I’m trying to figure it out. My annual last post is my book reflection for the fading year. I keep track of my books on Goodreads, and I always join their reading challenge to keep myself honest. What I can’t figure out is why I fell below 70 books this year. (The official total is only 61.) I set my goal below that, of course, because I’m no fan of setting targets impossibly high. The only thing I can figure is that some of this year’s books took longer than usual to get through. Maybe on average they were longer than my typical fare. In any case, my favorites among the fiction I’ve read are these:
For standard horror I especially liked Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and Ivar Leon Menger’s What Mother Won’t Tell Me. Interestingly, neither was speculative. I do seem to have slipped in that category a bit. Gothically speaking, Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale, Rebecca James’ The Woman in the Mirror, Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus were all memorable. I started reading Dark Academia somewhat intentionally this year and I would argue that Sarah Moss’ The Ghost Wall fits since the professor’s up to no good in the woods. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke also fits for a similar reason, only not in the woods. I enjoyed both. For literary fiction, edging back into horror, A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet was very good.
My reading tends toward nonfiction (occupational hazard) and here there are categories also. In the general category, Andrew Laties’ Son of Rebel Bookseller stayed with me. Don Foster’s Author Unknown was enjoyable and eye-opening. I also really enjoyed Mark Thomas McGee’s Fast and Furious. For books on horror I read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and his On Writing. (I also read one of his novels.) Both of these were quite good, I thought. I also learned a lot from Olga Gershenson’s New Israeli Horror.
I see that I also read quite a lot of unusual nonfiction. Most of it I quite enjoyed. The most conventional of them was David Robson’s The Expectation Effect. I’m fascinated by the power of the human mind, so Mitch Horowitz’s Uncertain Places and D. W. Pasulka’s Encounters gave me considerable pause early in the year. Carlos Eire’s They Flew, a weighty tome, was well worth the time it took. Among the reflective/spiritual nonfiction my favorite was Katherine May’s Wintering.
I very much enjoy my end of year reflection over the books I’ve read. I don’t plan my reading for the year in any systematic way. I will say that I received quite a few titles over the holidays that I’m looking forward to posting on these this coming year. And I suspect a few new titles will appear along the way as well. I do hope to get past 61, in any case. Read through 2025!
