2017 Year End Recap

(If you have a short reading attention span, feel free to just skip to the actual ranking, which you'd have to click into the blog post to view >:3)

This particular blog post is to first document what was actually published here on this blog in 2017 (some were backdated to earlier years). While my blog has been put back into action back at the end of 2016, 2017 was really the year I aggressively maintained the blog. For the [Food in Books] post, I know the reflex reaction may be 'how hard can creating those list be?', which is valid in regular circumstances, so I don't blame anyone who thinks like this; however, note that half of them were from ARCs at the time, meaning I could not actually copy and paste the text, and that was what that'd take more time and effort.

Note: Notice two font sizes below? The regular size matching this sentence and paragraphs above, are my makeup work for before. The smaller size (like this) are the ones that are posted extremely closed to, if not in fact on, the exact published date. Those, should there actually be casual viewers of my blog, are hard to miss, since the Blog Archive function reflects them quite well, and the backdated ones are what easily gone unnoticed, hence the emphasis.

1. Manga Reading List
2. [Food in Books] かもめ食堂 - 群ようこ (Ruokala Lokki - Yoko Mure)
3. [Food in Books] ランチのアッコちゃん - 柚木麻子 (Lunch no Akko-chan - Asako Yuzuki)
4. [Food in Books] 虹の岬の喫茶店 - 森沢明夫 (Niji no Misaki no Kissaten - Akio Morisawa)
5. [Food in Books] 鴨川食堂 - 柏井壽 (Kamogawa Shokudo - Hisashi Kashiwai)
6. [Food in Books] The Chocolate Cure (Love at the Chocolate Shop #4) - Roxanne Snopek
7. [Food in Books] The Crooked Sixpence (The Uncommoners #1) - Jennifer Bell
8. [Food in Books] Melt My Heart, Cowboy (Love at the Chocolate Shop #1) - C.J. Carmichael
9. [Food in Books] The Infidel Stain (The Blake & Avery Mystery Series #2) - M.J. Carter
10. [Food in Books] The Devil's Feast (The Blake & Avery Mystery Series #3) - M.J. Carter
11. [Food in Books] Rosie's Little Café on the Riviera - Jennifer Bohnet
12. [Survey] Best Series: Trilogies
13. [Food in Books] The Valentine Quest (Love at the Chocolate Shop #5) - Melissa McClone
14. [Food in Books] Charmed by Chocolate (Love at the Chocolate Shop #6) - Steena Holmes
15. Picture Book Reading List
16. [Food in Books] The Chocolate Comeback (Love at the Chocolate Shop #7) - Roxanne Snopek
17. [Food in Books] The Door in the Alley (The Explorers #1) - Adrienne Kress
18. [Food in Books] The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game #1) - Evelyn Skye
19. [Food in Books] The Crown's Fate (The Crown's Game #2) - Evelyn Skye

This very post itself is published in 2021 and backdated. To be fair, I only vaguely played with the idea in 2017, and didn't really seriously consider it until 2 years later, then another 2 to actually take action. That said, to date (2021/4/13), 2017 still remained the craziest reading year for me! And because of this, I'm sharing, or a little closer to the bragging side, my highlights of the year. I had never met an author prior, and I met two incredible ones in the same year!

@CorneliaFunke meeting wonderful fan @samantha_kasa pic.twitter.com/hTzfNkfRbe

— Breathing Books (@breathingbks) June 4, 2017

@EliseKova Is it just me, or did I happen to wear something super close to Petra's skin tone? =D Either way; it was lovely to meet you!! pic.twitter.com/Ot0LZnhomW

— 蛇鰻鯊 五⁺人十（かさ）Sammm (@samantha_kasa) July 12, 2017

How cool was that? I debated putting the above later, but thought not ending the post with the ranking would just be odd lol. Anyhow, the first part being rather large was due to my relatively good productivity this year; I hope people are patient enough to reach this part, lmao. On Goodreads, there's the My Year in Books function they provided that give some statistics, [check out mine for 2017!] (My GR profile is set for GR Users only, so this one, you'd have to login in order to view.) There's also the Goodreads Year in Review, [read mine!] (no GR account required.) FYI, the list was actually too huge to the point I could not publish the content in my review, and had to resort to posting the updated version in the comment area of that review!

So what's different here is that I'm going to rank what I've read, but limited to series that concluded or standalones published in this year. Be ready, 2017 has a big list. And, ladies and gents, drum roll....!

[Food in Books] The Crown's Fate (The Crown's Game #2) - Evelyn Skye

• Ch. 1
• A chakchak cookie

a cluster of fried dough piled together with syrup and walnut bits.

• Ch. 3
• What Pasha drank

Damn alcohol. It was probably closer to samogon—homemade moonshine—than real vodka.

• A platter of black bread and smoked herring

• Ch. 7
• Baguettes
• Pains au chocolat
(both Galina’s daily order from Madame Boulangère, a French bakery)

• Ch. 25
• Vika's tree with sweets

Vika snapped her fingers, and deep-violet sugarplums appeared all over the tree, hanging by black licorice stems. The lower boughs of the tree grew heavy with enormous candy pinecones, each a different color and flavor, from strawberry red to marmalade orange to honeysuckle-berry blue. And tufts of white cotton candy, like sweet snow, floated down onto the branches. Wherever a child could reach, a treat could be found.

• Ch. 31
• A fresh tureen of borscht
• Tarte à l’oignon

a plate of miniature tarts, filled with caramelized onions, gruyere cheese, and thyme

(both poisoned)

• Ch. 33
• Syrniki pancakes (with cottage cheese and honey; poisoned)

[Food in Books] The Crown's Game (The Crown's Game #1) - Evelyn Skye

• Ch. 1
• A tray of oreshki cookies, and the caramel-walnut confections
• What Vika carried

Ludmila laughed as she fetched a Borodinsky loaf, the dense Russian black bread that was Sergei’s daily staple. She wrapped the bread in brown paper, creased the corners, and tied it with cotton twine.

Vika paid and tucked the bread into her basket, which contained a few sausages from the butcher and a jar of dill pickles from the grocer two streets down, where she had stopped earlier.

• Ch. 4
• Several crates of apples

• Ch. 10
• Kvass
• A stale slice of bread

• Ch. 16
• A tray laden with bouillon, chicken à l’estragon, and apple tarts

• Ch. 17
• A croissant spread with strawberry jam

• Ch. 21
• A pitcher of beer
• An ice-cold bottle of vodka
• A cutting board filled with rye bread, smoked fish, and cucumber pickles
(all from the Magpie and the Fox)