2024 Reading List
Originally published at . Please leave any comments there.
Welcome to the 2024 Reading List! I read 39 books last year! Very happy with that number! This year I will keep the list more orderly, with newest acquisitions at the TOP. It got messy last year! All the books brought forward from 2023 will be at the bottom, with xmess next, and so on. Here we go!
Number of novels: 28 That’s it for 2024, folks! The next book I start will be on the 2025 list!
Number of graphic novels/comics collections: 26
A couple strays from Goodwill:
The Recipe Box, Viola Shipman. This is a fluffy girly novel about how important family and heritage is. It’s sappy, but I’m getting through it. The book is written by a dude who uses a pen name for all his girly stuff, which I find infinitely amusing. It’s a quick read, very formulaic.
Learning to Bow, Bruce Feiler. Subtitled Inside the Heart of Japan. I got this one for the look inside Japanese culture, but this guy writes a lot of Christian crap, so we’ll see how it goes. It seems to be less novel and more guide? I’ll report.
Memorials, Richard Chizmar. I got this randomly. As Stephen King describes it, it’s ‘suburban horror’, and I agree. Chizmar is a slow burn kind of author. He takes his time with set ups and character development. This is the best of the books I’ve read of his. My one criticism is the ending(s). The Big Finale is, indeed, BIG, and I liked how the story came to its penultimate scene. I did NOT like how Chizmar prattled on with irrelevant chatter for a dozen pages AFTER the Big Finale, BEFORE he got to the wrap up. I actually skimmed those pages and was actively annoyed. I’m not sure WTF he was trying to do, but that whole section should’ve been edited out. IRRELEVANT. Once he finally go to the wrap up, it was satisfying. Not satisfying in how it ended, but a good END of the story. He did not pull any punches with the wrap up and I appreciate that. Not every story has a happy ending; not every character comes out unscathed.
Courtney Crumrin, Ted Naifeh. (Things I realised I’d missed!)
Courtney Crumrin Vol 4: Monstrous Holiday
The Crumrin Chronicles Vol 1: The Lost and the Lonely
The Crumrin Chronicles Vol 2: The Charmed and the Cursed
The Crumrin Chronicles Vol 3: The Wild and the Innocent
Ollies/Goodwill Summer
The Drowning Kind, Jennifer McMahon.
The Restaurant, Pamela Kelley. The author calls this “fiction for women”, I call it a 100% predictable, light summer beach book.
Rewired, S.R. Johannes. A YA novel that is VERY teen oriented. The author misuses tech terms (LAN is NOT any cable) and there are many typos of the sort that autocorrect will miss (breath is not the same as breathe; sentence fragments) which tells me this is definitely a low budget YA book. It’s just OK. The story is fairly good if the author would get out of her own way. I’m not in a hurry to read anything else by her.
Leaving Time, Jodi Picoult.
The Cure for Dreaming, Cat Winters. A YA novel set in 1900. It centers on suffrage and women’s rights with a little hypnotism thrown in for colour. It is a good read and the author added a suffrage timeline as well as more reading for the younger readers this book is aimed at. Well done!
Strike Me Down, Mindy Mejia. This was a mystery, action-y type story. A fast read and entertaining.
Ollies Hurl Feb 2024!
Finding the Flavors We Lost, Patric Kuh. Started today. It’s a tad dry, but it is an exploration of the notions of “artisanal” and “farm to table” and how they’ve shaped the American restaurant landscape. This is my treadmill book, so it will take a minute to get through it. Finally finished! Yay! This one is strictly for those who wax poetic about high end chefs and restaurants. It is ponderous and meandering.
Read the rest of this entry »