Here’s my look at the first half of my year in reading:

📚Favorite Book: The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley — Choosing a favorite and the honorable mention was really difficult, as I’ve read some great books so far this year (Hamnet, Young Mungo, and A God in Ruins were also contenders and really could easily go in either spot). But The Kingdoms had so many elements of what makes me love a book.

📚Honorable Mention: The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller

📚Biggest Surprise: Jaws by Peter Benchley — I thought this would be a book I’d read just to say I had, and that having seen the movie so many times, wouldn’t hold any surprises for me. Not only were there just enough differences to keep me on the edge of my seat, it’s a well written story with scares aplenty.

📚Favorite “New to Me” Author: Norah Lofts for The Wayside Tavern — I first read about this book in @catrentzenbrink’s book. I loved the way Lofts told the history of a family, a village, and a building across the centuries.

📚Favorite Graphic Novel: Hostage by Guy Delisle — It’s amazing how much he can convey in his drawings, especially when so much of the book takes place in a single room.

📚Favorite Nonfiction: The Five by Hallie Rubenhold — a book about the five canonical victims of Jack the Ripper.

📚Scariest Book: A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons — a follow up to Summer of Night which I read last year. Also scary!

📚Most Disliked Book Not DNFd: The Love of My Life by Rosie Walsh — I “hate read” this book. So much awfulness.

📚Book I Want to Finish by the End of the Year: Middlemarch by George Eliot — I’m ashamed to say I started this in the spring of 2022 and am still making my way through it.

📚From January through June I read 63 books.

📚I DNFd 8 — several of which were popular bestsellers. Some I gave up almost immediately for various reasons, and others were halfway or even almost finished when boredom overtook any interest I had in reading them.