The Plan for 2018

David Krachov - The Book of Life

Last year I read more than 218 books, according to Goodreads. Since this blog started in July, I'm not even sure that count is correct because sometimes I would rate books without entering reading dates. That's a lot of books, and to be perfectly frank, I wasn't always happy with my reading. I accepted so many ARC books and some of them were not of the quality I might have chosen to keep reading before venturing into reviewing. So this year, I'm planning to change things up a bit. Of course, I'll still be trying to snag some of the best and most interesting ARCs I can find to share with other readers. And of course, I'll tell be reviewing Hugo, Locus, and Nebula nominees. But I'm also going to make time to catch up on reading that I've wanted to do for a while (Leigh Bardugo, Sarah J. Maas, Tamora Pierce...) and to bring some classic books to the attention of readers. In the latter category, I've decided that each month I'm going to pick a classic sci-fi book and a classic literary book to read and review. In January, those books are going to be Octavia Butler's Kindred, the first science fiction novel written and published by an African-American woman, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a novel that pierced the veil of the gender confinement in Victorian English society, which viewed women as chattel, giving us a heroine trying to live independently after the failure of a disastrous marriage. (Anne Brontë's writing is quite different from that of her sisters Charlotte and Emily!) In the meantime, in the coming weeks, I've got some great reads to share- excellent memoirs, the usual mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and of course general and historical fiction.

And, for the first six months of the 2018, each month, Alex of Alex Can Read, Mrs. Allen of Wishful Thinking and I are going to be doing a buddy read of the books of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence! I'm really excited because I don't think these books have received nearly enough attention (though please note that the whole series was a Hugo Award Series finalist in 2017!) We're going to be blogging about these books across our three blogs and a little bird told me there might be a Craft Sequence nail lacquer collection coming out in the early summer.

What classic works would you suggest I read for review? Give me a shout out here, or on Facebook or Twitter to share your thoughts!

Wishing you a happy, healthy 2018, with lots and lots of great books.