Sammi Loves Books – Year In Review 2015 Part 2

In Part 1 I looked over the reading themes and challenges I set myself for the year.  In Part 2 I shall look over the books I read and reviewed in 2015…

2015 stats

The figures were less than I was expecting…

• I read and reviewed 56 stories this year – which is less than 2014, whose total was 63 😦
• 35 of the reviews were for full-length novels
• 21 of the reviews were for short stories

My Favourite Books of 2015

This is how my list of favourite reads of the year ended up:

1. Shadows In Bronze (Lindsey Davis)
2. The Silver Pigs (Lindsey Davis)
3. A Morbid Taste for Bones (Ellis Peters)
4. The Vanishing Witch (Karen Maitland)
   
5. The Apothecary Rose (Candace Robb)
6. Cocaine Blues (Kerry Greenwood)
7. Except the Dying (Maureen Jennings)
8. The Devil in the Marshalsea (Antonia Hodgson)
9. Nefertiti (Michelle Moran)
10. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind) / The First Horseman (D.K.Wilson)

I must say that towards the end of the year it became harder and harder to add books to this list because I hated the idea of displacing other titles that were already there, and I do believe a number of them also deserve a mention:

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
Aberystwyth Mon Amor by Malcolm Pryce
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
The Winter Garden Mystery by Carola Dunn
The Duchess and The Doll by Ellis Peters (Short Story)
Death of A Gossip by M.C.Beaton

Books I read but have yet to get around to reviewing…

I read much quicker than I review, so there are always books that slip through my review-net.  There is no reason for it, only that there are not enough hours in the day.  That being said, the books will remain on my desk until I have reviewed them…no matter how long it takes…

So which books are still waiting to be reviewed:

• The Martian by Andy Weir
• The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling
• A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
• Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier
• Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwall

The most popular reviews of the year were:

1. The Sphinx Without A Secret by Oscar Wilde – Short Story Review
2. The Black Veil by Charles Dickens – Short Story Review
3. The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side by Agatha Christie – Book Review
4. The Judges House by Bram Stoker – Short Story Review
5. The Necklace by Guy du Maupassant – Short Story Review

Hope you all had a good 2015, and wishing you all a 2016 full of good books!