What I Read in the Year 2013

In 2013 I recorded my reading for the year in a lovely hardbacked spiral bound notebook which is covered in a pleasant green material with flowers added for decoration. I notice that I didn’t actually fill the notebook with my notes and I could have used it for a second year. I read 512 books in the year and this is the second and final year in which I read more than 500 books – I can’t imagine reading that many now, even though I have more free time available than I did ten years ago.

The first book that I read in the year was The Disposal of the Living by Robert Barnard. I have written a bit about how much I enjoy the writing of this author in my review of two of his earlier books here and here. His detective stories are short but thoughtful and occasionally very funny. The title I read in 2013 is about an English country village and events which surround its church fete where a murder occurs. It seems quite a traditional idea for the genre but the author’s observational humour make it a little bit different from the usual. It’s one of his best and I highly recommend it.

The final book that I read in the year was Bring Me Sunshine by Janet Gover. This author is one I first read on Kindle and her books are contemporary romances. This one’s set on a tourist expedition to Antarctica where our heroine is a lecturer who gradually becomes involved in the lives of her fellow passengers. I’ve read quite a few of her books, many of which are set in Australia, and they are good, light reading.

I note that romance is a bit of a theme in 2019. For many years before that I didn’t read romance, possibly for snobby reasons as I thought that they weren’t good books. That opinion is obviously rubbish and, of course, once I started reading romance I found that I loved much of it. I think that I started reading it on the Kindle because that way no one else could see what I was reading but also because so much was available at very low prices. I enjoyed small town romances especially at this time and series of linked books where every sibling in a family finds love. I still read quite a bit of romance but annually I discover that crime, suspense and thriller novels make up the majority of what I have read in the year which is something that hasn’t changed since I first started recording my reading.

In 2013 I first began to get free books, in proof copies, to read and review before publication. Some of them came from the Amazon Vine scheme where I was a reviewer for about seven years – these were paper copies which are clearly marked that they are not for resale. I also obtained a lot of books from Netgalley which is a site which distributes advance copies of new books electronically which could be downloaded to my Kindle. I really enjoyed getting books before publication this way and I was gifted with a lot of titles over the few years that I got them this way. In the end I stopped getting books free like this because I had an obsessive tendency to obtain too many and I then got in a mess trying to read and review them in the timescale required. I am very grateful for the publishers which allowed me to obtain books this way but I now only read and review what I own and it’s a lot more restful to set your own deadlines !