2024: My year in reading (books)
The vast majority of the things that I read are on my computer screen: social media updates, blog posts, news articles, and the like. I use Thought Shrapnel to share some of the longer-form stuff that I come across, along with my reactions and comments on them.
This post, though, is about the books that I've read this year. These days I use a service called literal.club to track this, along with my ratings and any words I feel like writing by way of review. Here's my profile. I'm currently reading The Burglar in the Closet by Lawrence Block and Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East by Martin Sixsmith.
For leisure purposes, I read a total of 24 books this year. Fifteen of these were by Donald E. Westlake including one under his pen name, Richard Stark. I haven't counted my academic reading in this, but given that I completed two modules of an MSc in Systems Thinking, this took up much of my time for non-fiction reading. In fact, other than the Russia book I'm reading at the moment, the only non-academic, non-fiction books I've finished this year are:
- The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane (5 stars) — "Wonderful. It's awesome/odd that two people have gifted me this book, several years apart, in two different formats. I actually preferred the audiobook version."
- Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman (4 stars) — "An odd book, especially as I've never seen any of Fassbinder's films. A bit as though a British, less gloomy version of Fernando Pessoa was writing a biography."
- Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick (3.5 stars) — "I kind of forgot I hadn't finished this, having put it in a box during our house move. It's an absolute adequate book, but if you've engaged with AI at all, nothing here is new. Probably best used as a gift to someone who has no idea about what might be coming next.
- The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (3 stars) — "My wife bought me this after a recommendation from a family member. It's well-written, but I didn't particularly like the author or her partner. I also felt like she was somewhat of an unreliable narrator. Still, as someone who has completed multi-day walking trips, it's always interesting to read other accounts. I guess it's made me consider walking the south west coastal path."
I tend to read fiction books in bed. When I do so, I want to read things which are going to help me switch off from the day. Like many people, I've absolutely loved reading P.G. Wodehouse and the Jeeves series. I also liked reading the Reacher novels by before Lee Child started phoning it in, and then handing over the series to his brother.
Earlier this year, I wanted a series of books I could get into that would tick all of my boxes. It turns out that ChatGPT is fantastic at this. After some prompting, and narrowing things down, my "little robot friend" (as Laura calls it) suggested an author and a series of books that even if I had heard of, I probably wouldn't have tried. I'm really glad I did, though, as the Dortmunder series of books were exactly what I needed this year. Now that I've finished them, the next series it's suggested is the series I've now started by Lawrence Block featuring a burglar named Bernie Rhodenbarr.
I never would have read books like this when I was younger, mainly because I believed, not incorrectly, that it's probably best to start with the classics. So I've read a lot of Russian literature (in translation) as well as classics of French, English, and other European literature. I've also dabbled with some American modern classics. I think there's an inverse relationship, for me at least, between the complexity of stories I can handle, and social media use.
Outside of books by authors Westlake and Block, the other fiction books I read this year were:
- Roots by Alex Haley (5 stars) — "Absolutely incredible, I'd give it 10 stars if I could."
- Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (5 stars) — "Words like 'dark' and 'bleak' don't do this book justice. An incredible read. Not an enjoyable one."
- The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (4 stars) — "Well-written and put-together, but the 'twists' were quite obvious and I didn't really identify with any of the characters."
- No Plan B by Andrew Child (1.5 stars) — "Not sure why I finished it. Like a fanfic version of Reacher."
I usually give a book about 50 pages to convince me, unless I've read an absolutely glowing review which suggests it takes a while to get into. But there are other reasons why I don't finish books, some of which are mundane and others bizarre. For example, as I mentioned above, I lost the Co-Intelligence book for a while during our house move, which is a rather mundane reason for almost not finishing it. But I had to stop reading Underworld by Don DeLillo when a printing error on a copy I bought from a second-hand bookshop meant that it merely repeated the first half of the book twice! Bizarre.
There are also times that I just forget that I'm reading a particular book. There are rhythms and seasons to my life, and therefore times when I squeeze in more reading than others. I'm also more likely to read while on holiday, so sometimes if I don't finish a book during the time we're away, I don't finish it when I return. Due to these many and varied reasons, I'm not going to list the 10 books I didn't finish this year; the chances are I'll come back to some of them.
If you have kept track of your reading this year, I'd love to know either in the comments or (better yet!) in your own blog post what you've enjoyed and what you haven't.
Image: Drew Coffman (I actually read most books on my Onyx BOOX Note Air 2)