Books read in 2018

I read 30 books in 2018, my highest total yet. A couple of these probably shouldn't count, since they are illustration based and I flipped through them relatively quickly. But I did read over 10,000 pages, nearly double the amount from any other previous year, so maybe that balances out the lightweight books on the list.
2,281 of those pages were from reading books 5-7 of the Harry Potter series aloud with my big kids, which happens to be one of my best experiences of the year. Maybe of all my parenting years.

I had an unofficial goal this year of not reading anything written by white male authors. I ended up reading six white men out of 30 books. (Don't worry, white men, I still like you, but I've read your work almost exclusively my whole life.) As a result of reading The Wedding Date, Between the World and Me, The Hate U Give, and An American Marriage, I got a slightly better understanding of what it's like to be a Black person in America. Give it a try, fellow white people. It's jarring, in a good way.

Lots of Janes this year: Jane of Austin, a Pride & Prejudice retelling that I picked up because of its beautiful cover rather than a love for Jane Austen retreads, and two books from the Lady Janies series, My Lady Jane, which is a retelling of Lady Jane Grey's story, and My Plain Jane, a retelling of Jane Eyre. Got all that? (The best one of the three was My Lady Jane.)

Multi-generational family stories: A Spool of Blue Thread, Before We Were Yours, and The Astonishing Color of After.

Made me cry: Harry Potter 5, 6, and 7, plus A Monster Calls, The One and Only Ivan, and The Deal of a Lifetime. Probably a couple other minor cries in there as well that I can't recall.

Inspiration overload: The Wright Brothers. Wow. They had insatiable curiosity and tried a million things and never, never gave up. After reading this, I wanted to go back in time, move to Ohio, and set my boys up in a workshop and see what they come up with. Then I realized that I could probably just set up a workshop for them here and avoid the hassle of the time travel and the Ohio winters.

Did you ever notice that goodreads will plot your books on a graph, arranged by publication date? I started the year with Agatha Christie (1926) and ended the year with Charles Dickens (1843), and filled the middle with nothing written earlier than 2003. I think in 2019 I need to read some Shakespeare, or better yet, Plato, to throw my graph way off.