In no special order:

Travels with George: In Search of Washington and his Legacy - Nathaniel Philbrick

The Searchers - Tanya French

Mrs. Whaley & Her Charleston Garden - Emily Whaley

American Dirt - Jeanine Cummins

The Crooked Branch - Jeanine Cummins

How to Catch a Mole - Marc Hamer

The Rose Code and The Alice Network, Kate Quinn
Heaven's Keep, William Kent Krueger
The Third Sin, Aline Templeton
Miss Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey
What's Left Behind, 12 Rose Street, and The Nesting Dolls, Gail Bowen
Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein
The Kitchen Front, Jennifer Ryan
The Consequences of Fear, Josephine Winspear
At Risk, Stella Remington
The Darkest Evening, Ann Cleeves
Miss Buncle's Book, D. E. Stevenson
Dissolution and Dark Fire, C. J. Sansom

I can go on. I love Gail Bowen, Stella Remington, Aline Templeton, Michael Connelly, C. S. Harris, Elly Griffiths, Jeri Westerson, William Kent Krueger, James Lee Burke, James R. Benn, Susan Hill . . .

Most of the books I read this year weren't that memorable. The only one I recommended was The Other Passenger by Louise Candlish. It had so many startling twists!

Msmeow, did you finish it as it didn't grab you, I recall?

Ann, yes I did finish it. And it did have a lot of twists! I still didn’t like any of the characters, except Clare. 🙂

Thanks Msmeow. I didn't see that final twist coming that meant it was all for nothing!

I don't think we were meant to like the characters except Clare, who was so kind and even offered forgiveness.

I hastily grabbed two mystery books from the Quick Pick library shelf and just saw in time it was the same book under UK and US titles!

Saw this book on a pile of TBR's in a photo a friend sent...........

The Boarding House - William Trevor

His novel are always in a kind of an hazy, but he always manage to descrive the characthers in a lot of nuances

I have a very short reading list this year too, but I'm not sure why. I seemed to gravitate to re-reading favorites (looking at you, Murderbot series!) instead of reading something new. Anyway, here are my best-of's:

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, V.E. Schwab. What Sheri said above! Simply terrific.

Death Sentences, Kawamata Chiaki. A circular tale based on the surrealism movement in 5 sections that turn in on themselves. Odd and a bit creepy (a surrealist writes a poem that 'infects' its readers where they all eventually enter a catatonic state and die), but fascinating in its structure and ideas.

Ghosts of Gold Mountain: the epic story of the Chinese who built the transcontinental railroad, Gordon Chang. My best non-fiction read. Chang did a fantastic job of research to reconstruct the history and I learned so much.

The House in the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune. My best 'feel-good' read. It makes me smile just to think of it now.

I just got off a Zoom book chat where we all talked about our best-of-2021, and half the group listed News of the World by Paulette Jiles. Needless to say, that is now on my holds list at the library.

Welcome back, PAM!

The Rose Code, The Huntress, the Lady Juiia Gray series................

all good reads, nothing that knocked my socks off.

I didn't read as many as usual but most of them were very good. The top picks surprised me:

The Wonderboy of Whistle Stop - Fannie Flagg. This is the sequel to Fried Green Tomatoes; just as delightful.

Setting Free the Kites - Alex George. A coming of age story set in Maine.

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitsgerald A first time read for me.

The Red Notebook - Antoine Laurain. Delightful book with a particularly great ending

Have You Seen Luis Velez? - Catherine Ryan Hyde

How to Make an American Quilt - Whitney Otto. The movie was also available on Amazon so that was fun.

The Paris Library - Janet Skeslien Charles. Read it, then turned around and ordered a copy for myself. It mentioned many titles that I've added to my TBR and some beautiful turns of phrase that I've made note of.

Summer of '42 - Herman Raucher. First time read and I'm glad I didn't read it in adolescence. It would have been a completely different book which I likely wouldn't have deemed worthy a re-read.

The President's Hat - another by Antoine Laurain. This one was even better.

In no particular order:

Kiss Myself Goodbye - Ferdinand Mount. He traces the devious life of his Aunt, who by the time he knew her was living among the 'fast set' . .. but all was not at it seemed. Really worth reading to the end . . .

Miss Benson's Beetle - Rachel Joyce (who you may remember wrote about Harold Fry and Queenie Henderson) It was an entertaining story; just what I needed in a dull time of COVID lockdown.

Instructions for a Heatwave - Maggie O'Farrell. A family tries to rally round their Irish mother, who wont tell them what is wrong. Set in London during the heatwave of 1976.

Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers. A newspaper story sets a young woman journalist on what she knows must be an impossible search. Set in the 1950's, a rather grey era in England which Chamber's pictures quite accurately.

Light Perpetual - Francis Spufford. A 'what-if' tale of a group of working class children and what might have happened to them from the 1940's to the 2000's . . . if only they hadn't been killed by a bomb. A gritty rather than a gentle read.

Goodness, this thread has already become one big, remarkable TBR list. I love it! And Skibby, it's nice to see your name pop up. Haven't heard from you in a while.

Favorites I read this year are:

Hidden Valley Road - Robert Kolker. A fascinating nonfiction book about a family with twelve children (ten sons, two daughters) and six of the sons were diagnosed with schizophrenia. An astonishing and sad tale. Several are still alive today.

Eight Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson. A really good murder mystery about a man who owns a mystery book shop in Boston. In his blog on the store's website, he lists his eight favorite mystery novels. The police begin to notice that a serial murderer seems to be using the book seller's list as a guide.

The Good Luck of Right Now - Matthew Quick. I loved this story of a nearly-40-year-old man who has tended to his mother's needs his entire life, and due to her death, is now faced with how to make a life for himself. Very heart-warming and humorous, though there is a character who drops the f-bomb rather constantly and that might put some readers off, but not me, not in this book.

How Lucky - Will Leitch. This was unlike any other book I've read, in that the narrator (and main character) is a severely physically disabled young man. While the book is not about his disability, you do learn a lot about how a disabled person can manage life on their own rather well. This guy crazily gets involved in a big mess because he witnessed a serious crime and reported it to the police. The perpetrator of the crime is trying to figure out who ratted him out. A sort of comical thriller, if such a genre exists.

I just noticed that my list contains only male authors. That surprises me. Okay, I'm editing this post to add a book written by a woman, because truly, most of the books I read are by women.

The Reading List - Sara Nisha Adams. This is a novel about a reading list of eight book titles that we are all pretty familiar with. Someone has planted the list in multiple locations in London. The novel describes various people who found the list and decided to read the eight books. A charming story for book lovers.

Kathy, I've just requested Eight Perfect Murders and The Reading List from the library. TRL is wait listed.

Carolyn - I predict you will like them both.

Ever since the pandemic began, my reading life changed and I'm only reading a handful of books a year (and some of them are instructional books).

Thus, my list is very short:

--A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. It is excellent (it won the Booker prize in 2011).

--Life is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman

The story of a 103-year old African American, who among other things, learned to read at age 98. An unassuming man who had an ordinary, and yet extraordinary, life.

Reader, I LOVED Life is so Good. George Dawson is an inspiration that no matter what, just keep moving forward, and never think you are too old to learn. I read it years ago and bought my own copy for my kids to read when they were teenagers.

PAM

donnamira, Paulette Jiles is one of my favorite writers and I've read most of her books. I chose News Of the World for our book club a couple of years ago and everyone really loved it. I haven't seen the movie but I did see the scene where the Captain "finds" the girl in the movie. I felt that change alone from the book so diminished the power of the book that I have no desire to see how they ruined the rest of it.

Jiles's spare and powerful writing really speaks to me.

laceyvail, I finished News Of the World the other day, and very grateful to all who mentioned it. I thought it well-written with strong characterization and plotting. Well worth the time to read it, and although I don't think it would have knocked anything off my 'best-of' list, it would have definitely been a runner-up. It's the sort of novel that sticks in your memory and grows with time. It not only brought in a lot of history, it made the time and setting so very alive.

Speaking of runners-up, Vee, I noticed you had Miss Benson's Beetle on your list - it came very close to being on mine too. I loved the characters!

donnamira, often I find the books we choose depend so much on 'mood/circumstances'. When I first mentioned having enjoyed Miss Benson's Beetle (over a year ago) someone complained that they didn't find the characters 'likeable'. It's a fair comment but often, for me, it is the less than 'nice' persona who make the story more entertaining; especially when they get their comeuppance at the end.