Books Read in 2024: Yearly Total and One-Star Reads

I had a bit of an... odd? reading year. I don't want to say 'bad', but I was behind my reading goal all year, which has not happened in recent memory, and I went up and down about how much it bothered me. When Eve got home on December 14th she said "I have to read two books in the next sixteen days" and I barked "try ELEVEN". We both resolved to not let it bother us and then both ended up chugging one or two short books to meet our goal.

I know 111 books is perfectly fine - any total is perfectly fine. I know that how much I read tends to define more of my identity than it probably should. There is a rhythm to reading, like with everything else in life, and a rhythm isn't a rhythm unless there are downbeats as well as upbeats (I have no idea if I'm using those terms correctly and also WHY is the word rhythm so hard to type). 

That said, I have thought a bit about the reason for reading less because I was unable not to. I sort of forgot that I didn't drop my fourth school library until September, so I still had that job for the first half of 2024, and it took a fair bit out of me. I was really sick three times, and it was the kind of sick where I watched tv more than I read, because all the coughing made me eyes so bleary it was hard to see the page. I don't listen to audiobooks unless I'm on a long drive, because I find it too hard to stay focused on them. Aaaaand, let's be honest, I spend too much time on my phone. The biggest pitfall is probably when I get into bed and think "I'll just check Facebook one last time before I read". THAT IS A BAD IDEA. I'm going to stop doing that. 

Now, on the 'reading more diversely' front? Also much room for improvement. I start out well and then often just kind of forget that I'm supposed to be paying attention to the diversity of my reading list and start randomly reading whatever library ebook is going to expire next. This is one reason I need to be better about setting goals and writing them down somewhere where I can't forget about them. I'm not sure how this doesn't result in writing everything down on my bedroom walls. Just kidding. I have a billion pretty notebooks I can use. I'm just afraid I'll forget about them.

Last point: I realized a few months ago that I was possibly getting a little bit lazy with my reading choices. While reading Don Quixote for book club I realized that it felt good to approach something with some density again. I read Middlemarch AND The Magic Mountain in 2019, and I've been trying to read one lousy Anthony Trollope book ever since (mostly because I want to tell people I'm taking my favourite Trollope to the beach in the summer, but still). Ugggghhhhh, I'm going to have to make a reading list and approach it methodically. I hate approaching things methodically.

So, 111 books, down from 139 last year. I looked hopefully at the page count, but I was several thousand pages less than last year as well. 

69 were by women

7 were by LGBTQ writers

4 by binary/two-spirit writers

17 by POC (one from the fifteen hundreds, so he probably counts a bit less)

One Star Reads

Twenty-Seven Minutes by Ashley Tate: Synopsis from Goodreads: "The rare gift that delivers it all: elevated prose, characters with depth, unpredictable twists, and a pitch-perfect mood."—Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push. Phoebe Dean was the most popular girl alive and dead.

For the last ten years, the small, claustrophobic town of West Wilmer has been struggling to understand one thing: Why did it take young Grant Dean twenty-seven minutes to call for help on the fateful night of the car accident that took the life of his beloved sister, Phoebe?
Someone knows what really happened the night Phoebe died. Someone who is ready to tell the truth.

With Phoebe's memorial in just three days, grief, delusion, ambition, and regret tornado together with biting gossip in a town full of people obsessed with a long-gone tragedy with four people at its heart—the caretaker, the secret girlfriend, the missing bad boy, and a former football star. Just kids back then, are forever tied together the fateful rainy night Phoebe died.

I was actually pretty hopeful for this early on based on the writing. The story was just so thin and unaffecting. A little surprised I didn't give it two stars rather than one, thinking back, but I'm going to trust past me and leave it. 

The Spellman Files (Spellmans #1) by Lisa Lutz: Synopsis from Goodreads: Meet Isabel "Izzy" Spellman, private investigator. This twenty-eight-year-old may have a checkered past littered with romantic mistakes, excessive drinking, and creative vandalism; she may be addicted to Get Smart reruns and prefer entering homes through windows rather than doors -- but the upshot is she's good at her job as a licensed private investigator with her family's firm, Spellman Investigations. Invading people's privacy comes naturally to Izzy. In fact, it comes naturally to all the Spellmans. If only they could leave their work at the office. To be a Spellman is to snoop on a Spellman; tail a Spellman; dig up dirt on, blackmail, and wiretap a Spellman.
Part Nancy Drew, part Dirty Harry, Izzy walks an indistinguishable line between Spellman family member and Spellman employee. Duties include: completing assignments from the bosses, aka Mom and Dad (preferably without scrutiny); appeasing her chronically perfect lawyer brother (often under duress); setting an example for her fourteen-year-old sister, Rae (who's become addicted to "recreational surveillance"); and tracking down her uncle (who randomly disappears on benders dubbed "Lost Weekends").
But when Izzy's parents hire Rae to follow her (for the purpose of ascertaining the identity of Izzy's new boyfriend), Izzy snaps and decides that the only way she will ever be normal is if she gets out of the family business. But there's a hitch: she must take one last job before they'll let her go -- a fifteen-year-old, ice-cold missing person case. She accepts, only to experience a disappearance far closer to home, which becomes the most important case of her life.

This series has been on my radar for a long time (although I have had to learn several times that it has nothing to do with magic even though the family name is Spellman). I have to think it must be something about me or my mood that made this reading experience so exceedingly unpleasant, because a lot of people I often agree with liked the book. But wow, I HATED it. Every single relationship seemed either bad or incomprehensible, no matter how it was described. Izzy decides she will date a man, although she doesn't really seem to like him, and he seems baffled by her (but dates her anyway?). Every family member seems to hate every other family member - it seems like the author intends to paint them as lovably madcap but they just came across as assholes to me. Izzy manhandles her younger sister in a way that seems borderline abusive, although admittedly the younger sister is so terrible I kind of understand the inclination. I could have sworn I reviewed this on Goodreads but apparently I did not, but I was so appalled and infuriated by it I remembered it all anyway. This seems unfair.