10 Books That Got Me Excited to Read Again

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This week the prompt was a “thankful” freebie in honour of Thanksgiving in the USA. I already have a practice of regularly posting lists of joyful moments in my life, I do this whenever I’m feeling low or frustrated (or hormonal!) to find a bit more balance through gratitude.

And so for the prompt I decided to stick with books, and pick 10 that really encouraged my (rediscovered) love of reading! I talked a bit about this in my Reading Eras post, I’ve always been a reader but I’ve had different phases of enthusiasm, and the volume and types of books I’ve read. Today I’m going to focus on the books from 2020 to 2023 that got me to where I am today – loving book blogging, finding new books and reading more than ever!

For context, from 2019-2020 I was reading book club books and whatever I had on a disc of eBooks someone had given me in 2017 (mostly Discworld or old classics like Brave New World). 2020-2021 I was exploring the Kindle store a bit but mostly reading the Bridgerton series, and rereading Anne of Green Gables (I’d been watching a lot of Netflix!). Then by 2022 I was trying lots more new contemporary literature titles, which got me to finding Bunny and blossoming into blogging in 2023.

1. The Radium Girls by Kate Moore – I read this in April 2020 after hearing about it on a podcast. It’s a non-fiction books that tells the story of the 1920s female factory workers who contracted horrific radiation poisoning from their work painting dails with radium paint, and the America corporations who tried to sweep it under the rug. It’s very moving, and a crazy story to modern ears. It was a good reminder that there are non-fiction books that aren’t just dry facts!
2. Pretending by Holly Bourne – I read this in May 2020 after buying it on a whim because it was 99p, and I’d enjoyed a couple of the authors YA books in my School Librarian era. I hadn’t read any ‘womens fiction’ like this in a long time but I enjoyed it a lot, and it had more depth than I’d expected.
3. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens – I read this in June 2020 after a colleague recommended it and I absolutely loved it. It made me really miss book club because I was desperate to find people to talk about it with!
4. The Bridgertons series by Julia Quinn – I blasted through most of these books between Jan-Feb 2021. Like everyone else I’d loved the Netflix adaption and needed more! These books got me through the dark cold winter! A couple of them I read in 2 days because I couldn’t put them down (Romancing Mr Bridgerton!), it had been a very long time since a book had inspired such obsessive reading! They opened me up to light “historical” romances as a genre I can enjoy (these are more like fan-fic of regency era romance!). With Bridgerton I may never have gotten to The Wallflowers!
5. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata – I read this in Mar 2022 and it got me really excited to find more weird little books with outsider oddballs who actually find they don’t need to change to please society! I need to read more by this author.
6. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – I read this in May 2022, it blew my mind a little bit and it’s by far my most successful book recommendation with IRL friends and family. It also inspired one of my earliest blog posts (still one of my most viewed). I cannot recommend Piranesi enough it you want something completely different to read that’ll challenge your expectations!
7. Uprooted by Naomi Novik – I read this in June 2022 and after a bad run of books that promised witches and had barely any decent witchy magic action (*cough* Discovery of Witches *cough*) this gave me everything I wanted and restored my faith that the books I want to read do exist!
8. I read two books by Ottessa Moshfegh in 2023 that got me excited about contemporary literature for women and encouraged me to explore that more. My Year of Rest and Relaxation I read in July and I enjoyed it despite the hard to like protagonist (loved the Star Trek references), and was also impressed with Eileen when I read that in the September.
9. My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell – I read this in October 2022 and it is incredible. It’s definitely not an easy read but it deals with grooming and teacher student relationships in a brutally realistic way, through the challenging POV of a protagonist that refuses to believe she is a victim. Highly recommend it, if you can handle the subject matter.
10. Bunny by Mona Awad – I read this first in December 2022 and then again in January 2023 and it inspired me to do my first bit of literary analysis in about 15 years, for my first full-length review. I never shut up about this book. Mona Awad’s writing makes me so excited, it just tickles my brain. It reminded me that I always loved magical realism when I studied at Uni!