This has been a great year for reading! In total I read 218 books, and completed my Goodreads challenge of 125 books about halfway through the year. As of my last reading round-up post I had read 129 books, which means I read 88 books in the second half of the year. Not bad!

A full list of all the books I read between August and December 2022 is posted below, and you can also check out my 2022 shelf on Goodreads (friend me!). Here are a few bests and worsts!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Katie Spofford (@spoffk)

Favorite New Author

I read What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher in August, The Twisted Ones in November, and The Hollow Places in December. While I’m not sure I’ll read any of their fantasy novels, I’ve really enjoyed their horror! I especially like how each book is inspired by a horror class. What Moves the Dead is a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, while The Twisted Ones takes inspiration from Arthur Machen’s “The White People” and The Hollow Places is inspired by Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Katie Spofford (@spoffk)

Best Secret Society

I noticed a running theme in my reading choices: many books about private schools with secret societies: Murder of Crows by K. Ancrum, Fraternity by Andy Mientus, The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky, and They’re Watching You by Chelsea Ichaso. My favorite of all of these was The Mary Shelley Club. I loved all the horror movie references!

Best Book Set in the 1990s

Several of the books I read this half of the year were set during the 1990s, which had a nostalgia factor for me. Fraternity, Direwood, Call Me By My Name, and This Is Not the Jess Show all took inspiration from the 90s. I really loved Call Me By My Name, which was about two gay boys living in a time when AIDS was still a major concern. But I enjoyed all of these titles!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Katie Spofford (@spoffk)

Book I struggled to finish

After loving The Twisted Ones, I picked up The Great God Pan and Other Stories – I had heard of “The Great God Pan” as a horror classic and wanted to read the inspiration for The Twisted Ones. Unfortunately, I found Arthur Machen’s style of writing to be so difficult to read. The worst part is that the “horror” in these stories was so vague. Like, they would end with something along the lines of “You could only imagine what horrors they beheld!” and I couldn’t imagine because I had been given next to no information about what was going on.

Best True Crime

I really got into true crime this year. My favorite by far was Unmask Alice, which wasn’t necessarily a “true crime” book per se, but felt like one. It’s all about how the woman who penned the bestsellers Go Ask Alice and Jay’s Journal essentially stole other people’s lives and embellished them to be sensational. She also lied about being a therapist. I had read both of her books as a young adult and it was so shocking to see how much she made up.

Best Re-Read

My favorite re-read this time around was The Annotated Sandman v. 1, which was actually a re-read of the first 20 volumes of the Sandman comics. I read these about 10 years ago and retained so little that when I started watching the Netflix series, I barely recognized it. The annotations really helped me get a deeper understanding of the story, and reading it in sync with watching the TV series was pretty cool.

And now for some pie charts!

As with the first half of the year, I read more hardcovers. I removed ARC as a format and just put in the format of the ARC (eArc vs. paperback). Audiobooks may look like my least preferred format, but it’s mostly because it takes me longer to listen to an audiobook than to read a physical book (about 10-14 days as opposed to 3-5 days).

Next year I could probably increase my goal, since I have surpassed it (by a lot!) the past two years. But trying to reach a goal is hard, and seeing how far I can surpass it is more fun and way less stress!

Full List:

1. Cake Eater by Allyson Dahlin
2. Small Town Pride by Phil Stamper
3. The Feeling of Falling in Love by Mason Deaver
4. The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass
5. The Saints (Quarantine #2) by Lex Thomas
6. The Third Person by Emma Grove
7. Tiger Daughter by Rebecca Lim
8. Game Changer by Neal Shusterman
9. Unmasked: My Life Solving Cold Case Files by Paul Holes
10. Six Months Later by Natalie D. Richards
11. The Dark Between the Trees by Fiona Barnett
12. How It All Blew Up by Arvin Ahmadi
13. The Burnouts (Quarantine #3) by Lex Thomas
14. What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
15. Graveyard Wars v. 1 by A.J. Lieberman
16. The Annotated Sandman Volume 1 by Neil Gaiman
17. The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill
18. Murder of Crows by K. Ancrum
19. Amazona by Canizales
20. The Final Gambit (The Inheritance Games #3) by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
21. Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl
22. I’m the Girl by Courtney Summers
23. Defy the Night by Brigid Kemmerer
24. She’s Too Pretty to Burn by Wendy Heard
25. Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13) by Patricia Briggs
26. Don’t Let in the Cold by Keely Parrack
27. Fence v. 5: Rise by C.S. Pacat
28. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
29. The Castle School (for Troubled Girls) by Alyssa B. Sheimel
30. Direwood by Catherine Yu
31. All of Our Demise (All of Us Villains #2) by Amanda Foody & Christine Lynn Herman
32. This Is Not the Jess Show by Anna Carey
33. Be More Chill: The Graphic Novel by Ned Vizzini
34. Demon in the Wood: The Graphic Novel by Leigh Bardugo
35. These Gentle Wounds by Helene Dunbar
36. Little Eve by Catriona Ward
37. Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan
38. Destination Unknown by Bill Konigsberg
39. Constantine: Distorted Illusions by Kami Garcia
40. Fraternity by Andy Mientus
41. Survive the Dome by Kosoko Jackson
42. Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting by Kindra Neely
43. Ex Libris by Matt Madden
44. The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky
45. Aces Wild: A Heist by Amanda DeWitt
46. Nothing More to Tell by Karen McManus
47. Silver in the Mist by Emily Victoria
48. Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson
49. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
50. Downsiders by Neal Shusterman
51. Twelfth Grade Night by Molly Booth
52. The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
53. Medusa by Jessie Burton
54. Doughnuts and Doom by Balazs Lorinczi
55. Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod
56. I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston
57. Black Paradox by Junji Ito
58. Pretty Dead Queens by Alexa Donne
59. What It Is by Lynda Barry
60. Queen of the Tiles by Hanna Alkaf
61. Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy #3) by Maggie Stiefvater
62. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
63. The Silver Ones by Charlotte Mallory
64. Foul Is Fair by Hannah Capin
65. Dark Room Etiquette by Robin Roe
66. Ghost Book by Remy Lai
67. Aerial Yoga: The Low Fly Zone by Sam Mellor
68. How to Survive Your Murder by Danielle Valentine
69. When You Call My Name by Tucker Shaw
70. Sensor by Junji Ito
71. Blue Flag v. 1 by Kaito
72. In the Key of Us by Mariama J. Lockington
73. We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach
74. They’re Watching You by Chelsea Ichaso
75. Once Upon a K-Prom by Kat Cho
76. Family of Liars by E. Lockhart
77. Slenderman: Online Obsession, Mental Illness, and the Violent Crime of Two Midwestern Girls by Kathleen Hale
78. Blue Flag v. 2 by Kaito
79. The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher
80. Blue Flag v. 3 by Kaito
81. The Half Life of Molly Pierce by Katrina Leno
82. The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, A Rún, Vol. 1 by Nagabe
83. The Fervor by Alma Katsu
84. Bravely by Maggie Stiefvater
85. Blue Flag v. 4 by Kaito
86. The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, A Rún, Vol. 2 by Nagabe
87. The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, A Rún, Vol. 3 by Nagabe
88. The Great God Pan and Other Stories by Arthur Machen