A Year in Books – The Book Lovers’ Sanctuary

Welcome to a new year! May 2024 bring you all the happiness, joy, peace and of course health that you would wish for – whether you find that through reading, exercise, family, food or faith.

It has been a challenging year with its ups – a fantastic holiday to Rome, taking daughter and wife abroad for the first time in their lives – and some very significant downs. My dad is facing the last leg of terminal cancer and I have found it difficult to manage that especially as we live four hours away from them. It would be easier in many ways if we were able to do some of the day-to-day practical help but we can’t. Alongside that, my daughter’s autism has been triggered by starting new school – and by Christmas. The long week between school breaking up and actual Christmas was difficult for her. And work has been … hectic, culminating in an Ofsted Inspection just before Christmas…

In response to the challenges this year, I can see that my reading habits have adapted: cosy comfort reads seem to have come to the fore, and I have read fewer books in total. Partly that may have been due to my subscribing to Final Fantasy XIV as well… And I know I have slacked off on my book reviews this year.

And what was I reading as the new year rolled in this year?

You can see on the graph a promising start, January to April followed by a marked drop! Still, 46 books is not bad at all and I don’t every set myself targets or reading lists – there are too many of those at work! – so the 60 ‘target’ was a very rough guide. After all, having reading a couple of Claire Keegan’s books this year, size does not equate to quality – her novels (novellas?) are exquisite and incredibly brief and beautiful.

In 2022, I had read 59 books; 2021 was 56.

The graph does pretty much track with the challenges of the year: it was about April that my dad’s condition became more obviously terminal and his health started to decline noticeably.

According to my trusty spreadsheet, and Amazon’s page counts for its books, we can also look at the number of pages read this year and the totals are

• 17,238 pages in total in 2023
• 331 pages a week
• 47 pages a day

I will be blogging separately about my favourite books of 2023 so many on this list will feature on that post, but not necessarily all of them. A five star book may not actually become a favourite and I imagine I would cite Demon Copperhead as an example of that. It is without doubt an incredible book and phenomenally well written and crafted. I absolutely cannot find any fault in it and it wholly deserves 5 stars… and yet it was a trial (emotionally) to read and I do not see myself returning to it, nor am I inspired to catchup on Kingsolver’s back catalogue.

So, these are the books that on either my blog or spreadsheet I gave five stars to. Whilst I mocked the Booker Prize judges for dominating the shortlist with Irish writers and writers named Paul, this has been a good year for writers whose names begin with a K~!

• So Late in the Day, Claire Keegan
• Trespasses, Louise Kennedy
• Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
• Babel, R. F. Kuang
• The Bee Sting, Paul Murray
• The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe
• Impossible Creatures, Katherine Rundell

And what is a five star read…? That is a very subjective question and surely varies between reviewers. For me it is a book that contains something exceptional, something beyond the conventions of the genre, something important about the human condition… but which does not sacrifice the narrative to explore it. Something more than simple expertise or even enjoyment. I finally got around to reading The Lies of Locke Lamora this year and thoroughly enjoyed it and it is an exquisite piece of fantasy writing… but for me it doesn’t quite exceed expectations.

It’s interesting that there are significantly fewer five-star reads this year than in 2022… subjectively I have found myself uninspired by many of the bookish prize lists this year…

If I were to chose just one of these books to select as my pick of the year… it would be a tough choice but I would have to offer up the Claire Keegan – a short, powerful, evocative novella that will haunt – or perhaps keep me company – for a long time.

Although I am an avowed mood reader and do not have to-be-read lists as such, the Top Ten Tuesday meme does encourage us each season to at least consider the books we have available to read if not an active intention or ambition. So let’s consider just how strict I have been with meeting these lists. Spoiler alert: I have not been strict at all!

Spring

Books read: 8 out of 16, 50%

Books begun but not finished: 1/10

Books still keen to read:

Summer

Books read: 1 out of 10, 10%

Books still keen to read:

• Shy
• Tress of the Emerald Sea
• I Must Betray You
• Yellowface
• Witch King – although I want to finish the Murderbot Diaries first
• In The Lives of Puppets

Autumn

Books read: 3/10

• The Last Devil to Die
• So Late in the Day
• In Ascension

Books begun but not finished: 1/10

Books still keen to read:

• Silver Nitrate
• Our Share of Night
• The Land of Lost Things
• The Fraud

Winter

Books read (or reading): 3/10, 30%

Books still keen to read:

• Silver Nitrate
• The Land of Lost Things
• The Wolf Den

TBR Overview

So the total is 15 books read from 46 that is have had an interest in reading which is 32% – I did best in Spring, which coincides with the Women’s Prize Longlist being announced.

It also means that read 31 other books that never made it onto the tentative to-be-read lists on the blog!

I’m not entirely sure how legible those genre labels will be!

Literary fiction and contemporary fiction will always be well represented here because I do come from a literary background and I teach literature as well as following literary prizes. I can see that I have read more fantasy this year… perhaps again as a response to publishing trends, potentially as an escape from some of the pressures that the real world exerts on us all sometimes.

And obviously, having read a lot of fantasy, there will be a number of worlds that won’t track onto a nice map of the Earth. However, of those books set in the real world, the settings we explored this year look like this…

Representation of all of our lived experiences are so important and it is one of the crucial features of literature that it can open our eyes to the challenges and joys of lives other than our own just as much as its power to celebrate and validate seeing ourselves in stories.

I have focused on only a handful of those experiences, which is not in any way to denigrate or diminish or deny the myriad of other forms of humanity and personhood that exist and some of those chosen categories are very personal. Does having a daughter with a high degree of autism affect my sensitivity towards neurodiverse representation and coding in my reading? Does the experience of learning sign language with her in order to ameliorate the frustrations of her being non-verbal for five years predispose me to seeing it in my reading? Who wouldn’t?

In terms of authors I read, the gender divide is heavily biased towards female authors – perhaps as a result of my choosing to follow the Women’s Prize for Fiction, which I have always found a lot more inspiring and brave than the Booker Prize.

Turning to the blog itself, I have to confess that the statistics generated by WordPress look, frankly, very suspect at the moment. An end of year and a new year surge is not unexpected, but the visitor counts in the last three days of 2023 that went from tootling along at about 300 views a day – which I had been pretty chuffed with considering I was so behind on my reviews, to in excess of 3,000 on 30th December and surpassing 14,000 on New Year’s Eve stretches credibility!

That said, I’m taking it as a win and will absolutely be touting my new count of nearly 79,000 views in 2023, thank you very much, when seeking out ARCs and NetGalley’s offerings!

So cuurently, my stats look like this

which makes the first eleven months look a little paltry! Taking out the anomalous 2 days – where my About Me biography was viewed 14,000 times, but the most traffic the actual posts got was 53 views – the traffic looks like this

In addition to views, the subscribers to the blog have increased by 68, to 896 at the end of the year. It would be nice if I could break 1,000 next year – but it seems statistically unlikely!

And after reviewing the year, let’s look forward to 2024

Top Ten Tuesday

I still fully intend to keep up with the Top Ten Tuesday prompts into 2024: the prompts are lovely way of engaging with books, sometimes in novel and interesting ways, but more than that, the TTT community is lovely and supportive and friendly and a lovely play to hang out!

Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Themes include           

• January 2: Favorite Books of 2023
• January 9: Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the First Half of 2024
• January 16: Bookish Goals for 2024
• January 23: Books I Meant to Read in 2023 but Didn’t Get To
• January 30: New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023

and I have tried hard not replicate exactly those themes on this post.

Blog

I really do want to return to the blog properly, keeping up with book reviews and catching up with older missed ones.

NetGalley

And finally, I would like to make better use of NetGalley in 2024 – not simply because it lets me enjoy great books early, but because it is a service to authors as well. My current rating is pretty good at 94% but I know I am not using it as much as I could

I’d like to post a review a week, as well as the TTT posts, but life does have a habit of intruding at times!