2013: A Year in Books | The Favorites

Image Credit: Abhi Sharma

The year is almost over, and you know what that means: it’s time to write our “Best of” lists and anger people with our terrible choices. But fear not! My impeccable taste guarantees a list filled with nothing but great recommendations… That, and I’m aware of how obnoxious and pretentious some of these lists are, which is why this year I’m going with “Favorites” instead of “Best”. So even if you violently disagree with me, at least you know that I consider this my list and not the list.

Before I get to it, though, I wanted to thank you all for the wonderful year I’ve had. I know I was a bit of a slacker, yet you’re still here even when I only blog once a month. But consistent or not, 2013 was a lot of fun and that’s all thanks to you blogger/twitter/reader/author friends who make the Internet welcoming, interesting and highly addictive.

I’ll resume my not-so-regularly scheduled blogging next month, but in the meantime I leave you with my favorite books of the year (in no particular order). Let me know if any of your favorites made the list.

Review: Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine Scheidt

Source: a review copy was provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

The rise of the New Adult category has created an interesting debate about including sex in fiction marketed to young readers, and whether there is room for sex in these stories, or if it’s even appropriate. As in everything in life, the answer to that is that it depends on the context.

Personally, I think that in a world where female sexuality is often seen and portrayed with negative connotations in and by male-dominated environments, having positive representations of sex in stories that are mostly read by young women and teenage girls is a good, and necessary, thing. 

But of course, with the popularity of New Adult stories it becomes obvious that there’s a huge (or hugely vocal) audience claiming for the hypersexualization of stories that mostly have no business being sexualized in the first place. Because as many “adult content” warnings these books include, the truth remains that these are stories marketed to YA readers, that may not all be that young, but most of them are. So even though I think that sex in YA is necessary and can be a positive addition to the story, I’m not sure I agree with stories written with the excuse to add sex in them*.