My Year in Books 2019, an explanation

December 18, 2019 - Mina V. Esguerra - No comments

This has been my best year of reading. Ever! I have never read more than a hundred books in a year. (I don’t count the ones I helped publish, or manuscripts that may still be revised. Just published books or advance copies.) I didn’t even set a goal to read more necessarily, but it just happened, because of the following choices:

DNF right away. It’s okay for a book to not be “for me.” Sometimes I skip to a later chapter, to see what it’s like when the story has truly gotten rolling, and sometimes I go back and stick to a book that way, knowing it gets better, instead of hoping it does. But usually, DNF happens. And it’s okay to try again with a different book by the same author, this works for me too.

Read more audio. My Scribd subscription includes a number of audiobooks per month, and I have an excellent enough selection to meet my allocation every month. That is, if I don’t think about what I’m missing that’s exclusively on Audible. But most trad-pubbed YA and historical romance are there and promptly, which is awesome because those are the books I normally don’t buy or read as individual book purchases either in print or digital anymore. The reason apart from cost by the way is heat level, I can handle slow burn better when it’s audio.

Read more new-to-me indie Filipino authors and Filipino romance. These would tend to be shorter work just because of how we publish here, so that adds to the numbers and quickly. But more than that, I’m happy to start finding people whose stories I get. As a Filipino reader I started out acting like supporting Filipino authors was a chore, and by now I can be that person who says it’s not a chore, but a Choice. I’ve found the creators whose work speaks to me and there will be more. I don’t have to marginalize my own country’s creators on my reading list.

Read with a goal. This year I was invited to be one of the judges of The Ripped Bodice Awards for Excellence in Romance Fiction and that meant I made the same choices but moved to the top of my TBR books that were published in 2019. Tangent: This has been liberating in an unexpected way because in previous years I’d spend a lot of time catching up to the romance “canon,” buying and reading books that I somehow missed because I grew up in the Philippines and lived in a non-romance-reading household. Some of these modern classics don’t hold up, and I feel like I caught the late bus only to arrive at the after-party, where people are talking about a party that I still never saw or experienced. This year when I did read to “catch up,” I read Beverly Jenkins, and saw not just what she had been doing for decades, but what else needed to be done. I knew I was late, but I felt included, recognized how I could still participate. I feel it’s changed me.

Now, I post reviews and reactions while reading. I used to tell people that I don’t review books, because I was managing a community and wanted to be “neutral.” Years later, I see value in stating my opinions again, because I always had them (I didn’t stop having an opinion just because I chose not to post my review) and because I feel it helps our writing community when we talk about how to make books better. One way to be an example for that is to actually talk about what I like and don’t like. When you do this, and someone tells you to “be quiet and just support,” you know those books and authors aren’t going to be worth your time. Based on analytics my threads and review posts are getting a lot of views, but more than that, in this industry there is value in being out there as a Filipino reader who actually reads and can talk about what they’ve read.

Something I’m still figuring out: How to talk about bad rep. For all the things I talked about above, I have an exception. I finished a book that wasn’t for me, despite knowing from chapter 1 it wasn’t for me. I didn’t publicly post my reaction, but shared my opinions to a private group. This is a book backed by a big publisher, which means it’s one of the few books that will partially represent me and has the machinery to be the most visible book that partially represents me, and the rep is offensive to me. I had to finish the book because I wanted to see if it got better, if it became less offensive, and it didn’t. I haven’t figured out how to talk about this, but since books with better rep are out there, I’m glad I probably don’t have to ever talk about it.

OK now for my faves! Including Amazon links because they would most likely be there, but please buy from the store you prefer, if any of these interest you. Listing in order of when I read them.

Favorite erotica/erotic romance:

Editor’s Note by Delilah Fisher

Heat by Mandie Lee (Tagalog, Precious Hearts website)

Indecent…Trilogy by Jane O’Reilly

Private Eye by Katrina Jackson

Benefriends by Chencia C. Higgins

Just Past Two by Elia Winters

All Together by Brill Harper

Neighborly by Katrina Jackson

Everything else that Katrina Jackson has written

Favorite historical:

At His Lady’s Command by Nicola Davidson