2024--The year's reading in review

It seems as if I should update this blog more frequently than I do, instead of allowing it to be so essentially defunct, so nearly undead as it is.  I am, after all, retired now, and ostensibly have more time for such things.  But then it seems like the golden age of blogging and bloggers and all our little circles and subcircles and social wheels is a bit done now that we're in the Age of Content.  When everybody has a blog, nobody does, or something like that.

Anyway, anyhoo, whatever; no promises are made for the next year.

But at some point, I started keeping track of everything I was reading and watching, mostly because I've reached that point in my life (and, perhaps, unfortunately, that point of having had COVID in 2020) where if I don't make note of a thing I've done, I may not know I did it.  And last year I posted the lists of what I'd read an watched, and this year I do it again to yawp into the vast digital infinity.

These are the books I began and finished in 2024.  There will be a supplemental post sometime setting forth the books I started in 2024 and finished next year.

 Title

 Author

 Category

 A note

Strange Gods 

Donald Wells 

fiction 

 

Creepshow 

Stephen King, Bernie Wrightson, Michele Wrightson 

graphic novella 

reread? 

Erebus--The Story of a Ship 

Michael Palin 

nonfiction 

 

The Mask of Cthulhu 

August Derleth 

short stories 

 

The Shuttered Room 

August Derleth (writing as "H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth) 

short stories 

reread 

In A Lonely Place 

Dorothy B. Hughes  

fiction 

 

The Day of the Jackal 

Frederick Forsyth 

fiction  

 

Rumpole Misbehaves 

John Mortimer 

fiction/short stories 

 

The Price of Salt [Carol] 

Claire Morgan [Patricia Highsmith] 

fiction 

 

Mother Night 

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 

fiction 

 

The Postman Always Rings Twice 

James M. Cain 

fiction 

 

Mildred Pierce 

James M. Cain 

fiction 

 

Double Indemnity 

James M. Cain 

fiction 

 

Roadside Picnic 

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky 

fiction 

translated by Olena Bormashenko 

The Hyperion: Tales From Hell 

edited by Suzanna Lundale and Marc Tizura 

anthology 

 

Serenade 

James M. Cain 

fiction 

 

Bunny 

Mona Awad 

fiction 

 

Rumpole and the Primrose Path 

John Mortimer 

fiction/short stories 

 

Death of a Doxy 

Rex Stout 

fiction 

 

Too Many Cooks  

Rex Stout  

fiction 

 

The Trail of Cthulhu 

August Derleth 

fiction 

 

Fletch 

Gregory Mcdonald 

fiction 

reread 

Confess, Fletch 

Gregory Mcdonald 

fiction  

 

Fletch's Fortune 

Gregory Mcdonald 

fiction  

 

The Destroyer of Worlds 

Matt Ruff 

fiction 

 

The Disaster Artist 

Greg Sistero and Tom Bissell 

nonfiction  

 

The Wager - A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder 

David Grann 

nonfiction  

 

You Like It Darker 

Stephen King 

short stories 

 

When the Clock Broke -- Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up In the Early 1990s 

John Ganz 

nonfiction 

 

My Best Friend's Exorcism  

Grady Hendrix  

fiction  

 

Nights At the Circus 

Angela Carter 

fiction 

 

Seduction of the Innocent 

Fredric Wertham 

"nonfiction" 

reread 

And Be A Villain 

Rex Stout 

fiction  

 

Rumpole and the Angel of Death 

John Mortimer 

fiction/short stories 

 

Cry Hard Cry Fast 

John D. MacDonald  

fiction 

 

The Z Murders 

  1. Jefferson Farjeon 

fiction 

 

American Prometheus - The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer  

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin 

nonfiction 

 

Three At Wolfe's Door  

Rex Stout 

fiction/novellas 

 

Blood Grove 

Walter Mosley 

fiction 

 

The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures  

Aaron Mahnke 

folklore 

 

Black Orchids 

Rex Stout 

fiction 

 

A Murder of Quality 

John Le Carré  

fiction 

 

The Other 

Thomas Tryon 

fiction 

 

Rumpole For the Defence 

John Mortimer 

fiction/short stories 

 

The Black Magic Omnibus (Volume 1)  

edited by Peter Haining 

anthology 

 

A History of the World in Six Glasses 

Tom Standage 

nonfiction  

(re)read 

Trouble In Triplicate  

Rex Stout  

fiction/short stories 

reread 

The World of Lore: Wicked Mortals 

Aaron Mahnke 

folklore 

 

Murder For Christmas 

edited by Thomas Godfrey 

anthology 

 

Lovecraft's Monsters 

edited by Ellen Datlow 

anthology 

 

 

Special: 

Finished Patricia Highsmith's The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder, a collection of short stories I picked up several years ago and started reading but set aside for some reason and didn't actually get around to. 

 

Note: 

Standage's World in Six Glasses is one I originally purchased on Audible years and years ago and listened to the first chapters at least twice without getting around to finishing. At some point I picked up a physical copy and it sat on the TBR for awhile; this year I finally restarted it and got further than the section on spirits, ultimately finishing it. 



It looks like an even fifty books if I'm counting correctly, which I may not be, and doesn't seem like many, but okay.  The list also doesn't include whatever RPG rulebooks I managed to get through in the past year.  If there's any kind of trend, I seem to be reading a lot of mysteries and noir these days.


As ever is the case, I have books that have sat on the TBR pile for years.  Some of the books read this year were purchased fresh and new, some were purchased from used bookstores, a few were read online via the Internet Archive.  Two (I won't single them out) were produced by friends, one as a self-published title and another the product of a successful crowdfunding campaign.  As noted, two of the books in the list were in a liminal unfinished state for years, and thus I suppose my earlier statement that these are books started in 2024 and finished in 2024 is technically what you might call a lie since the books were started who-knows-when (years ago, actually, years); the Highsmith, indeed, could only be finished cogently without restarting because it was a book of short stories.


I suppose I could make this a moderately more interesting exercise by telling you which books I especially loved or hated, or giving you reviews of them.  The problem for me would be that I would then feel terrible if I didn't review one or didn't even have much I wanted to say about one, because I'm a neurotic with undiagnosed anxiety issues and my brain would start eating itself.  For the sake of what's left of said brain, I'm merely going to tell you what I told you coming into this bit of public navel-gazing: these are the books I read in 2024.


The list of movies will post sometime soon, after I've watched everything I was going to this year.







Comments

PaulM said…
That's a lot of reading. I used to read voraciously but since I've retired, the only book I've read is an old Janet Evanovich novel I've read before.

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