Review: 2017 on Goodreads

2017 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So 2017 was a highly successful reading year for me! I set a goal of 70 books and finished 95 so I'm pretty pleased with that effort! I generally spent more time reading and less time watching TV, and I put more effort into reading on public transport instead of just playing with phone. I really enjoyed rediscovering the comfortable solitude of being immersed in a good book.

Best books I read in 2017:
-The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
-Duskfall by Christopher Husberg by Michael Crichton
-Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

I also had a lot of fun with self-development books and learning a bit more about mind and spirit. There were some groundbreaking ideas for me and the process of putting some of these things into practice was very enlightening!

Game-changing Non-Fiction:
-Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
-The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
-The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy
-Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works by Evelyn Tribole
-The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World's Happiest People by Meik Wiking

I won a few giveaways:
-The Girl Before by J.P. Delaney
-Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit
-Close Enough to Touch by Colleen Oakley
-The Dark Lake by Sarah Bailey
-Finding Hannah by Fiona McCallum
-Forgotten by Nicole Trope
-The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
-The Greatest Gift by Rachael Johns

Read some more classics:
-Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
-Tales of Horror by Edgar Allan Poe
-The Two Dianas, Volume 1 by Alexandre Dumas
-Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
-Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
-Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
-Selected Poems by William Blake
-Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
-The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins
-The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
-The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
-The Art of War by Sun Tzu

I read some pretty decent trash, too, but who wants to hear about the trash?!

That being said ...

Biggest disappointments:
-The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons
-All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I also re-read the entire The Dark Tower Series Collection: The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, The Dark Tower and I'm still just as in love with it as ever. I was also pretty stoked to receive Stephen King's The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born as a gift - my first comic book ever! :)

I also made a lot of new GR friends and it's been such a thrill interacting with so many new, book-loving individuals! I've found myself being heavily influenced by everyone else's reviews. I was reading more YA towards the end of the year and this seems to be a growing trend in 2018.

Honourable mentions:
-Draekora by Lynette Noni - I'm so in love with this series! (Check out my review for the latest book, Graevale, here.)
-The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte - I'm obsessed with Dumas so this was a great read. But it still mentioned so much literature I've yet to read! So I'd love to re-read it again one day.
-Winter Be My Shield by Jo Spurrier - I put this book off for ages but when I finally read it, it blew me away. Fantastic that Jo is an Aussie author, too!

Overall, 2017 had some wonderful reading moments for me.

2018 is starting strong so here's hoping I outdo myself this year! :)

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