A lot of blogs I follow are doing End of the Year Round-ups of the books they’ve read.  So for the last day of the year I thought I’d suspend Fiction Friday for a week and join the trend by posting a review of my year in reading…

1) Best Book  –  In some ways I have an easy answer here, because I reread two of my favorite books this year.  The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery, and my favorite Star Trek novel, First Frontier by Diane Carey and James I. Kirkland.  Barring those two, I think I’d have to go with Rapture of the Deep by L. A. Meyer, another installment in the Jacky Faber series.

2) Worst Book  –  The second half of The Time-Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  I actually liked the first half, but then it went wildly downhill.  Right about when they started trying to have a child.  Just adopt, all right?  Really.

3) Most Disappointing Book  –  A tie here.  Sundays at Tiffany’s by James Patterson had this great premise about an imaginary friend.  I was looking for another White Darkness, and instead I got a badly written romance with a lame twist ending.  Second candidate is Beatnik Rutabagas from Beyond the Stars by Quentin Dodd.  Probably no one but Douglas Adams could live up to that title.  Dodd was plainly aspiring to be Douglas Adams but all he produced was a book of total randomness (and I like randomness!) with nothing at all to tie it together.

4) Most Surprising (in a Good Way)  –  The Far Side of Evil by Sylvia Louise Engdahl  –  This was a sequel to Enchantress from the Stars, and turned out to be both darker and more thought-provoking than I expected…in a good way!  Both excellent books, but very different from each other.

5) Best Series You Discovered – Golden and Grey by Louise Arnold  –  I found this only in the last month, and have really been having fun with it.  I’ll have a review up in the next week or so.

6) Most Hilarious Read  –  I read several Discworld books by Terry Pratchett this year, and I have to place all of them as the winners of this category, with honorable mention to A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag by Gordon Korman.  I might give it to Korman, but it wasn’t a new read, so it feels more fair to give it to the new (to me) books.

7) Most Beautifully Written  –  The Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery  –  Her writing is always incredible, and this is one of her best.  There’s just no comparison with anyone else I’ve read this year.

8 ) Can’t Believe I Waited Until 2010 to Read It  –  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen  –  I actually did read this before, long ago in about seventh grade.  But I barely remembered it.  Unfortunately, since I read it when I was twelve, I had this impression it was a difficult read, which made it off-putting to pick it up again, even though I kept meaning to.  Finally I actually bought it, still didn’t get around to it for a long time, went through a period where I resolved to read all the books I owned but hadn’t read, and finally read it then…it’s a lot easier to read when you’re not twelve.  And it’s a lovely book.

9) You Mean I Didn’t Read That in 2010…?  The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean is my favorite book that I didn’t actually read this year.  I wrote a book review and watched the miniseries that inspired one of the characters and altogether feel like I have immersed myself in this novel…even though I listened to the audiobook in 2009, and haven’t actually read the novel since at least 2008.

10) Most Looking Forward To in 2011  –  Tortall and Other Lands: A Collection of Tales by Tamora Pierce  –  I don’t know much about it, but it sounds exciting!  She’s been a favorite author for many years, who does not publish nearly as frequently as I would like…