Yellow Wallpaper

I read 107 books in 2018, which is only two less than the previous year (2017's post is here ). I completed a book challenge from a local bookstore that got me reading things I might not have otherwise read. I also read some of the Whitney Award finalists this year, although I was not able to read everything that I would have liked since I simply ran out of time.  I only read 20 nonfiction books and 87 fiction books. This has been a trend for the last few years; I tend to gravitate towards fiction, and reading Whitney finalists skews the ratio as well. It felt like I had read more nonfiction since I remember most of them. I enjoyed a much higher percentage of the nonfiction books I read and thought most were well-written. Each year I think I'm going to read more nonfiction and it doesn't happen, but I have a new reading challenge for 2019 and it should help. I also usually like to see what my ratio of female to male authors is. This year, I read 78 books by women and 29

A Double Life by Flynn Berry This was a quick read and I enjoyed it more than the last book I read by Berry, since it didn't suffer from the same problem of a last-minute reveal that mostly came from left field. The ending was still surprising to me since I didn't think it would go that far, but it was in keeping with what we knew about the character. While Berry is not my favorite thriller writer, she's better than most.  The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu I do not know a lot about physics and I have not spent a lot of time thinking about things like chaos theory. That made this book a bit hard to read, and it took me about halfway through the book to get a good sense of what was going on. I don't think that's the book's fault; in fact, I think that's a sign of a good translation that retained the foreignness of the setting and language of the original. Days Without End by Sebastian Barry The writing style of this book took some time to get us