Books I Loved in 2012

I’ve gotten lots of good response to the book club! I’m glad that so many of you will be reading along with me. I also promised you a list of the books I loved in 2012 so I’m making good on that today.

Most of my choices were dark and twisty, starting with Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. It is a delicious and dark read with characters you will love…and hate. It sucked me in right from the beginning, and I couldn’t put it down. I was underwhelmed by the ending, but it was still a solid story. I liked it enough to check out Gillian Flynn’s other novels – Dark Places and Sharp Objects. Dark Places was also good, better than Gone Girl, I think. It has a strangely likeable oddball heroine with a very bad past. I DO NOT recommend Flynn’s other novel, Sharp Objects. The characters are flat and the story is unbelievable, but even worse than that, it’s uninteresting.

My favorite find of 2012 was the Jackson Brodie detective novels by Kate Atkinson. There are four books (Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, and Started Early, Took My Dog ) in the series (write another one already!!!) and I’d definitely recommend reading them in order. The books stand on their own, but the back story of Jackson Brodie gets developed with each book. The novels are so well-written and so delightfully British. I read each of the books like an addict. I could hardly put them down. And I discovered recently that there is a BBC series about Jackson Brodie! Yes, please.