I know I'm out of the habit of book posts when I'm sat here wondering how to introduce this - the best book post of the year! I absolutely love end-of-the-year book lists and peruse many of them myself, so I hope you will enjoy this (although if you've been paying attention none of the below will be particularly surprising). And in the interests of catching you up as it's been a while, I thought I'd also give you a quick overview of the rest of the books I read between July and December.

So, surviving the first few months of parenthood. I started drafting this list in the wee hours in those first early weeks of motherhood and I'm finally returning to it now (as Ines is fast approaching the eight-month mark!) to polish it up for you and reflect on things I found useful during this hugely transitional time.

So okay, towards the end of March I brought forth a whole new person which predictably created a bit of a Life Schism. This means that those books I read before are mostly lost to pre-baby existence when my world didn't revolve around a soft, snuffling little cherub and the ones I read after were mostly read by the glowing light of my Kindle during night feeds... Needless to say the reviews for these couple of months are probably not going to be my most astute work, but I will do my best because there were some interesting and thought-provoking novels in here.

I may not have read much this month but I did find two great contenders for top books of the year; so far I seem to be hitting my goal of quality over quantity! Long may it continue.

There’s not a whole lot to report from this month (rather unsurprisingly as we remain firmly in lockdown…) so no ramblings this time, let’s just get straight into the books!

Sometimes when I write these blog posts about my monthly reading, they seem to me to become a kind of diary. December was tough for all sorts of reasons and I feel like I don't remember much of it as a result. Similarly, these books feel remote and somewhat tainted by my state of mind (should Rosewater have gone in my top books of the year? Or That Reminds Me? Would they have if I'd read them at a different time? It's impossible to tell until I reread them). But I have done my best to refresh my memory of them and pull together my disparate thoughts.

When I thought back over my reading year, I felt instinctively that it could have been much better. A bit of a negative way to begin this post maybe, but those were my initial feelings. Perhaps had the year not been quite so difficult in other ways, I would feel differently. Coming off the back of my year of buying no books and reading mostly backlist titles from my shelves, I felt I went too far in the opposite direction (typical!) and read too many trendy, recently released books over backlist titles I probably would have and should have prioritised for being more my kind of book.