Books Read in December 2024, Plus Stats for the Year

 

December was a good reading month and three of my reads were Christmas books. I included some notes on my reading in 2024 at the end of this post. 

Here is my list of books read:

Fiction

Tom Lake (2023) by Ann Patchett

This was a very good book and an enjoyable read. Basically it is the story of a woman telling her daughters about a summer love affair she had with a famous actor before she married their father. The daughters are in their twenties and all of them are living with their parents because of the pandemic. I like books about families and relationships. From beginning to end I was absorbed in this story.

A Redbird Christmas (2004) by Fannie Flagg

This book is set in Alabama, my home state, in a small town near Mobile. I could not quite figure out what time it is set in, sometime after World War II, but I don't think it really matters. Oswald T. Campbell lives in Chicago but he is very ill, has emphysema, and his doctor says he will have to move to a milder climate if he wants to live much longer. So he finds a place to live in a tiny town in Lost River, Alabama. I have never read anything by Fannie Flagg, but Kathy at Reading Matters recommended this book and December was a great time to read it. It is a Christmas book, but it is about so much more, and it was a wonderful read.

Gothic Horror

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) by Shirley Jackson

This is a classic gothic / mystery or horror story. I had put off reading this for years but the story was not nearly as scary or tense as I expected it to be. There was a sense of foreboding and waiting for something horrible to happen. The beauty of the story was in the way Jackson very slowly reveals small bits of the plot. My review here.

Fantasy

The Wood at Midwinter (2024) by Susanna Clarke

This is a fantasy story about a young woman, Merowdis, who loves animals and nature. She has many dogs and many cats, and a pig, plus other assorted animals. She prefers to spend her time in the woods alone, and she has a sister, Ysolde, who understands her and aids and abets her in her escapes to the woods. The rest of her family wants her to marry and be normal. My review here.

Crime Fiction

Elegy for April (2010) by Benjamin Black

Benjamin Black is a pseudonym used by John Banville. This is the third book in the Quirke series; I read the second book, The Silver Swan, earlier this year. The series is set in Ireland in the 1950s; Quirke is a pathologist in a hospital and gets involves with crimes or possible crimes often. I like the slow pace of the writing and the emphasis on the characters as much or more than the crime investigation. I will be reading the next book, A Death in Summer, in 2025.

The Unfortunate Englishman (2016) by John Lawton

I have been a fan of John Lawton's writing for years. His Inspector Frederick Troy series consists of eight novels published between 1995 and 2017. Those novels are a mix of police procedural and espionage, and are set between 1934 and 1963, with many of them covering multiple timelines. The Unfortunate Englishman is the second novel in the Joe Wilderness series. That series (so far) has focused on English / Russian / German relations in Berlin following World War II. The books in this series are really good spy fiction, but also complex and confusing. I love the focus on Berlin and the wall. You really have to read the first and second books in the series; this one doesn't stand well alone.

Mom Meets Her Maker (1990) by James Yaffe

Between 1988 and 1992, Yaffe wrote four mystery novels about Dave and his Mom. Mom Meets Her Maker is the 2nd of the four novels. Dave is an investigator for the Public Defender's office in a small town in Colorado. The book is set at Christmas, and it was the perfect read for me at this time of year. My review here.

A Bird in the Hand (1986) by Ann Cleeves 

As far as I can tell, A Bird in the Hand was Cleeves' first novel and the first book in the George and Molly Palmer-Jones series. Because I knew that it was focused on birdwatching and birders, I have been looking for a copy to read for years. George is the amateur sleuth. He has retired from the Home Office, which gives him some credibility and access to some records when he needs them. He is a "twitcher," a birder who travels to various parts of the English countryside, following reports of rare birds as they show up. His wife Molly is not that interested in birds but she enjoys the chase. Before retiring she worked as a social worker. The book is not as good as Cleeves' later books, but satisfied me in every way. I liked the characters, the setting, and the birdwatching.

End of Year notes

I read 89 books in 2024. That is very close to the number I read last year. The longest book I read was 834 pages:  The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. The average number of pages for the books I read was 302, which was about the same as last year. 

• Of the 89 books I read, 68 books were from my TBR pile, which surpassed my goal of 48 books. I will continue to aim at 48 books from my TBR in 2024. 
• I read less mysteries than last year, 48 as compared to 65 in 2023. Seven of the mysteries were espionage novels, and I enjoyed all of those. Eight of the mysteries were published before 1960.
• I read eight nonfiction books. Two were books about books, two were memoirs, and one was a travel/adventure book.
• I read eight books in the science fiction or fantasy genres, so I did better in that area than I thought I would. Three of those books were about time travel.
• I read 15 novels that I categorize as general fiction. And four short story books. 

The photos above and at the top of the post are from a couple of photo excursions. The bird was at the Santa Barbara Zoo, but we don't know the location of the other two photos. Click on the images for the best viewing quality.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Shirley Jackson

 

This is the first paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It establishes the narrator and tells us a good bit about her. 

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

I think this type of book is best experienced when you know little about it, and I enjoyed going into it that way. Although I might have read it sooner if I had read more reviews. Thus my description and comments will be brief. 

As this short novel starts, Mary Katherine (also known as Merricat) lives with her older sister, Constance, and her Uncle Julian in a very large but run down house. The reader learns shortly that everyone else in the family died from poisoning when eating a meal. For several years after the poisoning, Merricat was the only one who left the house. She would walk to the nearby village twice a week to do the shopping and get books from the library. Constance never left the house, and Uncle Julian was confined to a wheel chair.

 

My goal in reading this book was to read a Gothic novel, since I don't go for that genre much, and to read more by Shirley Jackson. Up to now I have only read a few of her short stories.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. This story was not nearly as scary or tense as I expected it to be. There was a sense of foreboding and waiting for something horrible to happen. 

I liked Merricat's narration, and the depiction of their lives before and after the rest of the family died. I liked the way the ending was handled. The beauty of the story was in the way Jackson very slowly reveals small bits of the plot.

 -----------------------------

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2006 (orig. pub. 1962).
Length:    146 pages
Format:    Trade Paperback
Setting:    Vermont, US
Genre:     Gothic, Classic
Source:    I purchased this book in 2017.

Short Story Wednesday: Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson

 

Dark Tales includes 17 stories by Shirley Jackson. Most of them are fairly short, between 5 to 12 pages. One is 24 pages long, another is 18 pages. 

For years I have avoided Jackson's stories and novels because she is known for writing scary or unsettling stories. I should not have worried; these stories did not scare me and most of them were not that unsettling . 

I had read the first story in the book before I purchased it. Patti blogged about "The Possibility of Evil" at her blog, Pattinase. It is available to read online. Reading that story gave me the confidence to try more stories by Jackson.

On the back cover of my Penguin paperback edition, there is this description:

For the first time in one volume, a collection of Shirley Jackson’s scariest stories, with a foreword by PEN/Hemingway Award winner Ottessa Moshfegh.

I have now read the first eight stories in the book. I did not find any of them to be scary; some were spooky, some were unsettling in a good way, and some were puzzling. All were strange.  

Maybe I will find some scary ones in the next nine stories, but I will be just as happy if I don't.

The other seven stories I read were:

"Louisa, Please Come Home"

This was my favorite of this batch of stories. Louisa wants to get away from her family and successfully escapes to a town not too far away. Every year on the anniversary of the day she left, her mother puts out a message on a radio news broadcast to ask Louisa to come home.

"Paranoia"

I liked this story. The title is apt. A man is having problems getting home in time to take his wife out for dinner. The ending was surprising.

"The Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith"

This story was a good read but in the end I would have liked some more clarity. Sometimes I am okay with an ending that leaves you hanging; sometimes not.

"The Story We Used to Tell"

For me, this was the spookiest story. It did not scare me or impress me initially but I kept thinking about it afterwards. 

"The Sorcerer's Apprentice"

This was another good read. It was about a mean little girl, almost devilish, who torments a woman who lives in the same apartment building. But in the end it did not go anywhere and I was frustrated. More than one reviewer said that they did not get it.

"Jack the Ripper"

As you can tell from the title, this is a Jack the Ripper story. It was very short and I did not understand it.

"The Beautiful Stranger"

This one is about a young wife with two children who meets her husband at the train station. He looks like her husband but she is convinced that he is not her husband. Another one I did not understand, and it was unsettling. 

I look forward to reading the remainder of the stories in this book.