Hello and welcome back!
The vast majority of the reading that I do is fiction. This is a hard category for me to narrow down because it’s the closest I’ll get to picking a favourite book of the year. But the year is long and the reading is varied and how do you choose? I read a lot of Really Good books but the list below represents the books that I really thought were great. The ones that I kept thinking about and pondering even weeks and months later.
This year, you might notice that some of these titles appeared on other lists in other categories. I tried to keep some variety in my winners
The Runners-Up:
Writers & Lovers – Lily King
Heart the Lover – Lily King
I’m putting these two together because I read them both this year and they really are a pair in my mind. You don’t have to read both and you could probably read one or the other alone and still be perfectly satisfied but as a set they really draw something out in the reader and in one another and I especially enjoyed thinking about them in the context of each other.
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – Charles Dickens
I put off reading this book for so long and then I enjoyed it so much when I did read it. I think it might be the funniest Dickens I’ve read. At the same time, it’s sweet without being sappy and the characters are so ridiculous and yet you can’t stop cheering for them.
The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden
I’ve reviewed this book already and shared in my Best Debut category about it so I won’t repeat myself except to say this was an astonishing read and one I’ve recommended a lot over the year.
Nightbitch – Rachel Yoder
Similarly, I’ve written about Nightbitch already and how it spoke to me as a novel. It’s such a good representation of the power of fiction – of a way to portray real and true things in an entirely made up way.
And the winner is…
Sleep – Honor Jones
This novel seems unassuming because it’s not about much. A dual timeline of a woman when she was ten years old and years later when she’s an adult, a mother, navigating a divorce and a new relationship. It sounds simple and it is but only in the way that life itself is simple, which is to say not at all. This novel is such a powerful portrait of the complexities of relationships, of motherhood, and all the personal history we bring as parents into the way we move forward with our own children.
Karissa Reads Books 
Now you’ve got me interested in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club because you said it’s the funniest. However, I promised Nick that I would read Pride and Prejudice aloud to him. I bought a really nice copy that has side notes instead of footnotes or endnotes. I read another Jane Austen book by the same editor (Sense and Sensibility) and absolutely got so much more from the story by having those sidenotes, which include things like how much money someone has would be compared to today, social norms, what certain items in a home represent, etc.).
Oh, that sounds great! I vastly prefer footnotes to endnotes but I don’t think I’ve read a novel with side notes before. Those context notes etc can be so helpful.
I had never seen them before. I picked up a copy of Sense And Sensibility at the library where I used to work. It stuck out to me because the book is pretty huge. It’s a hardcover and all the pages are glossy. Thankfully, I found a used copy of Pride and Prejudice on Amazon, though I haven’t bought a book from them in ages. It just wasn’t available somewhere else.
Oohhh Sleep sounds so good! I can’t remember reading your review of it now, which is weird. Also, quite the interesting show of Charles Dickens on this list , it’s a bit of an outlier haha
Haha, you’re right, Dickens doesn’t quite seem to fit!