Books in 2018

This year has been a great one in many ways and a year of learning good, easy, and hard lessons all around. One of my favorite revelations this year has been finding out that it takes a lot of focus to build some focus. Eventually, the latter increases while the former decreases. It’s easier to focus on things for a longer time if you spend consistent effort focusing. This has led me to write more, read more, and deliberately work on things I value.

Reading is one of my favorite things to do because it relaxes me, takes me away to a different world, I learn something new, or about someone new and all these things are things that reading in some form brings me. So in this post I’ll talk a little about that and a little about my favorite way to consume books consistently, audiobooks.

Last year, I started listening to audiobooks by way of Harry Potter and within 3 months, I finished all 7 books! This was a combination of the writing by J.K. Rowling and narration by Stephen Fry. I also listened to a couple more books along with that, including Jurassic Park narrated by Scott Brick (written by Michael Crichton).

This year, I continued the trend with even more books. I got to a total of 20 books! I did slow down a bit in the middle of the year but I started listening to more again in September.

Below is the full list of all the books I listened (narrators in parentheses):

1. Artemis by Andy Weir (Rosario Dawson)
2. The Lost World by Michael Crichton (Scott Brick)
3. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (author)
4. Lord of the Rings [radio show version] by J. R. R. Tolkien (multiple cast members)
5. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Wil Wheaton)
6. Watership Down by Richard Adams (Ralph Cosham)
7. The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (Luke Daniels)
8. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Stephen Fry)
9. A Fine Mess by T.R. Reid (author)
10. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (Michael Jackson)
11. Ikigai by Héctor García & Francesc Miralles (Walter Dixon)
12. Dragon Teeth by Michael Crichton (Scott Brick)
13. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (author)
14. The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom (author)
15. The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo (Graeme Malcolm)
16. Deep Work by Cal Newport (Jeff Bottoms)
17. Eragon by Christopher Paolini (Gerard Doyle)
18. Factfulness by Hans Rosling (Simon Slater)
19. The Wild Ones by C. Alexandar London (William DeMerritt)
20. Stardust by Neil Gaiman (author)

Out of these 20 books, my top there are Watership Down, Dragon Teeth, and Stardust. All the ones I enjoyed the most were fantasy or fiction of some kind. Dragon Teeth blew me away by how well it was written and how different of a book it is from anything else I’ve encountered. I listened to Stardust within the last 2 weeks and it has been a great book read by Neil Gaiman himself! My favorite of the year is definitely Watership Down, check out my full review of it.

Now, on to 2019 and a full year of new books to check out! If you have any recommendations, please send them to me!