BTT: Best books of 2008

This week's Booking Through Thursday prompt asks “It’s a week or two later than you’d expect, and it may be almost a trite question, but … what were your favorite books from 2008?”

Now this is a different perspective on “Best Books of 2008”. At BookObsessed, I posted these as the best books I had read during 2008:

• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
• Full of Grace by Dorothea Benton Frank
• The Ruby Ring by Diane Haeger
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
• Soul Identity by Dennis Batchelder

I've made no attempt to rank these against each other. They were simply the very best books that I read all year. They are books that I gladly recommend. The two that were in paper (Full of Grace and The Ruby Ring) have already been swapped and mailed to other readers. Unfortunately, I can't do the same with the electronic books, though I should point out that Little Brother is freely available via download from Doctorow's web site. It was also released with a Creative Commons copyright that allows its distribution, so you can download copies formatted for various electronic readers from MobileRead and Feedbooks. I also wrote short reviews of Little Brother and Soul Identity.

Now, if I take the prompt literally and look at my favorite books of the year, then I'd have to add a couple that aren't in the same class as best books.

• Bishop Special Crimes series by Kay Hooper

I signed up for a bookring circulating the nine books in this series. The first two books, Stealing Shadows and Hiding in the Shadows arrived in February and I was immediately hooked. The last three books arrived in November and I quickly read them to get them on the way to the next reader in the ring.

• Stealing Shadows
• Hiding in the Shadows
• Out of the Shadows
• Touching Evil
• Whisper of Evil
• Sense of Evil
• Hunting Fear
• Chill of Fear
• Sleeping with Fear

• Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer

Another guilty pleasure I indulged this year was reading PUF (Paranormal and Urban Fiction). It's a genre I had not explored prior to 2008, but I'm really enjoying most of the books I've been reading. Many of these books are romances, and the Twilight series was aimed at a young adult audience. These particular books were all the rage and after hearing about them for a while, I plunged in and read them quickly, purchasing the last in the series a day or two after the publication date. I topped off my Twilight experience by going to see the movie with my sister and her daughters over Thanksgiving weekend.

• Twilight
• New Moon
• Eclipse
• Breaking Dawn