Sometimes, I have #BookTube going on in the background while I’m playing with Nolan, a relatively new bookish rabbit hole I’ve discovered. OOPS! I thought it’d be fun to BLOG my 2019 mid-year FREAKOUT because this year has been AH-MAZING for books! I have read 56 books in 2019 so far!

• Best Book Read in 2019: WOW. This is hard. I’d say Daisy Jones & The Six mostly because it has totally reignited my love for Fleetwood Mac — and it holds a special place in my heart as really my first ARC as I’ve been doing this whole bookstagram/blogging thing. “I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody. End of f*cking story.” — Taylor Jenkins Reid

• Best Sequel Read in 2019: This is KIND of cheating, but I LOOOOVED Lost Roses, the prequel of Lilac Girls, published in March of this year. I read both of Martha Hall Kelly’s books this year and both, and they were both beautifully written pieces of historical fiction. Pick them up if you haven’t yet!

• New Release I Haven’t Gotten To Yet: Jill Santopolo’s More Than Words. I keep wanting to pick it up, but then reminding myself of how C R U S H E D I was after finishing The Light We Lost last year (I will disclose that I was 8 months pregnant while reading it…but probably would have similar reactions regardless).

• Most Anticipated New Release: NINTH HOUSE by Leigh Bardugo. I haven’t had the chance to read anything else by her, but I have heard that she’s a phenomenal writer and this his her first foray into adult fiction. The preview I read here has me SHOOK.

• Biggest Disappointment: The ONLY book I pre-ordered this year: Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered. I really wanted to love it. I’m obviously obsessed with the My Favorite Murder podcast, but they had talked about MOST of the stories in the book on the podcast already. I was so, so bummed and looking for a lot more out of it. It was a fun read, but I just felt like I had heard most of it already. 😦

• Biggest Surprise: Sadie by Courtney Summer. I was expecting a neat & cool YA novel with a little bit of edge; what I got was a gritty & dark tale of revenge, told from multiple POVs, including a podcast transcript. I LOVED it!

• Book You WILL Read by the End of the Year: The sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, I NEED TO READ The Testaments. I CANNOT wait for this release! I guess a re-read of the original is in order, too; apparently the sequel doesn’t follow what happens in the show but what happened in the book. (YAAS. More dystopian nightmares! [ugh what if it’s literally just news headlines from the past two years; we’re already living in a dystopian nightmare, but I digress])

• Favorite New Author: I am interpreting this as an author I have just discovered — and that is Beatriz Williams. She creates STUNNING settings, relatable characters, and does a phenomenal job of weaving history with fiction. I read The Summer Wives in a day on my flight to Nashville and The Golden Hour was one of my June BOTM picks — both were amazing. All of her titles are now on my TBR.

• Character Crush: Jonah from The Simple Wild. Oh, yes. The slow, sultry burn that was this book. Yaaas.

• Newest Favorite Character: Evelyn Hugo from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. She’s amazing, resilient, and fierce AF. Plus she’s gorgeous. (Also, I may or may not have been walking through a bookstore and saw it on a table and shoved this book in someone’s hand and said “YOU WILL NOT REGRET THIS!”)

• Made Me Cry: The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin was SO WELL DONE! I definitely had a few tears at the end of the novel. This novel made me reflect on the best ways to live – is it with reckless abandon? Is it with caution? Is there some in-between way to live best? This is a phenomenally written existential novel that is going to be popular with book clubs and often raises more questions than answers for the reader. (Evelyn also made me cry, but I just gushed about that one sooo…)

• Made Me Happy: Park Avenue Summer made me so happy! It has been described as Mad Men + The Devil Wears Prada, but it was so much more than that. It was a beautifully written piece of historical fiction about 1965 Manhattan and a feminist icon, Helen Gurley Brown. This was my first book by Renee Rosen, but it won’t be my last!

• Most Beautiful Cover: Sure, it’s not a super intricate cover, but this is one of the last books I NEED to gush about, and that’s The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker. This was a beautifully written novel about a disease that takes over a town, making people fall asleep — and stay asleep. It was super readable and stunning to read. I LOVE gorgeous apocalyptic fiction (yes, I’m weird. It’s fine. It’s why I LOVE The Passage trilogy.)