Tag Archives: lisajewell

Te amo, Je t’aime, I Love You… (Top 10 Tuesday)

Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s challenge is a Valentine’s Day/Love freebie!

I really enjoyed this one! I tried to approach it not just from a romantic perspective, but in a way that includes many different types of love. Mother-daughter love, sisterly love, the special love between a dog and its owner, love of a place or activity, and more! There are many different kinds of love, something which many languages other than English do a better job of differentiating linguistically. English only has one word: love. You can say you love your mom and that you love chocolate and we can use context to determine which kind of love we mean. But in Spanish, there are entirely different verbs to represent these two kinds of love. So interesting! I love to geek out over Spanish grammar, but I’ll stop (for now). Instead, let’s check out my top ten choices for books with a love motif!

Top 10 Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Read in 2020

Welcome to Top 10 Tuesday! This is a weekly challenge hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s challenge is about authors I read that were new to me in 2020.

I was really excited to put together a list for this challenge! I appreciate how the focus is on authors that are new to me, but not necessarily new in 2020. For instance, I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the first time last year, but Bram Stoker certainly isn’t a new author! I tend to prioritize older books that I’ve been meaning to read for a while, rather than new releases each year. It’s not that I don’t read more current releases, it just isn’t usually what I prioritize. On this list, you’ll find a mix of authors that were new to me in 2020 as well as authors that were new to everyone last year! These were all authors that were not only unfamiliar to me, but whose work I truly loved. Here is my top ten…

Top 5 Audiobooks of 2020

As rough as 2020 was, being stuck in quarantine sure did make more time for reading! Without my commute to work, I listened to fewer audiobooks but was also able to get to more books in my physical TBR pile! Even with the reading slump I hit this summer (amidst pandemic wedding planning), I still managed to read an astounding (for me, anyway) 100 books, with many of my favorites being from the very beginning and very end of the year.

I have my top books divided up among physical books and audiobooks (since this greatly impacts the reading experience). I considered dividing the lists by genre or by target audience (adult, young adult, children’s), but decided to go by format instead since a great book can be written for any audience and from any genre. I also didn’t commit to a specific number of books to acknowledge for each category, I just identified my standout reads from the year and ranked them within that range.

Without further ado, here are my top audiobooks of 2020!