Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Discoveries of 2019

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Topics:

January 7: Most Anticipated Book Releases for the First Half of 2020
January 14: Bookish Discoveries I Made In 2019 (these could be books, authors, blogs, websites, apps, products, etc.)
January 21: The Ten Most Recent Additions to My Bookshelf
January 28: Book Cover Freebie (choose what kind(s) of covers you want to talk about: prettiest, most unique, most misleading, weirdest, most memorable, creepiest, ugliest, etc.)

Another “looking back” list here, which is running the risk of repeating some of the features in previous recent posts, particularly the 2019 Book Survey and Year in Books but I will try to avoid repetition where I can.

The List

Discovered Authors

I do try to follow a variety of literary awards in my reading year: the Man Booker Prize, the Women’s Prize, the Costa Prize, the Carnegie Medal… In part that is to expose myself to great writing, but there is a vast wealth of good writing that does not reach those prizes and a part of me is genuinely anxious about that. In part, though, it is also to expose me to a range of new or different authors that I may not have come across before. It is from these prizes, or from friends’ recommendations, or from Twitter and blog traffic, that many of these new authors came up.

Akwaeke Emezi

Pierre Lemaitre

Madeline Miller

Elif Shafak

Michelle Paver

Samantha Shannon

Discovered Blogs

So very many new blogs this year, and I really don’t read as many of them half as much as I would love to, or you deserve but two special citations to the two blogs that host the two literary bookish weekly memes and lists that I try to keep up with

Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl

Amanda @ Devouring Books

Discovered The Love of Bookish Spreadsheets

It would come as no surprise to those who know me that I love a good spreadsheet: I am literally in charge of writing them for work data tracking! But it was only last year that I stumbled across first Brock Roberts’ Bookish Spreadsheet – check him out on Twitter @lets read – and later Reader Voracious’ version. Both generate beautiful graphs and charts! Geek out!

Reader Voracious Spreadsheet

Brock Roberts‘ Spreadsheet

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(Re)discovered Poetry

Choosing to follow various poetry prize as well as novel prizes was a return to an old lost love in 2019. I’m still not entirely sure how to review them – or whether I really understand them, but Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost is powerful, unsettling and disturbing. All the things poetry should be.

Discovered a need to write

Nothing that I feel is in any way in a state to make public, nothing completed but a range of vignettes I suppose, sketches, exercises sort of connected in a way. And I had a crack at a detective story for National Novel Writing Month… not one that reached the 50,000 but hey ho!

Discovered a range of new features in WordPress

New (to me) and exciting (to me) things like covers, columns and my favourite, the scheduled post!

Things I am still experimenting with!

Thanks for reading!

Michael.