2019 Year In Books

I realise that it's not quite the end of the year (being at the beginning of December) but quite frankly I'm not sure today is going to be my day. I can feel the migraine coming on through my neck and it's been an all around fucker of a morning. My jeans ripped, I didn't sleep well and I dropped an eye shadow palette all over my carpeted floor. 

So I decided to do something less intensive (mentally) than a book review. 

So I thought instead I'd discuss my yearly reading goal, which I kept tract of on Goodreads, which books I'm currently reading and which books I've just finished. Thrilling stuff! 

I had originally started the year with a goal of keeping track of the diversity (race, gender, country of origin) of my books, age level, when published and by whom it was published. I did that for about a month and gave it up. I can't even say it's because I have a crazy life, I just forgot. Also, I realised I need to up my excel level...it was harder than I thought to create or even modify a bookish spreadsheet to my want. Yikes. 

So whatever, lets start with Goodreads. I ended up using the website for the fifth year in the row to track my reading challenge. This year I lowered my numbers to 200 books read. As much I as I love the library, I eschewed it in order to make a huge dent in my books at home. I took them all out of the bookshelves a year and a half ago to determine (the slowest Konmari ever) if I wanted to keep them. I've managed to donate and sell quite a few books I don't wish to keep anymore and am only keeping the books that bring me "joy" (3.5*+). I figured anything that was read beyond the 200 was just gravy. The years before I read 250 or 260 books so this has been an easier year for me. 

I had planned to tackle some thicker books but I keep having slumps so I didn't get to as many thicker books as I had wanted. I also looked at my "year in books" to get the numbers crunched (as of today). I did read/re-read some doozys, including Homer's Iliad, Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, and Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I also read some newer books (Peter Ritchie's Where No Shadows Fall) and some older books (Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim). Some of my most new exciting reads (at least to me) was Skip Hollandsworth's The Midnight Assassin, Liz Nugent's Lying In Wait, and Darren O'Sullivan's Closer Than You Think. 

I just finished four books over the holiday (strangely productive considering): 

1. Sandra Brown's Outfox, which I'll probably do a post on eventually. Brown tends to either enrage me or enrapture me (she did both with this book) because she dabbles in writing unlikable characters. I think she must be good because I keep picking up her books. This one had conversations that were a bit overwrought but was otherwise easy to read. 
2. Agatha Christie's ABC Murders, this is a Hercule Poirot mystery and I bought the special edition to match my Murder on the Orient Express version that I picked up in Hatchards. I wasn't expecting to like it at all because I don't enjoy cozy mysteries at all (even though I love the TV/movie variations of Christie's works). This was slightly different from the genre I think. I actually really liked this book and read it in a day never sure who the murderer was. It is heavy on the conversation but still plenty of action to move it forward. 
3. Karen Harper's Inferno, which is about a bush pilot, a serial arsonist, and an arson squad investigator. It's pretty action packed and I was interested in the first 25% for sure but then it started getting a bit too much (kidnappings, murder, secret identities, long-long history with other characters, a romance love angle, dealing with the death of a husband...who might have been murdered by the arsonist etc.) and I started to loose interest. I power-read/skimmed to the end. 
4. J.K. Rowling/Matthew Fitt's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone/Stane (Scot's Edition) was the last book I read. I've read the Harry Potter books numerous times so this was a faster read. It's written in the Scot's language which was a joy in itself (having lived there). It's an actual dialect spoken by many in Scotland and not always understandable to tourists. I don't know if Fitt is planning on translating the rest of the series, but if he does I'll be picking them up. 

I'm currently reading five books mainly. I tend to read multiple books at once, especially if one is hard to read or depressing. For the most part I switch between and put up/pick up easily. I fully realise this is probably odd. Two are re-reads (also part of a series). 
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1. Well Met by Jen DeLuca, this is a contemporary romance which I'm reading while my computer boots up or over breakfast. It takes place over the summer during a Renaissance Faire. I'm on chapter eight (about 30% through) and so far it's super cute. DeLuca has hinted at some darker things (a bad breakup for the main character, Emily, as well as family loss for the other main, Simon) but I think it's mostly a story about finding happiness (it is a romance). I'm slowly dipping my toe into contemporary romances and this might be my third or fourth but so far I like it more than the others. 
2. Tami Hoag's Night Sins is a re-read for me. It's been awhile since I've re-read it though and I cannot remember the ending that well or most of the characters. What's jarring for me (and making the process slower) is the amount of hostility around one of the main characters (a female state police officer) who is breaking into the male dominated field. Even her love interest (the local sheriff) is barely a step above a troll at times. It was published in 1996, which in my head was like..four years ago but in reality is like...twenty+. Oh god. I mean The Troubles were still on-going and I was in elementary school I think. So the landscape for male love interest has changed a bit (to be fair, Hoag's later writing reflects that change, at least to me) but yeah...she does seem to capture the hellscape of women entering the upper ranks of police forces nationwide. Also, to note, having watched a docu-series on the Oakland County Child Killers of the 1970s, this book has been a bit harder to get through. It's my "purse book" so to speak, and is with my for lunches and doctor appointments. 
3. Another re-read is Ann Stuart's Ice Blue, which is the third book in her series. It's set in Japan and California and follows an art curator and a character introduced in her second book. I tend to re-read this series a bunch (and even have it on audiobooks). I started it when I needed breaks from Hoag's book (which deals with child kidnapping and possibly murder). Having read it so much it's an easy read for me. I liked that the male character is Japanese as publishing houses don't always look at diversity in the romance world as a positive. 
4. Ethan Brown's Murder in the Bayou was a book I picked up after watching the docu-series (video link) and deep dive on Reddit's mysteries boards. I have to be honest, it's quite good but it's a hard book to read and the case itself is hard to know about. It's a true story about at least eight women in Jefferson Davis Parish (I know) who were murdered in a short span of time. The FBI came down and determined it wasn't a serial killer at all because of the connections between the victims. Investigative reporters (including local and national) determined that there was a high probability of police misconduct, drug trade, and mishandling of evidence. I actually started Well Met in the middle of Brown's book because I needed a foil. Brown also wrote a book called Shake The Devil Off, which I do want to read but I know it's going to be rough. 
5. Promise Not To Tell by Jayne Ann Krentz was what I started a last night and so far it's going well. It's a long book (for a mass market paperback, 400 pages!) but I picked it up because the main character is a art gallery owner and I enjoy my artsy-fartsy in other books. So far one woman has died (an artist repped by the gallery) and the gallery owner comes to a private investigation agency to determine if it was murder or suicide. There's also a cult (that the investigator, the gallery owner and the artist) that could be linked so it might be interesting. Krentz wrote the 1930s mysteries I read earlier this year (under the name Amanda Quick) which I liked well enough but figured I'd read through my library. So far I'm enjoying her contemporary books more than her historical books. This is the second book in a trilogy and so far it's okay that I jumped in the middle. 

Not to go all in on Harry Potter in Scots (I'm going all in) but here are three videos below, two with excerpts (with actual Scots language being spoken) and the third a more in depth look at the book. Harry Potter has been translated into several languages which is so cool as you can read it while learning a new language. A written excerpt from Chapter One, or truly, Chaipter Ane, can be found on Itcy Coo.