 Hey cuties! Welcome back to my channel! Today we're doing a 2022 Book Awards! Are we excited? Because I am! I'm ready to cause absolute havoc! Today we're going to be going through my 2022 reading and giving out some awards. Some good awards and some not so good awards. I just want to say before we get into it that I've done my best books of the year and worst book of the year videos. These are ranked. These are my top 10, bottom 10. If you want to know best book of the year, worst book of the year, they're in that video, okay? This is arbitrary categories that I have come up with and some of you have suggested to me and it doesn't really mean anything but it's my book awards all the same, okay? Also, we're going to go through this quickly because we've got a lot of categories and if we don't, we'll be here for 10 years, okay? It's like good with everyone. Also, I'm not going to... I'm not going to wish you a happy new year yet even though I know you're in 2023. HAPPY NEW YEAR! I'm still in 2022. I have not got the new year magic vibes around me that I feel every year so I'm just not going to say it. I'm not going to say it because it's still 2022 for me. Okay, are we ready? Let's go, okay. So the first category is most surprising. So when I was thinking of what I wanted to pick for this, it had to be a book that I went into with no expectations. So it needed to be a book that probably was picked for me in a video that I hadn't heard of, I hadn't read the author before. So I'm going with A Skin from the Shadows by Francis Harding. Now, I'm putting this first because I need to make a public apology. This should have been in my top 10 books of the year. I made a mistake. I didn't put it in there. I'm sorry about it. When I was making the list, I did think, oh, should it go in there? Because what was like number 10? I think number 10 was Dragon Republic and number nine was wrong place wrong time. I don't know. This should have been in there. It would have been in the like kind of 8, 9, 10 of the list, but it should have been there. Okay, I made a mistake. I'm sorry about it. I think because I read this really at the start of the year, I think maybe in March, it just like, it was recency bias. Okay, I apologize. I'm sorry about it. I had never even heard of Francis Harding before I read this. I did a video where I used the app Novelik and it picked what I read and I asked for like a very specific recommendation and this was one of the books was recommended to me and I loved this. It's about a girl who can like consume spirits. I don't want to say too much and she consumes a spirit of a bear. There's a bear on the cover and she's sent to live with her dead father's family and the family are very strange. There's a lot of stuff going on and I've got eyelash in my eye somewhere. Okay, I think we're healed. I absolutely fell in love with Francis Harding's writing in this. Like I, yeah, I'm a little bit obsessed. I cannot wait to read more. I think I've got like three Francis Hardings now that I own that I haven't read because the writing in this was just like, oh, it was just like so beautiful and lyrical and just amazing. It was so, so, so good. It has a really interesting historical setting. It's set during the English, is it English Civil War? Is that what we call it? I don't know. When like King Charles the first was like gonna get, you know. But yeah, this was a complete surprise to me. I'd never heard of the book before. I picked up completely out of the blue with absolutely no expectations and it was a five star. I absolutely loved it. Then we've got Most Disappointing which obviously has to be one that I had a lot of expectations for that didn't fulfill. So this isn't a book, I'm gonna tell you now, that was in my worst books of the year video. I gave it three stars. None of my two stars this year were books that I like, you know, really felt like I was gonna love. So they couldn't be Most Disappointing but like this one people are gonna be so mad at me. I'm so sorry. My Most Disappointing was a very secret society of regular witches. I'm not afraid of losing a follower, okay? I thought I was gonna love this. It's cozy fantasy, it's witches, this is all stuff that was made for me. I just didn't love it. We're following a witch who is sent to be a nanny basically or to help tutor these younger witches and this family and it's very much a found family story with other adults there that are there as well. I've got an, this is probably one of the books I've read recently that like I didn't give the most favorable review that I've got a lot of comments like angry or upset with me but quite a few angry just telling me that I'm wrong. Just like, no you're wrong. I felt like this book was a lot of like telling and not showing. I felt like the emotional points that it wanted to make like it wanted to make you feel something. It wanted to put you through a certain emotional reaction and I felt like it was overplayed like these characters would say the same things over and over again. We get it. You're a found family. We get it. You're like, people love you for the fact like I don't care. I wanted this to be a five star. I thought it was gonna be a five star. There's parts of it that I did like but it was a big disappointment. I'm so sorry. I had to like kind of force myself through it I remember. I just didn't like the writing. I didn't think the writing was great. I didn't really like the characters. I didn't really care. I just felt like the book was very transparent in what it wanted me to feel and the message it wanted to get across and I didn't feel like it did a good enough job of actually doing that. Oh my god. Most over hype. This was difficult actually because I feel like a lot of the really hype books I've read this year I actually enjoyed but I'm gonna go with Bella Donna by Edlyn Grace. I feel like a lot of the girlies are really loving this at the moment. Like they're like oh the aesthetic. Oh we're gonna fall in love with death. Do you know what I mean? This is about a girl who can't die. She has a love triangle with a stable boy in death. There's a murder mystery where the mother of the house that she goes to live with has recently died. Is there a ghost? Maybe. I feel like the girlies who love gothic romance who love like you know the girlies who love making like aesthetic picture boards for books like are obsessed with this. If you love aesthetics like you're gonna love this it's very much a vibes but I didn't find the love triangle interesting. I very rarely do because a good love triangle each love interest has to feel equal and if they don't I'm like what's the point then it's just a romance with like someone on the sidelines. The mystery wasn't interesting, the writing wasn't great, uh yeah this is boring. Sorry about it. Then for most underhyped I've got a book that I've only heard one person recommend but it's the person who made me read it. It is The Rook by Daniel O. Malley. So I read this when Mara from Books Like Wode, we did Booktube Twin Test. I read some of her favorite books. I had never heard of this book before. It's so good. I'll read you at the back because I feel like it gives you a good basis level of understanding. So it says a woman awakened in a London park, dripping wet and surrounded by corpses wearing latex gloves. In her pocket is a letter from her previous self, Rook Thomas, a super powered operative in Britain's most secret of secret agencies and then someone tries to kill her again. I loved this. I absolutely loved it. I thought it was so good. It's set in this kind of secret governmental agency with fantastical powers. Basically our main character has forgotten like lost her memory or is she even the same person? Is it like another memory mind in the same body? I don't know. But she knows what's gonna happen and she's left her future self instructions as to what the agency is and how to live in it. And we know that someone is trying to kill her as the story goes on. I would be lying to my core if I said that I hope there's no more drama here. This book was so clever. It was like verging on being too clever. Like man knows he's clever, being too clever. But I feel like it was just good enough that it didn't quite reach that. I just thought it was so unique. I loved the memory loss. I loved the kind of learning the way we learn. It was a bit info dumpy in the sense that we read letters that she had written telling us about how the agency worked. But it was so complex that you needed that to happen. So yeah, loved it. Okay, the next two categories are about twists and we're gonna go through them quickly because I've got a few options for each one. A lot of you asked me for best twist that I read all year. And I will have to say, I don't know if this quite counts as a twist because it's not like information necessarily being revealed. It's more the direction that a story goes in, like that it twists, it changes, you know? But as good as dead by Holly Jackson. Whoa! I am so excited for the day that I reread this series. I actually, like the one I most want to reread is this one. It was so good. It's very divisive this last book. People either love it or hate it. I think it's incredible. And like, I'm gonna call it a twist. The twist that happens halfway, that changes the direction of the story, that goes in a completely different direction than, you know, the other books have gone in. I thought it was amazing. Holly Jackson said, I'm gonna be brave and I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna serve it up and the girls are gonna eat it up or they're gonna like it but I don't care. And I just, I loved it. I loved it. This was like, I think the second book I read this year and I still think about it and I still love it. I might just reread this last one. I'm not gonna lie to you. Like the twist, oh my god. I'm feeling tense. I'm feeling very tense. The way all the moving parts come together in this book, it's so good. I'm not even telling you really what these books are about. If you're watching this video, you've probably been here a long time. I don't know. We're just, we gotta get through this quickly, okay? It's the Book Awards guys. Two honorable mentions. Uh, the Paris apartment by Lucy Foley. I know not everyone loves this. Okay, but I did. We're following a girl whose brother was going missing. She goes to his Paris apartment to look for him. And there was a twist halfway through this that I did not expect and I really loved how it changed the direction of the story. And honorable mention. I only gave this like a 4 or 4.5. I think I gave it a 4.5 but in my mind I'm like, oh it was a 5. Like it was really good. The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett did slap a bit. You ate that. And this is more a twist at the end that kind of explains the whole story and it was so clever. I cannot wait to reread this one day. It makes me so excited to read Janice Hallett's new book that's coming out in January. I thought the twist in this was absolutely great. Again, I didn't see it coming and it kind of like, oh, oh, it was very clever. I really liked it. Then we have most predictable twists or worst twists and I have two for this. So again, we'll just mention them quickly. Rock, paper, scissors. We are following me and Alice Feeney. We're just not friends. We're following a couple. The man's got face blindness. They're struggling in their relationship. They go away on this kind of last-ditch holiday to try and save their relationship. And both this and the other one. It's just like where the twist is so obvious. I'm like, was that supposed to be a twist? But then it is supposed to a twist because then nothing else happens in the book. So like what? Yawning, sloppy, lazy. The other one, even more so I would say, but I liked the writing in this better, History of Wild Places by Shaye Earnshaw. Me and Alice Feeney's writing, absolutely not. Yeah, I feel like the writing and the story and the like, I don't know, atmosphere of this book is is quite good. So in this we're following a community called Pastoral and the question is, is it a cult or not? There's talk of a disease that means people can't leave. Is that disease true or is it a form of control? We're following people who live within the community. And for me, again, the twist in this was like so obvious that I didn't think it was a twist. But then it was revealed in a way that it was a twist. And I'm like, the whole book is pointless. The whole book is leading up to this reveal, but I thought it was so obvious throughout the whole book that it wasn't a reveal to me. So those two were probably the most disappointing in terms of twists. Next category is Best Cover. I actually have a few honorable mentions for this. And it's funny, they're all kind of similar color schemes. I just thought of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. This is a pretty cool cover. I do like this. This wasn't my initial answer. This is an honorable mention. And then my other two favorites, I really love the cover of Yerba Buena by Nina Lacour. And I also really love this edition of The Maid. But this, maybe not Best Cover, this is like, I really love the spray edges on here. I do quite like the cover as well. But yeah, Yerba Buena, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, these are all covers that I enjoyed. Apparently I like green and blue covers, which isn't really my palette, but like, probably not survive. Then Worst Covers, I have to give it to the Greenbone saga. I think they're so boring. I'm so sorry, I do not like these covers at all. I just like, where's the spice? Like it's literally the same thing. I could tell that you've been feeling very ugly. And well, it's because you are. The same like lightning bolt going through, like it's literally the same. It's literally the same, but like a bit of a different background in each one. I think they're so boring. Sorry. Okay, now let's talk about endings. Again, we'll keep this swift because I can't, oh my god, wait, I'm clever. We're gonna keep it swift because obviously I don't want to spoil endings. So best ending, I have to give to my favorite book of the year, Babel Babel, as I call her. I loved the ending of this. I thought it was an incredible ending. I think Arif Kwong writes incredible endings that like kill you emotionally, but at the same time, it's the only way that book could end. The same with all the books in the Poppy War trilogy as well. I loved what this whole book had to say. We know that if you've been on Booktube, you know what this book is about. It's about translation, Oxford, it's about colonialism, it's about how English society is built on the blood of other nations. I loved it so, so much. And I said I was clever because our protagonist is called Robin Swift. Get it? I said let's be swift. Robin, I wasn't even intentional, I'm just so clever. I cannot wait to force everyone in my life to read this and I loved it. What a great book. Anyways, my shells are rapidly becoming a mess behind me. And then we're sending, this one was tricky because I feel like it's a little bit of a lot of bad endings, but I feel like we can all agree that one of the worst endings will survive the night by Riley Sager. Now, here's the thing with this one. I actually feel like a kingship with this book because it was so bad, it was good. But the ending is particularly bad. Like the ending is so bad where it gets to a point where like, I don't know, 80 pages from the end, like you know who you can't trust, you know who the baddie is, because there's so few characters in this that you kind of eliminate people and then you're like, oh, you know, but then it's not revealed that they're the bad person for ages and you're like, what's the point? Like, what is the point? And there's like an ending ending, like the last two pages of this that anger people. And I understand why they do. I'm not going to lie, like it's kind of ridiculous. I kind of like, I like Riley Sager for just putting this out there and just whatever we would be like, I kind of find it funny, but it was bad. But like, you know, it wasn't like bad made me angry, it was bad made me laugh. So we must be grateful for small biases. Then I always do recommendations for best for beginners, best for veterans and best for universal everyone, because I recommend to everyone. So we'll go first only. So the best for beginners are books that in that genre, I think that like, they're great for introducing you to that genre. The books that I'm going to say for this are both actually thrillers. We've got The Woman in Cabin 10 and Big Little Lies. I loved both of these. These are both five stars for me this year. This one I read, I was on a cruise in the Norwegian Fjords and I read on a cruise in Norwegian Fjords. It's about a woman who's on this luxury cruise. She hears a body go overboard and there was a girl in the room next to her that she met that everyone says was never there. And it's very, very confusing and mysterious. And I just thought it was just a good thriller. It's not reinventing the wheel. It's not particularly like anything new, but I really enjoyed this. I thought it was just a great page turner. This is another one we've got best page turner later on. And this would be an honorable mention for that as well. I could not put it down. And then I also loved Big Little Lies by Leanne Moriarty. I think this is such like a universal book that you can enjoy. It has gossip. It has drama. It has relationships that like develop really well over time. But yeah, I think if you're new to thrillers, these are both great, great recommendations. Best for Veterans. So best for people who read a lot of this kind of book. It was actually tricky one. I feel like a lot of the books I loved this year were fairly like widely recommendable books. But this isn't best for veterans of horror, which is its genre. I would say this is best for people who read a lot of weird books. It's getting weird. And that is Comfort Me With Apples by Catherine M. Valente. Valente. I really enjoyed this. It's so short. It's just a very short novella. We're following a woman who loves her husband and loves her life and loves her house and everything is perfect. Or is it? And I just thought this was very creative. I really liked the kind of reveals in this. There's some certain scenes in this. They're a little bit weird. A little bit strange. But I felt like it kind of did a good job of like not holding your hand through the weirdness. But like, I don't like weirdness on weird books when like it's weird and I can't like understand what's going on, where I lose basic comprehension or like being able to theorize. It does a good job of like enabling you to theorize and go, what could that mean? What's going on? Do you know what I mean? That's what I want my weirdness to be. I would say if you don't read a ton of weird books, you probably wouldn't enjoy this. But if you do, I really think you would enjoy the path that this takes. And then best universal recommendations that I would recommend to everyone is Taylor Jenkins Reid. I read both Man of the Rising and Carrie Soto's back this year. I loved them both. Okay, Taylor Jenkins Reid, I tend to give five stars every time. Taylor Jenkins Reid is always the author. I recommend to people if I meet them in real life and they're like, oh, you read, you read books. What would you recommend? And I know nothing about what they read because they're like just give me like, oh, you know, I like books. I don't know what they read. I tend to always recommend Taylor Jenkins Reid. I meet women. I always sound like I'm talking down to anything. But like who read, if you're English, you'll get the reference. If you're international, you probably won't. But like who read a lot of like supermarket fiction, who read a lot of books or romances or women's fiction that you find in supermarkets that they sell in supermarkets. I'm not talking down to it. But I feel like, you know, recommending Taylor Jenkins Reid is a good way to keep them comfortable, but to just like add a little bit of something, a little bit of something extra. Do you know what I mean? I'm not talking down to anything, but like add a little bit of, a little bit more, you know? She's always what I recommend to people in real life. I tend to recommend Evelyn Hugo. I feel like that's always my go to. Yeah, I love you Taylor. Please be nice to me with whatever you publish next. Next category, quite a few of you asked me for was new favorite author that I've read this year. So an author I've read for the first time this year. And they're my favorite author I've read for the first time this year. And I was looking through my list. There's a few authors that I've read for the first time this year and given five stars. But most of them I've only read that one book from the book that was five stars, Francis Harding, Leanne Moriarty, there's probably quite a few more. But there's only one author who I've read two books from this year for the first time. And one was a five star one was a four star. So my answer is Simone St. James. I gave the Broken Girls five stars and I gave the Book of Cold Cases four stars. I love her writing. I really think her writing is so good. Broken Girls was one of my favorite bricks of this year. I just thought it was such a good thriller that has just a little dash of speculativeness. Like you know what, you know those like TikToks or Instagram where you're like, you're like, God making me. And it's like this much or something, this much or something. Like it's like all the usual ingredients are like a thriller mystery put in. But then she just does like a good flick, you know, a little like of speculativeness, especially like in this one towards the end that I think just like it's like the little chef's like, you know what I mean? I don't know what the fuck she's saying, but girl, I am living. I really love Simone St. James writing. I cannot wait to read more from her next year. Hopefully I'll get a few more of her books. Then a few of you also asked for the biggest page turner. So like I said, Roman and Cabin 10 is definitely a recommendation for that. But I say the winner is a book I gave four stars because I didn't think it was completely without thought, but I could not put it down. And that is Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins. I read this book in probably two hours, maybe even under two hours. This is one of the quickest, fastest paced books I've ever read. We're following these characters who go to this deserted island and relationships start to fracture, people start to die. And I don't know, it's not without a fault, you know, it's just, I just think it's a fun time, you know, I don't think anyone is going to read this and it'd be their favorite book of the year. But I think it's like a fun book to read. If you're going through it, if you need to escape reality for a few hours, this would probably be my recommendation because I think it's just absurd, ridiculous fun, and just something to like lose yourself in, you know? And then finally, final category, a lot of you also asked, what book made me cry the most this year? And I have two answers we have talked about them both already. It is Jade Legacy and Babel. I'm trying to make myself say Babel now. I, when I was reading Jade Legacy, I was listening to the audiobook, I was sitting there in bed, Tom was next to me, and I was, I had headphones on. I have these Sony headphones that are pretty, if you know them, they're pretty good at noise canceling. And I was screaming. I was like 11 o'clock at night and he was looking to shut up like the neighbors can hear you. I was like screaming, crying at the end of this. And Babel made me scream, cry as well. I'm not gonna laugh. Both of these broke me. I was a mess after reading them. I was very sad, but I think that both five stars, both some of my favorite books of this year, so I like how I show damage. What can I say? So there we have it. That is my 2022 book of wars. How exciting! I hope you enjoyed this little reflection on my reading and giving out some awards to some of the best and most disappointing of the year. Thank you for watching this video. If you got to the end of the video, comment a trophy, the trophy emoji, and thank you so much for watching. I'll see you very soon in another one. Bye!