Happy New Year and all that…

Despite appearances, I am very much alive and this blog is still active…sort of.  The reason I haven’t been posting any reviews is because I haven’t been reading any novels lately.  2018 was a wonderful and busy year for me, so busy, in fact, that since August, I haven’t finished a single book.  Sad, but true.  The book I started last August, which I am still reading, is Cixin Liu’s fantastic sci-fi novel, The Three-Body Problem.  It is the first book in Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, which, despite being about a bunch of physicists, is a truly riveting novel.  But more on that later, hopefully.

As I was saying….I was so busy in 2018 that according to goodreads, I only finished 13 novel during the entire year.  It’s actually 12, but for some reason, goodreads listed Lincoln in the Bardo twice, and no matter what I do, I can’t get rid of the extra listing.  I haven’t read that few books since…ever!  I was so caught up with work and other things that I didn’t even notice that I started reading Anthony Horowitz’s Moriarty sometime last year until I logged into my goodreads account last week.

So, anyway…it’s 2019 and I’m going to strive to read more books this year…or at least more than last year, starting with finishing The Three-Body Problem.  Because of all the other things going on in my life now, I have to actually make an effort to read more.

Despite my pathetically short reading list last year, I think I read some excellent novels, like Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, especially Annihilation, and of course, the 2017 Booker Prize winner, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.  The two novels by Anthony Horowitz, Dear Mr. M, by Herman Koch, and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London are also worth noting.

There were a few books I abandoned or forgot about as well, like V.S. Naipaul’s In A Free State, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Monday Starts on Saturday, to name a few. I may get back to them, or I may not.  It just depends on what I feel like reading.

 

Happy New Year!!

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