The End

There's still one month left in the year, but considering I was debating between nonfiction or short-stories this month and neither are actually genres, it felt appropriate to conclude my Genre of the Month series. Last week I ended Writing Craft month by saying that the best book to teach you how to write is all the books, and that pretty much sums up this past year's experience. So for the last month of the year and this series, I'm doing a roundup of the books I read in 2011.

And I have a confession to make.

I've been holding out on you. The books I reviewed this year weren't the only books I read! I know, it's shocking. So some of the books I'm going to recommend won't be linked to reviews, but if they make my top ten out of the 110 (and counting) books I've read, you can safely assume they have merit.

Onwards! As I'm sure you remember, the first quarter of the year was spent reading Young Adult (also technically not a genre, but shh), contemporary fiction, and historical fiction. I've read a lot more Young Adult books since January, and I'll go into way more detail about the YA books I've read outside of Genre of the Month later this month, but The Hunger Games (the book and the trilogy) still ranks highly in its category and in the books I've read from all genres.

In contempary fiction, The Time Traveler's Wife still sticks with me as a gorgeously written and plotted book, and I still want to write an artist character in the vein of Clare. Since reading My Sister's Keeper I've also read and enjoyed another Jodi Picoult book (Nineteen Minutes), and I plan to read more as she is ridiculously good at using current events to come up with awesome premises. Another contemporary fiction book I liked reading offscreen was One Day, by David Nicholls. I loved the structure -- showing the developing relationship of a man and woman by seeing them on the anniversary of the day they met for almost two decades -- and despite the time jumps the story flowed and their progressing feelings toward one another never felt stilted.

Of the historical fiction, surprisingly I haven't thought too much about the books I read, but I do still want to read the sequel to The Last Kingdom. Considering I'd read more historical fiction before this year and would have called it a favourite after fantasy, I think out of the first three months this was the month I enjoyed least, but only because I had such good experiences diving into YA and with most of my contemporary choices (not Jonathan Franzen).

Genre of the Month Overview #2
Genre of the Month Overview #3
Genre of the Month Overview #4