Wrap Up: Reading Other People’s Favorite Books

At the beginning of the year I posted a tbr with 6 books included in lists of favorite books of 2021 from bloggers, booktubers, and people from book Twitter, and today I wanted to tell you how that experiment worked out, if I enjoyed the books or not and if I found a new favorite.

These are the books I was planning to read:

I ended up reading 5 out of the six books because I decided that I was not really interested in reading The Atlas Six after the third time I loaned it from my library and didn’t even attempt to read it.

Overall, I had really good luck with the books I picked:

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ – humorous, interesting, with unexpected twist. It had some pacing issues.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ – rough start, a bit confusing and boring, but once the mystery started to unravel it was fascinating.
The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher:⭐⭐⭐⭐ – Creepy, disturbing, anxiety-inducing and SO GOOD. It dragged a bit toward the end.
Finlay Donovan is Killing It by Elle Cosimano: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐- fun, fast-paced, full of twists and turns, absolutely absurd, with interesting characters that are easy to root for
The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina by Zoraida Córdova: ⭐⭐⭐⭐- beautifully written, full of strange and wonderful magic, and explores interesting themes. I wish it dove deeper into the characters.

CONCLUSIONS

While I only gave one of the books five stars, I still think this was an absolute success. I found really good books that were a bit outside my comfort zone, since I don’t usually read magical realism or hard sci-fi and I didn’t use to read that much horror.

Also, I discovered four new-to-me authors. I have read more books by two of them (Elle Cosimano and T. Kingfisher) because I enjoyed their books so much and I’m planning on reading more books by the other two authors (Andy Weir and Susanna Clarke). I also discovered another great book by Zoraida Córdova, who is an author I love.

I think part of the reason why this experiment worked for me was that I didn’t choose the books that appeared in the biggest number of favorite lists, instead within the books that were mentioned more than once, I chose the ones that sounded interesting to me.

Overall, I really liked the experience even if reading all of these books took me a lot longer than I hoped. I will definitely be doing this again in 2023.