**NOTE: This page was reformatted in 2026 as part of #Sonderbooks25, my 25th year of posting Sonderbooks. Here is my Sonderbooks25 post about these Stand-outs. Here is the original page, which is not in phone-friendly format. I've kept the wording the same.**
February 8, 2006
It's time again for my list of my favorite books of the previous year. This list covers Sonderbooks 91 through Sonderbooks 104.
My reviews are written right after I've read the books. At the end of the year, I like to list my favorites for that year, the ones that stick out in my mind as excellent.
This year, I was having marital problems, so that changed the kind of reading I enjoyed. This year my lifeline was books on relationships, and some of them changed my life. Of course I still read fiction, but I definitely wanted lighter, happy-ending stories. I didn't like reading books where marriages fell apart. In fact, the darkest novel I read was The True Story of Hansel and Gretel, by Louise Murphy, and I read that at the start of the year, before I was aware of my own problems.
It doesn't seem fair to compare books of different genres, and it doesn't seem fair to compare Old Favorites which I've read and loved many times with new books read for the first time. So I split the books into types, and usually gave the Old Favorites a list of their own. In a few cases, there was only one Old Favorite in a category, so I simply ranked it with the others.
All of these books are especially recommended!
Happy Reading!
—Sondra Eklund
