The 2018 Reading Challenge Part-2 | #BookSpyChallenge2018

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I started a reading challenge back in 2015, primarily to make up for the lost decade of books, and set the number at a comfortable 36 books – three a month. Interestingly, that target was met sometime between April and May, prompting me to keep at it, reading whatever books I came across. By the end of that year, I had ended up reading over a hundred books – a tradition I have joyfully maintained for four years now.

It is no mystery that a considerable chunk of my reading is consciously comprised of thrillers – a genre I like to call my bread-and-butter reading 😀. Even within the larger category of thrillers, I enjoy indulging in all their sub-genres. Action, Spy, Military, Crime, Psychological, Legal, Mystery – these are just some, from a much longer list of thriller genres, that I’ve read this year.

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon the twitter profile of TheRealBookSpy, thanks to one of my favourite thriller authors – Joseph Finder. TheRealBookSpy is considered an authority on thrillers and is now also recognized by Amazon as an online influencer. He continues to be my go-to source for discovering new authors and getting the latest on existing favourites. In 2017 he started his own reading challenge which I undertook successfully and decided to take it up again in 2018.

How the challenge goes is that TheRealBookSpy releases a reading list every month, of the books being published. You have to read at least one book from each month’s list, covering a minimum of eight months, and tweet about it.

Given below is the selection of titles I read as part of this year’s challenge. To know more about my views on these books, click on the book title.

If you are curious to see the complete list of 108 books I read this year as part of my main reading challenge, including a total of 23 thrillers (of which only twelve are listed below), click here.

Also, per the Aquamarine Flavours annual tradition, I have selected my favourite books from these 108 and compiled them into a list segregated by Fiction and Non-Fiction for Indian and International releases. Click here for this curated list.

For now, here is my list of books from the #BookSpyChallenge2018:

1. Hellbent – Gregg Hurwitz (January)
2. The Woman in the Window – A.J. Finn (January)
3. Sirens – Joseph Knox (February)
4. The Terminal List – Jack Carr (March)
5. Skyjack – K.J. Howe (April)
6. Reaper: Ghost Target – Nicholas Irving with A.J. Tata (May)
7. The Word is Murder – Anthony Horowitz (June)
8. Bloody Sunday – Ben Coes (July)
9. After Anna – Lisa Scottoline (April)
10. The Fallen – David Baldacci (April)
11. Button Man – Andrew Gross (September)
12. Dark Sacred Night – Michael Connelly (October)

Are you a thriller aficionado yourself, like me? Yes? I would love to know you and find out who your favourite authors or serial characters are. Drop me a message here so we can exchange notes. One can never have enough thrillers to read, right? 😃

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