Ghost brideLast January I challenged myself to keep a list of all the books I read in 2014. I knew the ‘empty bookshelf’ approach, emptying a shelf and filling it with each book you finish, but suspected I wouldn’t have a shelf big enough. I was right:

65 total books read
16 books that I Did Not Finish (DNF)
33 library books
9 digital books

The best books were:

Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga by Michael McDowell
Horror. Subtle with a complex cast of well developed ‘real’ characters. Set in the south with a creative monster (human crocodile hybrid? Creature from the black lagoon? I was never sure) I didn’t want this story to end, even after six full length books.

The Revenant by Sonia Gensler
YA fantasy. A diverse (most of the characters are Cherokees), well written ghost story with a smart and resourceful heroine who steals the things she needs and refuses to let a ghost stand in the way of her plans.

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
YA Fantasy. This adventure takes place in the afterlife as depicted in Eastern/Chinese culture. The plot hinges on a girl being courted by a ghost. She doesn’t love him, and fights to break free of him.

In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters
Historic YA fantasy. This is a book about surviving horrors, but it’s also a ghost story. The heroine suffers through the flu pandemic, WWII paranoia, her father being jail, and the love of her life haunting her. Everything felt amazingly real and vivid, the smells, the sounds, the pressures she was under.

WildfireWildfire by Mina Khan
Paranormal Romance/Western. This one blew me away. The heroine is a dragon shifter, she’s also half-Japanese and struggling with depression. I check often in the hopes of another book with these characters.

My best list makes it seem like I read a lot of YA, but they added up to only about 31% of my list. The rest is mystery or historic fiction. I rarely read romances (seven) and am far too picky about my Westerns (five).

I’m not going to mention the worst books by name, but oddly most were highly recommended. It seems I don’t have a lot of tolerance for confusion. Several of the DNF books involved world building that left me completely lost. In one example characters went by different names and switched genders depending on who was narrating.

While I have plenty of editing, running, and quilting on the schedule for the next few weeks I’ll probably add another three or four books to my total. While my tracking project was fun for a year, I’m not sure I’ll keep it up in 2015. I feel slightly guilty admitting I read more than a book a week, but didn’t write any new manuscripts. Saying I spent the year editing is a poor excuse. The best stories are always the ones that haven’t been written yet.