Say what you will about 2016, but it was an above average year.  At least, when it comes to my reading.

My goal as usual was to hit 20 books, and while I fell one short, I do feel pretty good about getting to 19 and finishing one about every 18 days.  Nine years of book reading data shows that’s right about where I should be.

Here’s this year’s list with links to their respective posts:

–The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba
–Funny Girl by Nick Hornby
–It’s What I Do by Lynsey Addario
–Morning Star by Pierce Brown
–Where Nobody Knows Your Name by John Feinstein
–The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore
–Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
–My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman
–The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler
–The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
–Ahead of the Curve by Brian Kenny
–What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
–Slade House by David Mitchell
–Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers
–A Torch Against the Night by Sabaa Tahir
–The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson
–The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
–Armada by Ernest Cline
–The Moon is Down by John Steinbeck

If you read five of them: The Lowland, Morning Star (the entire Red Rising series really), It’s What I Do, A Torch Against the Night, Sharp Objects.

I don’t think there are any I would have skipped entirely, but my expectations were much higher for Heroes of the Frontier and a little higher for Funny Girl.

The fastest read on this list was The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, coming in at six days.  The slowest was The Summer Before the War, which was a comparative slog at 43 days.

In each of the previous two years I read three books that had the same exact number of pages.  This year there were only two.

And in a departure from prior years, I did not see a movie version of any of these books.  A big part of that is the simple lack of existence.  There is a Moon is Down movie, and Sharp Objects is being made into an HBO show.  Morning Star would be tons of fun to see on a big screen.

I read about half the list on my Nook and the other half in actual book form.  Here’s the not-quite-complete tower (I borrowed and returned the rest):

For 2017, my hope is that the paperback tower is ginormous.  I have a number of books on my shelf that I’ve never read, and my goal is to get through as many of them as possible.

If you want to check out my recaps from previous years, they’re all here.