Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme that currently resides at The Artsy Reader Girl and features bloggers sharing lists on various book topics. The official topic for this week was childhood favourites; however, as this is the first week of July, I thought I would instead do a quick look back at my top ten favourite books from the first half of 2019.

I have had an amazing time this year reading some outstanding books, so I had a bit of a hard time choosing books for this list, but I did eventually manage to whittle it down to 10 books (with a few honourable mentions thrown in). I decided to only include books that were published between 1 January 2019 and 30 June 2019, which helped limit the list a bit for me. While I have reviewed most of these books on the blog or in The Canberra Weekly, there were one or two which I am currently in the process of reviewing and will hopefully go up soon. Check out my list below:

Honourable Mentions:

Emperor of Rome by Robert Fabbri – 4.5 stars

Reckoning of Fallen Gods by R. A. Salvatore – 4.5 stars

Recursion by Blake Crouch

I literally only finished this last night, but it was an outstanding and captivating read and I’m hoping to write up a review for it soon.

Firefly: The Magnificent Nine by James Lovegrove – 4.5 stars

Top Ten List (no particular order):

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon – 5 Stars

I only wrote a short review for this book, but it was a pretty epic novel that I really enjoyed and is easily one of the best books of 2019 so far.

Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff – 5 stars

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by K. J. Parker – 5 stars

War of the Bastards by Andrew Shvarts – 5 stars

Tiamat’s Wrath by James S. A. Corey

I listened to this one a couple of months ago and absolutely loved it. I still need to get a review up for it but it was an amazing book.

Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson – 5 stars

The Unbound Empire by Melissa Caruso – 5 stars

Star Wars: Master and Apprentice by Claudia Gray – 4.75 stars

God of Broken Things by Cameron Johnston – 4.75 stars

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Vol. 1: High School is Hell by Jordie Bellaire and
Dan Mora – 4.5 stars

I hope you enjoyed this list and the books I have chosen. Several of these books are likely to appear in any future Top Ten Reads of 2019 list that I do, but I really think that some of the books coming out in the next six months have the potential to make the top ten. Let me know which books were your favourite releases for the first half of 2019.