HUNT COLUMN: My Annual Book Report

“Whew,” I said at 10:00 on New Year’s Eve, as I finished book number forty out of my goal  of forty for 2024. That was cutting it very close and making reading feel like a chore  (although I did actually enjoy the book and didn’t care to leave the house for a wild party  anyway).

An outspoken acquaintance and regular reader of this column said to me recently that I  read too much. “What? That’s crazy!” was my not-so-tactful response. “Well, you  shouldn’t be so worried about meeting some arbitrary goal,” he continued. “Read what you  want when you want. Don’t be in a contest with yourself.”

I do believe he has a point. Toward the end of the year, I didn’t pick up one of a few fat  books I’ve been looking forward to reading because I thought it would hinder my reaching  my goal. I picked up a couple of skinny ones instead.

As usual, however, I would like to share last year’s reading experiences, in the hope that  something might pique your interest or inspire you – because reading rules.

Not surprisingly, I returned to some of my perennially favorite authors: Erik Larson, Ann  Patchett, Ken Follett, Charles Frazier, Carol Goodman, Stephen Graham Jones, Dean  Koontz, Stephen King, Val McDermid, and Ruth Ware.

I wrote last year that I wanted to broaden my horizons from my usual realm of novels, and I  did manage to read three books of short stories, a memoir, a biography, and three more  works of non-fiction. 

I usually like to take on at least a few classics (or golden oldies) that I’ve never gotten to. In  2024 I read The Unvanquished by William Faulkner, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia  Highsmith, and a book of short stories by Shirley Jackson. (Although, in my opinion,  Jackson’s “The Lottery” is one of the best short stories ever written, I found this collection  to border on too weird for even me.)

Once again, the most-visited genre for me was the mystery novel. A welcome find was the  British crime/mystery writer Chris Whitaker. His newest book, All the Colors of the Dark, is  a hit right now and is definitely on my list for 2025. My dad introduced me to the Gabriel  Allon spy series by Daniel Silva, and he’s just recommended author S.J. Parris’s Giordano  Bruno Elizabethan historical thrillers; I’ve bought the first in the series and will start it soon. My mom is reading The Women by Kristin Hannah and I can’t wait to borrow it.

And now for the highs and lows of my reading year. I’m glad I read more non-fiction,  because my three top picks for 2024 come from that group: Trevor Noah’s memoir Born a

Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood; Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest: A Saga  of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War; and Jon Krakauer’s Under  the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. The novel I enjoyed the most was Ann  Patchett’s Tom Lake.

My lows would include reading three mysteries by three different authors that took place at  snowed-in mountain retreats where a killer is on the loose. They weren’t bad books individually, but I was feeling claustrophobic and frozen after all that. And the worst book I  managed to finish was the horror novel House by Ted Dekker and Frank Peretti, both well known, successful writers. Maybe they should just never collaborate again.

I’ve started 2025 with one of those big books I’d been putting off: Cloud Cuckoo Land by  Anthony Doerr, the author of All the Light We Cannot See. The latter is a wonderful book,  and “Cuckoo” is proving likewise. Happy reading!

This post was originally published on here