I just noticed a Facebook Memory from 2010. It was a “Thursday 13,” a meme that asks participants to make a list of thirteen things on Thursdays. I chose that day, eleven years ago today, to compile a list of the last thirteen books I’d read. (I specified then that I was not including books I’d read aloud to my son — not an issue now that he’s 19 and a college freshman!) The fact that I keep track of my reading on the Goodreads site made this list easy to compile. I’m still reading voraciously, maybe even more than I was eleven years ago; in fact, I read all thirteen of these books in the past month.
Here is a list of the last thirteen books I’ve read, most recent first.
- Between Wild and Ruin (Wild And Ruin #1), by Jennifer G. Edelson
- Saltwater Secrets, by Cindy Callaghan
- Turtles All the Way Down, By John Green
- A Rosie Life In Italy: Why Are We Here? by Rosie Meleady
- Take Off Your Pants!: Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing, by Libbie Hawker
- Secrets of the Ravine (MacKenzie Chronicles #1), by Brenda Whiteside
- Brazen in Blue (The Muses’ Salon #5), by Rachael Miles
- The Six-Week Solution, by Paula Darnell
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter #7), J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter #6), by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter #5) by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter #4) by J.K. Rowling
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter #3) by J.K. Rowling
This list is not representative of what I usually read. In fact, I did not choose all of these myself; in the past month I have judged two writing contests and had to read the books that were competing. I was also in the midst of one of my frequent Harry Potter re-reads. And of these 13, only one is nonfiction. I generally do read more fiction than nonfiction, but because of the contests I was judging, this list is skewed more toward fiction than it might usually be.
So, which are my favorites? That’s a hard one. My three favorite Harry Potters are on this list: Azkaban, Order of the Phoenix, and Deathly Hallows. John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down is a stand-out, as his books so often are. A Rosie Life in Italy gave me a highly entertaining vicarious taste of one of my pipe dreams: moving to Umbria and buying a historic villa there. And Take Off Your Pants is one of the best of many books I’ve ever read about how to plot a novel. So I just picked six out of thirteen as favorites. And really, there wasn’t a single book on the list that I actually disliked.
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