The New Year is lapping at our toes. The press is already showing the lists of Best Books for the Year. I may not be done with my reading, but I will jump in the fray wrapping up lists and challenges for the year.
Goodreads has kindly informed me that as of today I have read 26,895 pages across 80 books so far this year, with my longest book coming in at 1376 pages (Noble House). Even though this is owned and operated by Barnes and Noble, the discussion groups have been a great source of titles and inspiration for me. One group ran monthly challenges in honor of its 10th anniversary year. I chose books from member’s libraries, books on my TBR list, prize winners, buddy reads, and recommendations from members. While the time was well spent for myself, I was one of 13 that completed the full challenge with all possible points, and was entered to a raffle that many times – and won third prize. I am now on the hunt for great titles to spend my gift cards on.
As I do that, here are some books you may be interested in – and how I challenged myself to read so widely.
List 1: Books I read for the PBT Decatholon:
| MONTH | TITLE | AUTHOR |
| September: | The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir | Jennifer Ryan |
| August: | The Thirty Nine Steps | John Buchan |
| July: | The Hearts Invisible Furies | John Boyne |
| June: | Marley and Me | John Grogan |
| May: | The Finkler Question | Howard Jacobson |
| April: | Runaway | Alice Munro |
| March: | Maus 1: My father bleeds history | Art Spiegelman |
| Maus 2: And here my troubles begin | Art Spiegelman | |
| The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint-Exupery | |
| February: | An Invisible Thread | Laura Schroff |
| January: | Beartown | Fredrik Backman |
List 2: Books I read for my travel log: Around the world
| COUNTRY | TITLE | AUTHOR |
| Saudi Arabia | Girls of Riyadh | Rajaa Alsanea |
| Afghanistan | The Pearl That Broke Its Shell | Nadia Hashimi |
| Chile | Ten Women | Marcela Serrano |
| China | The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane | Lisa See |
| Dominican Republic | How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents | Julia Alvarez |
| Ethiopia | Life After Coffee | Virginia Franken |
| France | The Velvet Hours | Alyson Richman |
| Hong Kong | Noble House | James Clavell |
| Iran: | Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood | Marjane Satrapi |
| Ireland | The Heart’s Invisible Fury’s | John Boyne |
| Kenya | Circling the Sun | Paula McLain |
| Korea | Please take care of mom | Kyong-suk Sin |
| New Guinea | Euphoria | Lily King |
| Pakistan | I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban | Malala Yousafzai |
| Peru | The Bridge of San Luis Rey | Thornton Wilder |
| Scotland | Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine | Gail Honeyman |
| Singapore | Crazy Rich Asians | Kevin Kwan |
| Sweden | Beartown | Fredrik Backman |
| Turkey | The Lost Sisterhood | Anne Fortier |
| USA | A Fall of Marigolds | Susan Meissner |
List 3: My best reads of the year
| Title | Author |
| Girls of Riyadh | Rajaa Alsanea |
| The Weight of Ink | Rachel Kadish |
| Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine | Gail Honeyman |
| Before We Visit the Goddess | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni |
| The Most Beautiful Book in the World: Eight Novellas | Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt |
| Faithful | Alice Hoffman |
| The Pearl That Broke Its Shell | Nadia Hashimi |
| The Hate U Give | Angie Thomas |
| A Fall of Marigolds | Susan Meissner |
| Beartown | Fredrik Backman |
| The Rent Collector | Camron Wright |
| The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir | Jennifer Ryan |
| Before We Were Yours | Lisa Wingate |
Last but not least, as I read through the Best Books lists of the year, my TBR list continues to expand. Currently at 126, here is what I am working on:
List 4: To Be Read (TBR):
| Title | Author |
| No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria | Rania Abouzeid |
| The Labyrinth of the Spirits | Carlos Ruiz Zafón |
| Unsheltered | Barbara Kingsolver |
| Pretend I’m Dead | Jen Beagin |
| Those Who Knew | Idra Novey |
| Asymmetry | Lisa Halliday |
| The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State | Nadia Murad |
| Nine Perfect Strangers | Liane Moriarty |
| We Should All Be Feminists | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |
| Truth and Beauty | Ann Patchett |
| Autobiography of a Face | Lucy Grealy |
| Almost Everything: Notes on Hope | Anne Lamott |
| Artemis | Andy Weir |
| Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women | Elena Favilli |
| In Search of Lost Books: The forgotten stories of eight mythical volumes | Giorgio van Straten |
| Little | Edward Carey |
| Night of Miracles | Elizabeth Berg |
| White Houses | Amy Bloom |
| Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance | Bill McKibben |
| Alternate Side | Anna Quindlen |
| The Diary of a Bookseller | Shaun Bythell |
| Relic (Pendergast, #1) | Douglas Preston |
| The Clockmaker’s Daughter | Kate Morton |
| The 19th Wife | David Ebershoff |
| Educated | Tara Westover |
| The Library Book | Susan Orlean |
| Codename Zero (The Codename Conspiracy #1) | Chris Rylander |
| The Rules of Magic | Alice Hoffman |
| Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry |
| Less | Andrew Sean Greer |
| Red Clocks | Leni Zumas |
| Do Not Say We Have Nothing | Madeleine Thien |
| For The Immortal (Golden Apple Trilogy #3) | Emily Hauser |
| For The Winner (Golden Apple Trilogy #2) | Emily Hauser |
| For The Most Beautiful (Golden Apple Trilogy #1) | Emily Hauser |
| The Power | Naomi Alderman |
| The Art of Hearing Heartbeats | Jan-Philipp Sendker |
| The Story of Zahra | Hanan Al-Shaykh |
| The Yellow Birds | Kevin Powers |
| Burial Rites | Hannah Kent |
| Maya | Jostein Gaarder |
| The Samurai’s Garden | Gail Tsukiyama |
| The Year of the Hare | Arto Paasilinna |
| The Tango Singer | Tomás Eloy MartÃnez |
| The Lady and the Unicorn | Tracy Chevalier |
| If You Leave Me | Crystal Hana Kim |
| The Masterpiece | Fiona Davis |
| Sea Prayer | Khaled Hosseini |
| Sleeping Giants (Themis Files, #1) | Sylvain Neuvel |
| The Last Watchman of Old Cairo | Michael David Lukas |
| I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life | Anne Bogel |
| The Girl Who Knew Too Much | Amanda Quick |
| Other People’s Houses | Abbi Waxman |
| Jerusalem, Drawn and Quartered: One Woman’s Year in the Heart of the Christian, Muslim, Armenian, and Jewish Quarters of Old Jerusalem | Sarah Tuttle-Singer |
| A Place for Us | Fatima Farheen Mirza |
| We Are Legion – We Are Bob (Bobiverse, #1) | Dennis E. Taylor |
| Uncommon Type: Some Stories | Tom Hanks |
| An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic | Daniel Mendelsohn |
| The House of Broken Angels | Luis Alberto Urrea |
| The Immortalists | Chloe Benjamin |
| Something Beautiful Happened: A Story of Survival and Courage in the Face of Evil | Yvette Manessis Corporon |
| Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved | Kate Bowler |
| Hey Ladies!: The Story of 8 Best Friends, 1 Year, and Way, Way Too Many Emails | Michelle Markowitz |
| Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces | Michael Chabon |
| The Optimistic Decade | Heather Abel |
| The Great Alone | Kristin Hannah |
| The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women | Kate Moore |
| The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead |
| Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1) | Ernest Cline |
| Destiny by Design- Leah’s Journey | Mirta Ines Trupp |
| The Two-Family House | Lynda Cohen Loigman |
| A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian | Marina Lewycka |
| The History of Love | Nicole Krauss |
| The Seven Good Years | Etgar Keret |
| The Music Shop | Rachel Joyce |
| The One-in-a-Million Boy | Monica Wood |
| I Love Myself When I Am Laughing… And Then Again: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader | Zora Neale Hurston |
| The Neverending Story | Michael Ende |
| Improvement | Joan Silber |
| My Ex-Life | Stephen McCauley |
| From a Paris Balcony | Ella Carey |
| Homesick | Eshkol Nevo |
| The Calligrapher’s Daughter | Eugenia Kim |
| Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo | Ntozake Shange |
| The Space Between Us | Thrity Umrigar |
| The Secrets Between Us | Thrity Umrigar |
| The Miniaturist | Jessie Burton |
| The Bookshop of Yesterdays | Amy Meyerson |
| Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader | Anne Fadiman |
| If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir | Ilana Kurshan |
| The Pearl Sister (The Seven Sisters #4) | Lucinda Riley |
| Three Daughters of Eve | Elif Shafak |
| Us Against You (Beartown, #2) | Fredrik Backman |
| The Map of Salt and Stars | Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar |
| Freud’s Mistress | Karen Mack |
| Everything Here Is Beautiful | Mira T. Lee |
| By the Book | Julia Sonneborn |
| Everything You Want Me to Be | Mindy Mejia |
| The Orphan’s Tale | Pam Jenoff |
| History Is All You Left Me | Adam Silvera |
| The Women in the Castle | Jessica Shattuck |
| The Alice Network | Kate Quinn |
| Lincoln in the Bardo | George Saunders |
| The Keeper of Lost Things | Ruth Hogan |
| Little Fires Everywhere | Celeste Ng |
| Ordinary Grace | William Kent Krueger |
| Not Me | Michael Lavigne |
| The Letter | Kathryn Hughes |
| The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun | Sébastien Japrisot |
| Perforated Heart | Eric Bogosian |
| 10:04 | Ben Lerner |
| Prayers for Sale | Sandra Dallas |
| The Most Dangerous Place on Earth | Lindsey Lee Johnson |
| Someone Knows My Name | Lawrence Hill |
| The Golden Son | Shilpi Somaya Gowda |
| The Healing | Jonathan Odell |
| Anything We Love Can Be Saved | Alice Walker |
| Say You’re One of Them | Uwem Akpan |
| Joy in the Morning | Betty Smith |
| Carter Beats the Devil | Glen David Gold |
| The Night Journal | Elizabeth Crook |
| The Beauty of Humanity Movement | Camilla Gibb |
| I, Mona Lisa | Jeanne Kalogridis |
| A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty | Joshilyn Jackson |
| The Weight of Heaven | Thrity Umrigar |
| Love Anthony | Lisa Genova |
The Source 4 Books 
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