by Josiah DeGraaf | Dec 31, 2020 | Annual Top Ten
Well, what a year this has been. I’ll spare you the obligatory comments about the craziness of 2020. Needless to say: despite everything else, I’ve managed to continue my standard reading pace I’ve kept up these past four years, including a lot more re-reading than I have for a while! Most of my re-reads were of classical works of literature, but there were a few non-classics as well.
Because I generally keep re-reads off this list (unless it dramatically changed my view of the book), those won’t be represented on this list. But without any further commentary, let’s dig into my favorite new reads I’ve done this past year. (As always, titles are linked to my longer reviews.)
10. Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseni
Khaled Hosseni was on my TBR list for a while before I finally got into him this year. I went back and forth on whether to include Kite Runner or A Thousand Splendid Suns in this slot, but ended up choosing Kite Runner since it was my first introduction to his beautiful prose and haunting themes.
by Josiah DeGraaf | Dec 31, 2017 | Annual Top Ten
After hitting a personal record of 154 books read in 2016, I decided to scale things back this past year. Apparently being a full-time English teacher leaves me with a lot less free time than being a college student teaching on the side. Who knew. I still got to 101 books, but the vast majority of those books were read before August when reading time went out the window.
It was easier to choose my top 10 this year since I was sorting through a lot less books, so here are the top 10 books I read in 2017 (yes; my list is pretty eclectic–I have a lot of varied tastes). I included a brief snippet about the book below, and the titles are linked to my Goodread reviews for the few of you foolish enough curious enough to want to read more of my thoughts on these books.
10. The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
This is an odd book in many ways. One of the best works of Christian speculative fiction I’ve read–and it was also written by an atheist. It markets itself as a sci-fi first-encounter-with-aliens book–but it’s really about the trials of a long-distance marriage. It doesn’t fit into many neat categories. But it was also a breathtakingly beautiful and profoundly tragic work. Really fascinating stuff.
