Last five books of the year!

 I don't have anything I'm particularly excited to review this week, so I figured instead I would share the last six books I'll be reading this year. (Related: I still kind of can't believe 2020 is ending in two weeks. This was simultaneously the shortest and longest year ever.) I'm a little shocked that I'll be meeting my goal of 150 books read this year, but I'm going to do it, and these are the books that will get me over the finish line!

1. City of Heavenly Fire by Cassandra Clare

My sister and I have been reading this series three chapters at a time over the course of the year and messaging back and forth about it, and we've finally made it to the last book! Real talk, we aren't going to finish this book by December 31st, so it doesn't really count toward my 2020 total, but I have almost finished City of Bones, the first book in the series, on audio for the second time back-to-back, so I'm applying credit for that toward this one. P.S. if you're interested in listening to City of Bones on audio, don't make the mistake I did and get the CD version. It's a different narrator than the digital version, and it's garbage. Digital audiobook, all the way - Mae Whitman is amazing.

2. Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw

Nora is a Walker, finder of lost things, and one of the only people who can enter the woods without going mad or wandering lost forever. When she discovers a boy from a local camp who went missing weeks before, still alive, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to him. But Oliver Huntsman may have secrets neither of them know about... This book is chilling in an awesome way, and I'm really enjoying it, although I may at some point regret choosing it for my bedtime read. Also, I was scrolling through Goodreads and saw that my uncle added this to his "want to read" list a month before he passed away in 2019, so in a weird way I feel like I'm reading it with him, and it brings me a bittersweet joy.

3. Remembrance by Rita Woods

This book bounces around several time periods, following multiple women: Gaelle, a Haitian refugee in present-day Ohio struggling to rebuild her life, Abigail, an enslaved woman in Haiti during the 1790s, and Margot, an enslaved women in New Orleans in the 1850s. Three women learning how to claim their power in a world hell-bent on keeping them down. I think I've had this book checked out since February, waiting to be read and now I'm a little less than halfway through and can't believe I didn't read it earlier. It's a great one to end the year with.

4. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

This was on a list of the next ten books on my TBR a long while back, and yes, I am still working my way through it. It's heavy, but enlightening, and so much of what I am learning is obvious as soon as I read it. It's infuriating realizing how blind I've been to the injustices of mass incarceration, and this should be required reading for everyone in the United States.

5. It's Not Like It's a Secret by Misa Sugiura

I'm reading this to my husband before bed, and we are greatly enjoying it. It follows sixteen-year-old Sana Kiyohara, who is moving across the country just before her junior year of high school, and it's wonderful.

So...those are my last five books of the year. What are you reading to wrap up 2020?