Favourite five: Books I read for the first time in 2017

I talk about books a lot on this blog, and that isn’t likely to change any time soon. So why not kick off my new Favourite Five series with a book list?

According to Goodreads, I read 12 new books in 2017. Which doesn’t seem like very many, but they were well complemented by all of the books that I re-read. I don’t know about you, but re-reading books is something I simply can’t give up. There are some books that I love too much to only read once.

Today’s post, though, isn’t about those re-read books. As much as I love them, I’m always looking for new books to add to my read list. I’m happy to say that in 2017, I found quite a few that I’m likely to go back and re-read later on.

So here, in no particular order, are the five books I most enjoyed reading for the first time in 2017.

I read The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins, at the beginning of the year and recommended it in February. Admittedly, I wasn’t the biggest fan of the characters in this book. What I loved, though, was the plot. The tension in it is about as gripping as you can get, and I had an incredibly hard time putting it down.

Like The Girl on the Train, Lauren Oliver’s Panic is a tense novel that isn’t going to let you stop reading. When I recommended it back in July, I talked most about the questions that rose in my mind as I was reading. While most were answered by the end of the novel, it didn’t quite take the track I was expecting. Which I have no problem with.

Marie Benedict’s The Other Einstein, meanwhile, hooked me on a different sort of level, and I both recommended it and gave away a copy in November. The Other Einstein has a more literary focus, and is based on history. While not everything the novel depicts is factual, it takes an interesting look at the life of Mileva “Mitza” Marić, Albert Einstein’s first wife.

Tension is turning out to be a common theme in this post. The Truth About Alice, by Jennifer Mathieu, is a novel I read and recommended in June. When I started reading it, I thought I knew what to expect, and in some ways I turned out to be right. In the end, though, the novel took a different turn than I was expecting–and I loved the book all the more for that.

Here’s where this list goes in a completely different direction. Diana Wynne Jones’s Reflections on the Magic of Writing, which I recommended in March, is a non-fiction piece, comprised of essays and articles that she wrote throughout her writing career. Discussing writing fantasy, writing for children, and Jones’s life growing up, the book is part memoir, part craft instruction, and entirely worth reading.