My year in books

With assistance from the Nine Nine

I loved collecting my year’s worth of reads last December, so I’ve done it again this year. As with last year, I’ve tried to list the books in the order I read them, but I didn’t track them in any one place so I’ve had to piece it together. And as with last year, I spent even more time including gif reactions/commentary, this time from Brooklyn Nine Nine, which I re-watched in pieces while nursing Baby Goop. (We’ll get to her, mid-year.)

I started the year by finishing Happiness Falls by Angie Kim. This 2023 interview by Andromeda put it on my radar, and I was glad to have read the interview before the book, because I think it made me appreciate the sheer volume of research and passion that went into the story.

Per usual, all Tenor.com, my favorite place to burn an hour

I think Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala came next. As much as I appreciated the fun of the mystery, for me, the real selling point of this book was the food! The story is chock-full of delicious food descriptions (a hallmark of cozy mysteries, I believe).

I just wanted all the food

Early in the year I read QUIJOTE Y YO: Y el Secreto en Zugarramurdi by Constanza Ontaneda. It’s the first in a series of Spanish books for beginner-ish students. It was really good practice and I wish I’d kept going with the series, but instead I tried to read a novelization of Guillermo del Toro’s El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), which was just too steep a learning curve for me, and my pre-bed Spanish reading turned back into English reading.

In February I read Amity Gaige’s Sea Wife and wrote a book report on it, trying to capture all the writing lessons it had to teach. Be forewarned, it’s a tearjerker. The two points of view are a wife and husband, but the husband’s POV is his captain’s log from a long sailing trip the family took together, and the wife’s POV is after the husband’s death on that trip.

Something I’m noticing from doing this reading roundup for the second year in a row is that I read more in the cold months than the warm. March was an especially great reading month for me. First up was Like a Sister by Kellye Garrett, about a woman who seems to be the only one who thinks her sister’s death wasn’t an accidental overdose. (But of course, someone else knows it wasn’t that…)

Crime, family drama, commentary—let’s go indeed!

I read parts of Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby, which made me laugh out loud. And yet I didn’t finish it–I’m not sure I’ve ever finished reading a book of essays all the way through. (See also Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, which I’ve picked away at over the past few years but still haven’t finished.)

Me reading Samantha Irby:

Me reading Audre Lorde:

We went to Florida in late March, and I wrote a piece about the two books I read on vacation: Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek and Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami.

I also admitted in a different piece that I’d put off reading Miracle Creek because I’d heard how good it was and I was weirdly worried it would ruin my self esteem to read it……..and it was just as good as I’d hoped/feared.

me reading Miracle Creek by the pool

The prolific Donna Freitas released an incredible memoir in April; I listened to Wishful Thinking on audio because it was read by Donna herself! It’s all about her Catholic upbringing, the loss of her faith, and her craving to get it back somehow. As a “Cultural Catholic,” I loved this one.

(Unlike Donna, I was not raised Catholic, but my mom was and she comes from a giant family we see all the time, so I feel very familiar with certain aspects of Catholicism, but they feel cultural to me rather than religious. And it turns out, lots of other people feel that way too, hence the existence of the term “Cultural Catholic” – if the Pew Research Center uses it, it must be real.)

Shout out to another April release, PT’s own Andromeda Romano-Lax’s Deepest Lake!!!! I read the book last year but interviewed ARL about it this year. Tagline: Mom infiltrates bougie writing retreat to search for her missing daughter.

If you missed reading it in 2024, it would be a perfect escapist read for this winter! Even though the MC is living any mother’s nightmare, it still made me want to travel.

In spring I read an advanced copy of Kate Brody’s debut, Rabbit Hole. (I interviewed Kate shortly afterward.) Ten years after her sister’s presumed death, a woman’s father commits suicide, and she finds herself going down the same rabbit hole he had been, trying to figure out what happened to her missing sister. It might be best described as a literary novel, but I found it to be quite a page turner, especially when Reddit threads turned into threats.

And then I read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It’s part WHY to pull back on social media and similar consumption, and part HOW to do that (i.e. the “digital declutter” he walks you through).

Not anymore!

This book is one of two reasons for my reading slowdown. As part of my “digital declutter,” I decided to take a break from listening to audiobooks. I wanted to let my brain reset a bit, so that I could sit with boredom and my own ideas could percolate.

And the other reason for my reading slowdown:

Baby Goop, book blocker

BOOM! (My three-year-old daughter was planning on calling the baby Boom, but in my experience you can’t pre-plan a nickname. There’s nothing to be done about it—she is not a Boom; she is a Goop.) How good is that onesie?! Courtesy of one Andromeda, who sent it without a note and it took forever for me to figure out where it had come from. (In my defense, the postpartum brain is not a quick one.) (Do we like the sunglasses I drew on her, for a touch of baby privacy?)

Going back to Digital Minimalism, I read it when I did on purpose, thinking I would try to time up my social media pause with my newborn time. It worked great for me. I still read a little bit on paper, just anything I could reach from wherever I was nursing Goop or holding her after she’d fallen asleep. I read parts of Colette’s My Mother’s House, which is a story in vignettes. Per the book’s opening note, although fictionalized, the novella came from a time when the famed French author was feeling very inspired by her own mother. From the few stories I did read, Colette seemed content with her childhood memories and appreciative of her mother; it was really nice to read at that time in my life.

Then I read Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo. The fact that I managed to read the whole thing with a newborn says it all: it’s a great book. That’s the whole review.

Me to Ilyon Woo

Except I wrote a lot more about it for PT, and then an expansion for Brevity Blog.

As great as Master Slave Husband Wife was, it was also long and thought-provoking, and so I didn’t hurry into anything else for a bit.

September is witch time for me, so I read parts of The Moon Book by Sarah Faith Gottesdiener and listened to parts of Italian Witchcraft by Raven Grimassi and Lunar Living by Kirsty Gallagher on Spotify.

Every September. I can’t help it.

I finished A Step Past Darkness by Vera Kurian in the fall. I started the audiobook while I was pregnant and had Baby Goop around the half-way mark. When I decided to pick it back up again, I got back into it super quickly and finished it over a matter of days.

Vera herself described it as “an homage to Stephen King’s It” and it showed. I can specifically vouch for the audio version. It might have been my favorite audio of the year—the narration was perfect to me, and it was *~* bingeable *~*.

Up next was a manuscript from a new writer friend. We were having coffee and she was describing the novel, and the more she talked (both about the story and her editing concerns) the more I realized I was about to offer to read it.

I won’t be surprised if it’s on other people’s reading roundups one day!

My next read was another audiobook: Sian Gilbert’s She Started It. It was darker than I expected, but still very fun, and the audiobook narration was great. Most of the characters were terrible people, but that was fine, because it was basically And Then There Were None but make it a hen party.

Yeah they did!

Next and last was There There by Tommy Orange, and what a way to end the year. It might have been my favorite of 2024. (I say “I think” because you never know how the books will marinate with time, ya know? But I have a feeling on this one.)

How to describe this book.

But also beauty, and comedy, and, dare I say, intrigue!

It’s about a bunch of interconnected characters who will all be at a powwow in Oakland, California, and you learn in the very first chapter that some of those characters are planning an armed robbery of the powwow. I’ll probably write a piece on it next year, once I’ve had time to really sit with it. I read this book on paper and enjoyed it best that way, but I couldn’t get enough so I also listened to the audio at times (thanks Cloud Library!).

And now, I’m closing the year with my first John Grisham since college. Ben has a handful of Grishams in the sun room, and I picked The Street Lawyer, about a big-firm associate who leaves his swanky, empty life to practice “street law” at a clinic that represents homeless clients. Despite repeatedly saying to myself “am I really going to read this” a handful of times in the opening, damn if Grisham didn’t suck me in.

I can’t tell if JG is using terrible language to convey the character’s bias or his own……BUT I CAN’T STOP READING

That said, I doubt I’ll finish it before the new year. Too many fun things planned, including parties, classic movies, and assembling a “Grand View Mansion” that’s taller than the three year old.

I hope every one of you has a fantastic reading year behind you and another ahead!

Let me know if you’ve read any of these books or if you’ve got something I’ve gotta read in 2025!

Also, I read shockingly few murder mysteries, so I didn’t get to use this amazing gif:

(Actually, it applies to She Started It, which is chock-full of motive.)