to have finished it.
• The Read.Write.Repeat. Facebook presence has stayed stable, but I've gotten increasingly active on Twitter. Like or follow if you haven't already! 
• I continued the monthly "chapter" posts and some off and on Movie Mondays as well as a few Let's Talk About... posts. I haven't done one of the LTA posts since the spring, but I'm hoping to bring them back in the new year. In fact, I have one brewing right now. I have some thoughts to share about the latest installment in a certain blockbuster science fiction franchise.
• I started offering personalized book recommendations last year and they are consistently the way people most engage with the blog (besides reading). I've done nearly 100 of them since starting the service. They are fun and I've made a better system to manage them better.
  

For those of you who are more number driven, here are some stats for you. If you are interested in comparing these to previous years, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, or 2012.

Books Read: 126

Total Pages Read: 40,470

Average Page Count (per book): 364.5

Most Read Author: Anthony Powell (4 books in the A Dance to the Music of Time series)

Average Pages Read Per Day: 110.8767

Busiest Month: May (16 books)

Slowest Month: September (6 books)

And, finally, here is the full list of books I read in 2016, with links to each review. If you missed it, earlier this week, I named my Best Books of 2016. That's a list worth looking over if you just want the highlights.

The Definitive 2017 Book List

1. The Hopefuls - Jennifer Close
2. A House for Mr. Biswas - V. S. Naipaul
3. The Defining Decade - Meg Jay 
4. Golden Son - Pierce Brown
5. Catherine the Great - Robert K. Massie
6. Gilded Cage - Vic James
7. The Passenger - Lisa Lutz
8. Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
9. Career of Evil - Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling)
10. The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
11. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu - Joshua Hammer
12. White Trash - Nancy Isenberg
13. Game of Crowns - Christopher Andersen
14. Sophie's Choice - William Styron
15. Talking As Fast As I Can - Lauren Graham
16. Midnight's Children - Salmon Rushdie
17. Modern Romance - Aziz Ansari
18. The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell
19. Gold Fame Citrus - Claire Vaye Watkins
20. Wesley the Owl - Stacey O'Brien
21. Faith Shift - Kathy Escobar
22. The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
23. Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara
24. The Magician King - Lev Grossman
25. Year of Wonders - Geraldine Brooks
26. The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
27. We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
28. A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
29. Marie Antoinette - Antonia Fraser
30. You Will Not Have My Hate - Antoine Leiris
31. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
32. Under the Tuscan Sun - Frances Mayes
33. A Man Called Ove - Fredrik Rackman
34. Furiously Happy - Jenny Lawson
35. Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
36. The Danish Girl - David Ebershoff
37. Beyond the Label - Maureen Chiquet
38. The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
39. Killing Wonder Woman - Tenaya T. J. Tison
40. Bread and Wine - Shauna Niequist
41. Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay
42. The Killing Lessons - Saul Black
43. The Magician's Land - Lev Grossman
44. Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher
45. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell
46. Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi
47. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
48. The Gammage Cup - Carol Kendall
49. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
50. Morning Star - Pierce Brown
51. Strangers in Their Own Land - Arlie Russell Hochschild
52. A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipul
53. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
54. The Ginger Man - J. P. Donleavy
55. Still  - Lauren Winner
56. Pawn - Aimée Carter
57. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven - Susan Jane Gilman
58. Calling on Dragons - Patricia C. Wrede
59. Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
60. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
61. Shockaholic - Carrie Fisher
62. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
63. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
64. The Wild Shore - Kim Stanley Robinson
65. Talking to Dragons - Patricia C. Wrede
66. Loving - Henry Green
67. The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
68. Bittersweet - Shauna Niequist
69. A Dance to the Music of Time: Spring - Anthony Powell
70. The 39 Clues: Beyond the Grave - Jude Watson
71. Appetites - Anthony Bourdain
72. The Nix - Nathan Hill
73. Cravings - Chrissy Teigen
74. Scrappy Little Nobody - Anna Kendrick
75. Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley
76. Just Mercy - Bryan Stevenson
77. Tribe - Sebastian Junger
78. Captive - Aimée Carter
79. A Dance to the Music of Time: Summer - Anthony Powell
80. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? - Maria Semple
81. A Dance to the Music of Time: Autumn - Anthony Powell
82. The Search for Delicious - Natalie Babbitt
83. A Dance to the Music of Time: Winter - Anthony Powell
84. Girls in White Dresses - Jennifer Close
85. Not the End of the World - Kate Atkinson
86. Salt - Mark Kurlansky
87. In Sunlight and in Shadow - Mark Helprin
88. Everything, Everything - Nicola Yoon
89. Seriously Delish - Jessica Merchant
90. The Daily Show - Chris Smith
91. Yes, Chef - Marcus Samuelsson
92. Hold Me Like a Breath - Tiffany Schmidt
93. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
94. A Year of Living Prayerfully - Jared Brock
95. London - Edward Rutherfurd
96. The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander
97. Exit West - Mohin Hamid
98. The Widow - Fiona Barton
99. Let Nobody Turn Us Around - Manning Marable & Leith Mullings
100. The Last Policeman - Ben H. Winters
101. The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert
102. The Call - Peadar O'Guilin
103. The Pursuit of God - A. Z. Tozer
104. French Impressions - John S. Littell
105. The Welcome Home Diner - Peggy Lampman
106. What Color Is Your Parachute? - Richard N. Bolles
107. Garlic and Sapphires - Ruth Reichl
108. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler
109. The Kind Worth Killing - Peter Swanson
110. Forever Chic - Tish Jett
111. Big Little Lies - Liane Moriarty
112. Origin - Dan Brown
113. The 39 Clues: The Black Circle - Patrick Carman
114. One Thousand Gifts - Ann Voskamp
115. What Happened - Hillary Rodham Clinton
116. The Three - Sarah Lotz
117. Fierce Kingdom - Gin Phillips
118. The 39 Clues: In Too Deep - Jude Watson
119. Upstairs at the White House - J. B. West 
120. The Crown - Robert Lacey 
121. Harmony - Charles, Prince of Wales
122. The Crows of Beara - Julie Christine Johnson
123. Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
124. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry - Neil deGrasse Tyson
125. Come, Let Us Adore Him - Paul David Tripp
126. Diana - Andrew Morton