Last week, I posted a list of my top 5 audiobooks of 2019. Today, I’m bringing you my favorites in print and ebook. I had trouble narrowing down the list, which is a good problem to have. It means I’ve read a lot of great books this year! But to make it easier to go through, I’ve separated my faves out by category.
Hopefully, you’ll find some to add to your holiday wishlist!
Favorite Romances
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Yes, I’m a romance writer who had only seen the movie and had never read the actual book. I blame high school for making me scared to read classics. I’m so glad I finally picked this one up. You can read about my full thoughts in this post.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
This one was just a delight all around. Fun, sexy, and sweet.
About the book:
What happens when America's First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?
When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius—his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There's only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through?
Misadventures with a Professor by Sierra Simone
I have trouble reading erotic romance these days because I tend to be extra tough on it (having written in that genre for so long) but I’m happy to report that this one was fantastic. Great writing, very steamy, and had likable characters. I’ll definitely be picking up more by this author.
About the book:
Zandy Lynch never planned on going to grad school a virgin. So when her professor father finds her a job abroad as a research assistant the summer before she starts her master’s program, she sees her chance. She’s got one night in London to lose her V-card to a Mr. Darcy lookalike before she has to join some ancient professor in the country.
Oliver Graeme is not looking forward to having some American co-ed hovering around while he’s trying to work, but he owes her father the favor, and besides, his office is an untidy mess of uncatalogued research. He needs the help. Still, he decides to take the edge off his frustration while visiting a colleague in London, and winds up having the sexiest, sweetest night of his life with a stranger, who vanishes in the morning without a trace…
To Zandy’s shock when she arrives at Professor Graeme’s house a day later, the door isn’t opened by a fussy old scholar, but by the wild, passionate man she met in London. Cold and reserved by day, Oliver is ferociously greedy with her at night, and it’s not long before Zandy finds herself falling for both versions of him—the aloof professor and the generous, rough lover. The trouble is that summer only lasts so long, and Zandy already has a plane ticket waiting to take her home…
Picture Perfect Cowboy by Tiffany Reisz
I always enjoy Tiffany’s writing, so this one isn’t a surprise. It’s super steamy with great backstory and emotion packed into this quick novella.
About the book:
Jason "Still" Waters' life looks perfect from the outside—money, fame, and the words "World Champion Bull-Rider" after his name. But Jason has a secret, one he never planned on telling anybody...until he meets Simone. She's the kinky girl of his dreams...and his conservative family's worst nightmare.
Favorite YA
Emergency Contact by Mary H. K. Choi
Quotes from my private reading journal about this book: “funny and weird and sweet” and “the end gave me the awws”. This one took a little bit to get into at first, but once I was hooked, I was hooked. Great story.
About the book:
For Penny Lee high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she somehow managed to land a boyfriend, he doesn’t actually know anything about her. When Penny heads to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer, it’s seventy-nine miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can’t wait to leave behind.
Sam’s stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs. He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he’s a famous movie director but right this second the seventeen bucks in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him.
When Sam and Penny cross paths it’s less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness. Still, they swap numbers and stay in touch—via text—and soon become digitally inseparable, sharing their deepest anxieties and secret dreams without the humiliating weirdness of having to see each other.
This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales
I really enjoyed the peek into the art of DJing in this book, and though it wasn’t a romance, I feel like the hook-up was portrayed well and served the story. I’m looking forward to reading more by this author.
About the book:
Making friends has never been Elise Dembowski's strong suit. All throughout her life, she's been the butt of every joke and the outsider in every conversation. When a final attempt at popularity fails, Elise nearly gives up.
Then she stumbles upon a warehouse party where she meets Vicky, a girl in a band who accepts her; Char, a cute, yet mysterious disc jockey; Pippa, a carefree spirit from England; and most importantly, a love for DJing.
Told in a refreshingly genuine and laugh-out-loud funny voice, Leila Sales' This Song Will Save Your Life powerful young adult coming of age novel is an exuberant story about identity, friendship, and the power of music to bring people together.
Favorite Horror/Thriller
No Exit by Taylor Adams
This was one was billed as a thriller, but I think it reads more like a tense horror movie. I prefer horror to thriller so that totally worked for me. Here’s a quote from my original review: “The best way I can describe this book is take the claustrophobic, trapped feeling of The Shining (minus the supernatural) and mix it with a villain who just won’t stop like Michael Myers in the Halloween movies, and this is what you get.” Read my full review here. This is a great one for a winter read because the main character is snowed in at the rest stop.
About the book:
On her way to Utah to see her dying mother, college student Darby Thorne gets caught in a fierce blizzard in the mountains of Colorado. With the roads impassable, she’s forced to wait out the storm at a remote highway rest stop. Inside, are some vending machines, a coffee maker, and four complete strangers.
Desperate to find a signal to call home, Darby goes back out into the storm . . . and makes a horrifying discovery. In the back of the van parked next to her car, a little girl is locked in an animal crate.
Who is the child? Why has she been taken? And how can Darby save her?
There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, and no way out. One of her fellow travelers is a kidnapper. But which one?
Trapped in an increasingly dangerous situation, with a child’s life and her own on the line, Darby must find a way to break the girl out of the van and escape.
But who can she trust?
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Clever world-building in this one (which took a while to set up in the story, but was worth the time) and I didn’t guess the mystery, which I always love. I’m also a sucker for a dark book set at a university. (This one is set at a supernatural version of Yale.) It did have a cliffhanger about one plot line but wrapped up the main one, so I didn’t get too frustrated with a partial cliffhanger. The next book doesn’t come out until 2021, so I will be eagerly awaiting the next one.
About the book:
Galaxy “Alex” Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse. By age twenty, in fact, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most elite universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?
Still searching for answers to this herself, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. These eight windowless “tombs” are well-known to be haunts of the future rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street and Hollywood’s biggest players. But their occult activities are revealed to be more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive.
Verity by Colleen Hoover
This one is labeled a romantic thriller. Quote from my private reading journal: “This book was super dark and a mindf**k. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.” This one was legitimately creepy and had a gothic feel to it with a big, old house, an invalid wife, and a creepy kid. It kept me guessing, and I’m really glad it didn’t turn out to be a trope I hate in thrillers. I won’t say what that trope is because I don’t want to risk spoilers.
About the book:
Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish.
Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity's notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn't expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of what really happened the day her daughter died.
Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents would devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen's feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife's words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue to love her.
Favorite Non-Fiction
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Y’all probably have figured out that I love just about anything from Cal Newport. This book was no exception. You can read about my digital declutter, inspired by this book, in this blog post.
About the book:
The key to living well in a high tech world is to spend much less time using technology.
Georgetown computer scientist Cal Newport's Deep Work sparked a movement around the idea that unbroken concentration produces far more value than the electronic busyness that defines the modern work day. But his readers had an urgent follow-up question: What about technology in our personal lives?
In recent years, our culture's relationship with personal technology has transformed from something exciting into something darker. Innovations like smartphones and social media are useful, but many of us are increasingly troubled by how much control these tools seem to exert over our daily experiences--including how we spend our free time and how we feel about ourselves.
In Digital Minimalism, Newport proposes a bold solution: a minimalist approach to technology use in which you radically reduce the time you spend online, focusing on a small set of carefully-selected activities while happily ignoring the rest.
He mounts a vigorous defense for this less-is-more approach, combining historical examples with case studies of modern digital minimalists to argue that this philosophy isn't a rejection of technology, but instead a necessary realignment to ensure that these tools serve us, not the other way around.
To make these principles practical, he takes us inside the growing subculture of digital minimalists who have built rich lives on a foundation of intentional technology use, and details a decluttering process that thousands have already used to simplify their online lives. He also stresses the importance of never clicking "like," explores the underappreciated value of analog hobbies, and draws lessons from the "attention underground"--a resistance movement fighting the tech companies' attempts to turn us into gadget addicts.
Digital Minimalism is an indispensable guide for anyone looking to reclaim their life from the alluring diversions of the digital world.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
From my original review: “As some of you know, I was a social worker/therapist before I left to be a full-time writer, so I’m already a psychology nerd. But this book was so much more than a look at psychology. Gottlieb is an experienced writer and storyteller, so what could’ve been dry was a rich and heartfelt page-turner. I got attached to the clients she featured and was invested in her own story as well. I have so many underlined passages in this one, and it made me think deeply about big life issues like mid-life crises and how to deal with fear of death and so much else. This one is sad at parts but ultimately uplifting and life-affirming. I want to put this book in everyone’s hands.”
About the book:
From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world--where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.
With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.
On Being 40ish edited by Lindsey Mead
Guess who turned 40 this year? ;) I loved this collection of essays. Some were funny, some poignant, some powerful. If you’re a woman of a certain age, there’s a lot here to enjoy.
About the book:
Fifteen powerful women and writers you know and love—from the pages of the New Yorker, New York Times, Vogue, Glamour, and The Atlantic—offer captivating, intimate, and candid explorations about what it’s really like turning forty—and that the best is yet to come.
The big 4-0. Like eighteen and twenty-one, this is a major and meaningful milestone our lives—especially for women. Turning forty is a poignant doorway between youth and…what comes after; a crossroads to reflect on the roads taken and not, and the paths yet before you. The decade that follows is ripe for nostalgia, inspiration, wisdom, and personal growth.
In this dazzling collection, fifteen writers explore this rich phase in essays that are profound, moving and above all, brimming with joie de vivre. With a diverse array of voices—including Veronica Chambers, Meghan Daum, Kate Bolick, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Sloane Crosley, KJ Dell’Antonia, Julie Klam, Jessica Lahey, Catherine Newman, Sujean Rim, Jena Schwartz, Sophfronia Scott, Allison Winn Scotch, Lee Woodruff, and Jill Kargman—On Being 40(ish) offers deeply personal, often hilarious perspectives across a range of universal themes—friendship, independence, sex, beauty, aging, wisdom, and the passage of time.
Beautifully designed to make the perfect gift, and to be a treasure to turn to time and time again, On Being 40(ish) reflects the hopes, fears, challenges and opportunities of a generation.
*Be sure to check out my Top 5 Non-Fiction Favorite in Audio of you want more non-fiction
Favorites on Writing/Creativity
Dear Writer, Are You In Burnout? by Becca Syme
I’m always recommending Becca’s classes to my writer friends, but now she also has books! This one was a must read for me because I am someone who cycles in and out of creative burnout on a pretty consistent basis—some burnouts worse than others. This book goes over the signs and what you can do to work your way out of burnout—and hopefully how to prevent yourself from ending up there again in the future.
About the book:
The industry is moving at a breakneck pace and writers are burning out everywhere. Write fast, write first, write every day... it's all taking its toll.
Some of us are built for this speed. Some of us are not. How do you know if you're in burnout? And if you are in it, how do you get out of it? Is it avoidable?
Author coach Becca Syme has been working with thousands of fiction and nonfiction authors, and has seen the burnout firsthand. This book is based on a popular series of videos from her authortube channel, The QuitCast, where she outlined the process of burnout, how to understand it and how to survive it.
This is a topic that, if it's part of your journey, will not go away until you face it. If you are in burnout, or are afraid you're headed for it, please get this book. It's time to face the pit together.
Keep Going by Austin Kleon
A small book chock full of inspiration and good advice for the creative. I really like Kleon’s style of books (go with the print version and not the ebook because of the drawings.) This is one to keep on your shelf and go back to when you need a little creative boost.
About the book:
In his previous books Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work!, both New York Times bestsellers, Austin Kleon gave readers the keys to unlock their creativity and showed them how to become known. Now he offers his most inspiring work yet, with ten simple rules for how to stay creative, focused, and true to yourself—for life.
The creative life is not a linear journey to a finish line, it’s a loop—so find a daily routine, because today is the only day that matters. Disconnect from the world to connect with yourself—sometimes you just have to switch into airplane mode. Keep Going celebrates getting outdoors and taking a walk (as director Ingmar Bergman told his daughter, ”The demons hate fresh air”). Pay attention, and especially pay attention to what you pay attention to. Worry less about getting things done, and more about the worth of what you’re doing. Instead of focusing on making your mark, work to leave things better than you found them.
Keep Going and its timeless, practical, and ethical principles are for anyone trying to sustain a meaningful and productive life.
Hey, you’ve made it to the end! Hope you found something you’d like to read.
I’d love to hear your favorite read of 2019. :)
