Slow month! It’s partially because as the end of the year approaches, I tend to not finish books. I think I was reading five on 12/31? Then I finished four of them on 1/1. Logging things on Goodreads caused this situation. I like to have credit for reading the books in the same year I read the books.
Young Adult
*The Bletchley Riddle by Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin The Meadowbrook Murders by Jessica Goodman
Grownup Fiction
Shadow Child by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto North Woods by Daniel Mason
Young Nonfiction
*Homebody by Theo Parish
Grownup Nonfiction
Green Money: How to Reduce Waste, Build Wealth, and Create a Better Future for Allby Kara Perez 488 Rules for Life by Kitty Flanagan
My Year in Books
Goodreads reports that I read 224 books in 2024. They also reported that my top-read categories were picture and middle grade books. This is directly due to the focus of librarian book group this past year as one of our members was on notables. I’m hoping to read more grownup fiction in 2025.
*Noodles on a Bicycle by Kyo Maclear and Gracey Zhang *We Who Produce Pearls: An Anthem for Asian America by Joanna Ho and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya *Built to Last by Minh Lê and Dan Santat *Mama in the Moon by Doreen Cronin and Brian Cronin *My Daddy Is a Cowboy: A Picture Book by Stephanie Seales and C. G. Esperanza
*The First Week of School by Drew Beckmeyer
To me, this felt like a subpar self-published Kindle book. But the rest of book group really enjoyed it.
Middle Grade
*How It All Ends by Emma Hunsinger *Island of Whispers by Frances Hardinge and Emily Gravett *Quagmire Tiarello Couldn’t Be Better by Mylisa Larsen *Tree. Table. Book. by Lois Lowry *Puzzled: A Memoir about Growing Up with OCD by Pan Cooke
*The Secret Library by Kekla Magoon
This was great escapist reading after November 5. It’s also a sneaky historical fiction.
Young Adult
*Pearl by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie *Libertad by Bessie Flores Zaldivar *The Forbidden Book by Sacha Lamb
*When the World Tips Over by Jandy Nelson
Alas, slog city. And I was looking forward to it.
Young Nonfiction
*Thomas Jefferson’s Battle for Science: Bias, Truth, and a Mighty Moose! by Beth Anderson and Jeremy Holmes *Side Quest: A Visual History of Roleplaying Games by Samuel Sattin and Steenz *Narwhal: Unicorn of the Arctic by Candace Fleming and Deena So’Oteh
Grownup Fiction
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff The Whalebone Theatre by Joanna Quinn The Girl On Legare Street by Karen White
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
The thing I want to gush about is a spoiler, so I won’t. But know that I am gushing!
Hiroshima in the Morning by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
I found this through Pearl, by Sherri L. Smith and Christine Norrie. It’s an engrossing memoir of time spent in a foreign environment, strain on a marriage, and choices the USA made in the early 2000s.
Skin & Bones by Renée Watson
Watson crams so much into this novel. And yet it never feels crammed.
Grownup Nonfiction
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling
One Week in January: New Paintings for an Old Diary by Carson Ellis
This is a very niche book, but I’m the niche, so I loved it. Like Ellis, I also moved to Portland in the early 2000s. Like Ellis, I made friends, ate bagels, and did things. It was fun to notice the subtle nuances that her eight days of journal entries caught, like checking your email and being disappointed when there wasn’t any.
This is a great time capsule view of being mostly unencumbered, creative, and looking for a place in the world.
I really loved this book. It was one of my favorites of the year. But this particular copy had a fun surprise.
At one point, Lena, the main character is at church, and a guest preacher explicitly says that if a woman wants a man, she needs to shape up and have a thin body. And a previous reader wasn’t having it.
There was one more comment.
Thanks, previous reader, for leaving your comments (on post-it notes). I left them there for the next reader to find and enjoy.
How did the Muslim ban affect individual U.S. Citizens? This book answers the question in an interesting and enlightening way. Alas, though, the poetry depended often on words f a l l i n g down the page, and the use of dramatic spacing.
Both of which felt cliched to this reader. None of the poems stood out, and I was left wondering why this novel in verse didn’t abandon the verse and write the interesting story it was telling in prose.
Young Adult
Dead Things Are Closer than They Appear by Robin Wasley *Everything We Never Had by Randy Ribay *Not Like Other Girls by Meredith Adamo *Twenty-Four Seconds from Now… by Jason Reynolds *How the Boogeyman Became a Poet by Tony Keith *The Unboxing of a Black Girl by Angela Shanté
Pick the Lock by A.S. King
One of my peccadillos is that I cringe when story-created song lyrics are present. And this is stuffed with story-created song lyrics. It was a rough go for me, but the book had an interesting way into how domestic violence affects families.
Red in Tooth and Claw by Lish McBride
Lish McBride does her thing (fantasy that doesn’t bug me, found family), but it’s a Western! What can she not do?
Grownup Fiction
The House on Tradd Street by Karen White
I picked a book by Karen White off the shelf at my library, and by page 25, I realized that the book I was reading was one from later on in a series. I put it down and put a hold on this book, the first in the series.
There were a few things I didn’t love like the cliche of the main character subsisting on sugar and remaining slim and the love interest grabbing the main character’s arm to get her to stay and listen to him. (Not okay! Not only that, but later in the book, he hit another character in the jaw for doing the exact same thing.).
But this managed to hit the sweet spot of having ghosts but not being too scary. As someone who loves ghost stories but doesn’t want them to haunt her dreams, I will be checking out the second in the series.
p.s. The book I initially started reading was the seventh in the series! Seventh!
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
The book that has forever changed my use of the phrase “verbal communication.”
*Time to Make Art by Jeff Mack *The Spaceman by Randy Cecil
Middle Grade
*Not Nothing by Gayle Forman *Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
Young Adult
*Ash’s Cabin by Jen Wang Geek Girl by Holly Smale We Can’t Keep Meeting Like This by Rachel Lynn Solomon
Grownup Fiction
Lizzie & Dante by Mary Bly Between Two Strangers by Kate White Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell Pioneer Girl by Bich Minh Nguyen The Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams
The Bridesmaids Union by Jonathan Vatner
Vatner’s Carnegie Hill charmed me by being about self-involved rich people, but also incredibly relatable. I was less charmed by the Bridesmaids Union because the main character really needed to say no. And she didn’t. Repeatedly. So the novel could happen, I guess?
I’m also quite happy that my era of attending weddings was much more low key than the one this book depicts.
That Summer by Jennifer Weiner
Weiner finds an interesting and multilevel way into #MeToo.
Grownup Nonfiction
The Art of Ruth E. Carter: Costuming Black History and the Afrofuture, from Do the Right Thing to Black Panther by Ruth E. Carter
Young Nonfiction
*Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States by J. Albert Mann
*Let’s Go! by Julie Flett *Ursula Upside Down by Corey R. Tabor *Just Like Millie by Lauren Castillo *Aloha Everything by Kaylin Melia George and Mae Waite
Middle Grade
*The Night War by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley *Plain Jane and the Mermaid by Vera Brosgol *With Just One Wing by Brenda Woods *A Little Bit Super: With Small Powers Come Big Problems by Leah Henderson and Gary D. Schmidt
Young Adult
All These Things I’ve Done by Gabrielle Zevin *The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag The Chandler Legacies by Abdi Nazemian Because It Is My Blood by Gabrielle Zevin In the Age of Love and Chocolateby Gabrielle Zevin Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac by Gabrielle Zevin
Grownup Fiction
Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau The Hunter by Tana French The Searcher by Tana French The Hole We’re In by Gabrielle Zevin Stand Your Ground by Victoria Christopher Murray The Mitford Affair by Marie Benedict Margarettown by Gabrielle Zevin
Carnegie Hill by Jonathan Vatner
Considering this books was populated with a bunch of rich people who want for little and are kind of spoiled, this was a surprisingly compelling novel. Kudos to Vatner for sketching a guy who could have been odious with a lot of nuance.
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison
Don’t let the exclamation point fool you. This is an overall downer of a book.
Young Nonfiction
*The Bard and the Book: How the First Folio Saved the Plays of William Shakespeare from Oblivion by Ann Bausum and Marta Sevilla
Grownup Nonfiction
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
Recommended reading: the three chapters where West chronicles her loss of love of stand-up comedy.
Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity by Peter Attia and Bill Gifford
*Born Naughty: My Childhood in China by Jin Wang, Tony Johnston, and Anisi Baigude
Young Adult
*Break to You by Neal Shusterman, Debra Young, and Michelle Knowlden Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin
Grownup Fiction
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin The Measure by Nikki Erlick But How Are You, Really by Ella Dawson Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton Honey by Isabel Banta A Winter in New York by Josie Silver Need Blind Ambition by Kevin T. Myers The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra
Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner
With a decades-spanning plot and two instances where I gasped “No!” this was pretty much my perfect read.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Sometimes the dial on historical fiction is turned too much to the side where we establish scene by naming songs and describing clothes and hairstyles. That was the case here. While Frankie’s story resonated with me, I kept getting pulled out of it by too many historical details that didn’t add anything to the plot.
Young Nonfiction
*Rising from the Ashes: Los Angeles, 1992. Edward Jae Song Lee, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King, and a City on Fire by Paula Yoo
Grownup Nonfiction
The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
Being the reader I was and am, I made sure to stock my growing-up trunk with important books from my childhood and adolescence. In no particular order:
I was given this Little House set when I was still a baby, so I got the yellow box edition. My friends who had their own set usually had the blue box edition. I liked the yellow one better. But then the next iteration was a nice gingham theme. I would have gone for that one too.
You can see that these books were read many times. First they were read to me, then I read them on my own, then I read them every summer. Sometimes I started at the end and ended at Little House in the Big Woods. When that happened, Mary regained her sight, rather than lost it.
My friend Cindy had a tiny book called the Paper Bag Princess, and I loved it so much (despite being in high school and thus “too old” for it) that she made me my own copy one Christmas.
She had fun adding the commentary on the back, which she adapted from actual blurbs on books in her possession. “Now a spectacular film from Orion!!” cracks me up.
My favorite Little Golden Book to read at my Grandparents’ house. It was originally my Aunt Carol’s book, and the paper dolls aspects had been lost years before I found it. I looked for my own copy for years before finding one in the toy store in Seaside during this trip. I did not include the book in my chronicle of the trip, and I have no idea why as it had been a decades-long quest. Anyhow, this was the original one.
Oh, Alice. This book, so many feelings. It was fun to listen to the series of episodes the podcast “You’re Wrong About” did, starting with Go Ask Alice Part 1. I also read Rick Emerson’s Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries, so it’s been a big year for Go Ask Alice.
This might have been my entry into Chris Crutcher. I loved how the descriptions of cross country running made me want to be a runner.
I read a lot of Cynthia Voigt, but these two made the cut. This is a loose sequel to Jackaroo, and I didn’t know how to pronounce the main character’s name Birle, so I stopped in a jewelry store in the mall and asked. Because we didn’t have the internet to pronounce things for us back then.
And here’s Jackaroo. My historical fiction preferences are quite clear.
When I watched the film The Princess Bride I had no idea there was a book! When I found this, I loved it so much I read it aloud to my family.
Fannie Flagg was a favorite author once the movie version Fried Green Tomatoes was released, and I read the book. But the description of the Miss America pageant in this book was hilarious, so I went with Daisy Fay over Fried Green Tomatoes.
Who the heck wouldn’t count the Outsiders as an important book from their youth? Probably kids now, as I’ve recently reread it and found it a bit stiff. But I sure loved it then. I also like this cover. It’s very of its time.
This is the book in my collection I find most cringeworthy. I really, really, really liked it though when it was released. At least my bodice ripper entry has a classy cover on it.
Here’s the book that probably no one has heard of. I loved the New York City immigrant 1940s experience. And it was also really sad. This one, I’m holding onto. Will I read it again? Maaaaaayyybeeee? What if it’s not that good?
A book I always thought of as a good companion to this one, though contemporary, was Walk Through Cold Fire by Cin Forshay-Lunsford. It’s too bad I didn’t track down a copy for the trunk as they seem to be scarce. There are currently three copies available on Thriftbooks and the prices range from $112 to $129. I’ll keep my eye peeled for it to turn up somewhere for a normal price.
I was a huge fan of The Secret Garden, but A Little Princess has always been my favorite Frances Hodgson Burnett book. And one MUST read the version with Tasha Tudor illustrations.
More historical fiction. This one took place in Hungary, pre-WWI.
And this sequel took place during the war. I’m pretty sure my mother read these as a child, and thus they came into my life. Good choices.
And another classic. I read this book several times, both as assignment and on my own.
And that’s the tour of my books. I hadn’t realized how few would be contemporary. Really just Running Loose. I’m a diehard historical fiction fan and have been since I was a child.
*Shark Teethby Sherri Winston *Mid-Air by Alicia D. Williams *Across So Many Seas by Ruth Behar
*Next Stop by Debbie Fong
I wouldn’t mind going on this kind of tour.
Young Adult
The Atlas of Us by Kristin Dwyer
The Breakup Lists by Adib Khorram
Where is Jackson finding so many t-shirts with tags in them? My shirts have had the tag info screen printed in them for years.
Grownup Fiction
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer The First Ladies by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray Delilah Green Doesn’t Careby Ashley Herring Blake
Hello Stranger by Katherine Center
Face blindness was a thing in YA literature a few years ago. In a standard grownup romance novel, it makes for an interesting plot. The villain was a little too uniformly evil, though.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Somewhat of a difficult read due to the everyday sexism, but also very entertaining in the rejection of that sexism.
I tried hitting my eggs with a knife rather than cracking them on the counter or the bowl and found it a good technique.
Little Free Library find.
Grownup Nonfiction
Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments by Gary Taubes Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution: The Complete Guide to Achieving Normal Blood Sugars by Richard K. Bernstein Sugarless: A 7-Step Plan to Uncover Hidden Sugars, Curb Your Cravings, and Conquer Your Addiction by Nicole M. Avena (strangely not listed on Goodreads…) Keto QuickStart A Beginner’s Guide to A Whole-foods Ketogenic Diet by Diane Sanfilippo
*Ahoy! by Sophie Blackall *The Last Zookeeper by Aaron Becker
Middle Grade
*Kyra, Just for Today by Sara Zarr
No matter the protagonist, Sara Zarr writes them so you root for them and also want to give them a big hug. It was also interesting to see how holding together the household and being A+ in that category meant that she had trouble keeping up in school.
*The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly
Nice job writing about 1999 and providing a sci-fi twist. I love Entrada Kelly’s characterization.
*The Wrong Way Home by Kate O’Shaughnessy
It’s an age-appropriate book about a member of a cult! The story traces Fern’s attempts to get back to the cult, the place she has been the happiest, and also her evolving thoughts about life outside the cult. There’s also an idyllic California beach town and people who help Fern and her mother adjust to their new lives.
Young Adult
*Black Girl You Are Atlas by Renée Watson and Ekua Holmes *Icarus by K. Ancrum Wide Awake Now by David Levithan
Young Nonfiction
*American Wings: Chicago’s Pioneering Black Aviators and the Race for Equality in the Sky by Sherri L. Smith and Elizabeth Wein *My Antarctica: True Adventures in the Land of Mummified Seals, Space Robots, and So Much More by G. Neri and Corban Wilkin
Grownup Fiction
Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang Chemistry by Weike Wang The Breakaway by Jennifer Weiner Weather Girl by Rachel Lynn Solomon
The Partner Track by Helen Wan
Hoo-boy do I dislike the law office culture on display in this novel. Wan kept me reading through my dislike with a well-formed main character to root for.
Grownup Nonfiction
The 2-Hour Job Search: Using Technology to Get the Right Job Faster by Steve Dalton
Breaks the scary task of networking down to efficient and manageable tasks.
The Job Closer: Time-Saving Techniques for Acing Resumes, Interviews, Negotiations, and More by Steve Dalton
The companion to the 2-Hour Job Search, this book also got me to stop obsessing over resumes (strive for error-free—no one really reads them all the way through) and cover letters (he gives a framework) and made updating my LinkedIn profile a breeze. He also discusses how to interview, how to negotiate, and how to get off to a great start at your new company.
Dalton’s two books are making my job search less of a herculean task.
Beyond Getting By: The Financial Diet’s Guide to Abundant and Intentional Living by Holly Trantham and Lauren Ver Hage
This wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I’m looking for a process to decide who to donate money to as well as something to help me understand the tradeoff of increasing my retirement contributions another percentage point annually given my current percentage.
While this didn’t meet my needs, it was full of good information and written in a breezy style. I suspect that the 32 hour workweek won’t be widely adopted in my working lifetime as it has at the Financial Diet, but it would be nice.
Rebel With A Clause: Tales and Tips from a Roving Grammarian by Ellen Jovin
A good book for the room in your house where you spend time intermittently and need something you can pick up and put down. The grammar information was good, and the writing about grammar was engaging, but I found eventually found repetitive setup of each vignette tedious. Her descriptions of the people visiting the grammar table were particularly annoying annoying after a while.
