What a year! Book in a Blink has been going for 7 months now and hopefully it will keep going for many more. With 2014 almost ending I would like to thank all my readers, especially those who have been subscribing or following the blog since the beginning. THANK YOU for your continuous support!

2014 in Review

The end of the year is a good opportunity to reflect on the blog’s journey thus far. Besides the detailed work - the content, the writing, the pictures, the layout, etc. - that need to be thought of for each post, the hardest part about starting a new blog is building a readership. So first on the ‘what went well’ is the number of readers and followers of the blog. There are now 475 likes on the Book in a Blink Facebook Page, which is such a great accomplishment, so thank you all!

What have I been reading and writing about this year? Around 25% of the 2014 posts have been based on biographies, another 35% on self-help, and the rest mostly related to nutrition, human body and fitness, with a fiction book thrown in for good measure. Looking back at the numbers, the blog has diversity in content but what I have come to realise through writing the book insights is that the more books I read the more I found the content of one book relating to another. This is not only emphasising the key message but it also helps to connect different books and ideas together. It is definitely another ‘what went well’ for 2014. And if you have not checked them out yet, here are the top three posts this year:

• The China Study by Colin Campbell
• Quiet by Susan Cain
• Brain Rules by John Medina

Nothing is perfect and there are always things that can be done better, right? So in 2015, in addition to the short insights that I write, I will try to give some more direct guidance on book recommendations with each post having a star rating and target audience information. The original intention of the blog was to capture insights that I read and was not intended as a pure book review blog, however a few weeks ago my husband (a.k.a. blog editor), suggested that I should include a star rating to share my opinion of whether the book is worth reading to get a fuller understanding of the material than what I can cover in my short insights from the book. So next year, each post will include a star rating. I will also include a short sentence on who the books are good for to help readers decide if the book is right up their alley.

The Lists

There are tons and tons of book lists out there so why not add one of my own. In no particular order, here is the list of my top 10 non-fiction books that I read in 2014:

• Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono
• Poke the Box by Seth Godin
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• The Dip by Seth Godin
• Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
• The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer by David A. Whitsett
• Creativity Inc by Ed Catmuli
• All the President’s Men by Carl Bernstein
• A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger
• Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz

I use Goodreads to keep track of my reading and as I reflected on the books I read this year I realised that a third of them are fiction books, so this post will not be complete without listing my top three fiction books that I read this year:

• The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
• The Redbreast by Jo Nesbo
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Before I owned an e-reader I used to love going into secondhand bookshops at least once a week to get a few books and put them on my bookshelf for future reading. This meant that when I finished reading one book I could just go to my bookshelf and picked another one in whichever genre I felt like at that time. Now that I am using an e-reader I miss this experience and when I finish reading one book on the e-reader, I like knowing what I am going to read next. Some books are good in that they give you further reading recommendations. So now instead of having books in my bookshelf ready to read, I have a list of books to be read. Here is a preliminary list of books I am planning to read in 2015:

• Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey
• Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo
• The Lost Girls by Jennifer Baggett
• The Blank State by Steven Pinker
• The Secret Life of the Grown-up Brain by Barbara Strauch
• Still Writing by Dani Shapiro
• Kokoda by Peter FitzSimons

What about you? What are your favourite books you read this year? And what books are in your to-read list for next year?