A Year of Books

I realize I have not written much over the break, and in part, it is due to the fact that I have come down with some random unnamable illness and part because I just needed to vegetate for a while. Now I find myself barreling towards the end of the calendar year and am in that “reviewing” type mode. One of the biggest changes that 2023 brought on is the fact that I read more books this year than I have ever read in a single year… or honestly over the course of several years. While I love books and love everything that there is about a bookstore… specifically the smell of moldering print… I was pretty reliably a “two to five books per year” type person. When something really caught my fancy I would grind through all of the books available in a specific series, but for the most part I picked at books rather than devoured them. My wife was the opposite… and all the time I spent playing the latest MMORPG or ARPG she was curled up on the sofa shotgunning books directly into her brain one after another.

What changed you might ask? Well, this transformation was in large part due to a little thing called the Libby App. It isn’t like my wife and I have not had library cards before… we both spent a large chunk of our adolescence in libraries as they were generally safe places for nerds kind. It was around this time last year that we got our first of many new library cards, and around this time I connected it to the Libby App for the first time. Over the years I have transitioned from reading physical books to reading almost entirely digital books for sheer convenience, and about a decade ago I tried this whole nonsense and found the entire process of getting ebooks from the library to be immensely fiddly. It left a sour taste in my mouth, but apparently, Libby formerly known as Overdrive has come along and smoothed out the rough bits allowing you to link your library card and have it automagically integrate with your eBook reader of choice.

One of the most important lessons that we learned was that different Library systems have different licenses for ebooks and audiobooks. So by going to some nearby communities, we were able to pick up library cards from three different systems… in our state, there is only one other major system and we hope to road trip to get a library card with it soon as well. Between these three systems, it has given us a broad reach of titles and the ability to mitigate some of the hold queues in favor of the shortest. Of the fifty-one books that I have consumed this year, I would say probably 10 were reading the books… and the majority were books that I consumed in audiobook form. My happy place is grinding away in an MMORPG or ARPG while listening to a book and I can legitimately do this for hours at a time.

When it comes to buying audiobooks… I’ve landed on a site called AudioBooksNow. Audible mostly feels like a monopoly and it is way the hell too expensive for most things. Sure Audible has a whole subscription service that supposedly gives you access to lots of content for one “low low price” but I have yet to find a single thing on it that I wanted to read when I wanted to read it. To be fair… we’ve had the same problem with Kindle Unlimited as a concept. I have no clue how this site charges so much less, but I am not going to ask too many questions because based on my research ahead of time they do in fact seem legitimate and well-reviewed. I think at this point I have bought four books and the majority of those were brand new releases that had 40 or so week hold backlogs in the library system. The majority of everything I have consumed comes from three of the four major library systems in my state.

I’ve been using Bookwyrm.social to track my progress this year. Honestly, I am really happy that I had the foresight to set up an account and start using it at the beginning of last year. Since every service seems to have a “year in review” functionality, I should not be shocked that Bookwyrm recently patched one in. If you are so inclined you can check out my year in review here. Largely at the beginning of last year, I set a target of 20 books, and last of last night I finished my 51st for the year blowing that goal out of the water significantly. I think I will probably set forty books as my goal for 2024 because while I am not from the tribe of “line must always go up”, I do think that maybe twenty was a bit low. I started my first book of the year on December 26th and it took me until January 8th to finish it. These days it takes me around two days per book pending I don’t get terribly derailed.

I would say probably my favorite books of the year are the “Viv” series from Travis Baldree first Legends and Lattes technically released last year, and then Bookshops and Bonedust which came out in November of this year. One of the things that I am learning about myself as I venture forth into books that are recommended to me by friends… is that I seem to really care about the characters more than the setting or the story. I love all of the characters in these books and would fight to protect them all. Mostly they arrived at the right time for me when I had just finished what I would term a “heavy read” and were lite and fun entertainment. I’ve tried to hold specific books in reserve like Scalzi’s Starter Villain for example as something that I knew I would enjoy as something I could effortlessly dive into after finishing more serious fare.

I think the book series that I am the most conflicted over is “The Craft Sequence” by Max Gladstone. I enjoyed the totality of this series… but I gotta say that there were some weak spots. You can tell that the entire sequence was planned ahead of time as the first several books introduce you to characters in almost “stand-alone” stories, that eventually weave their way back into the main story arc of the world with book four… which is technically chronologically the first book… and book five which brings everything together. Book six… feels like it should be starting a new sequence but just lands somewhat flat serving mostly as a way of giving a complete story arc to one of the main characters from book three. Three Parts Dead was phenomenal… Four Roads Cross… also phenomenal. Two Serpents Rise and Full Fathom Five were a bit middling… and then Last First Snow and Ruin of Angels I appreciate for the pieces of story that they give… but I didn’t super enjoy large chunks of both books. There is a new series centered on the best character… Tara Abernathy… and I am certain that before 2024 is up I will have given it a shot. Mostly I find myself conflicted because while I enjoyed myself, I am not entirely certain I would recommend the series heavily to others.

As we enter the next year… the book that I am probably looking forward to the most is Alecto the Ninth. This is the fourth part of quite possibly the strangest book series I have ever read The Locked Tomb. Every book has been wildly different than the previous books and I am mostly on board just to see where the hell this is going to go in the end. I am also really looking forward to The Relentless Legion by J.S. Dewes the third book in The Divide Series but there is no real tentative information on when it might drop. Another book series that I am anxiously waiting on is Apostles of Mercy the third book in the Noumena series by Lindsay Ellis which got delayed from a late 2023 release to a mid-2024 one. This similarly is a series that has had high points and low points but I am very much here for the journey. I’ve very recently become obsessed with the Alchemical Journeys series by Seanan McGuire and will be looking forward to reading Tidal Creatures when it also drops in mid-2024. I am also interested in whatever the next book in the Dresden Files series ends up being, but I gotta say after 17 books it does not feel anywhere near as fresh as it once did.

As I look forward to 2024, I am looking forward to as many adventures in books as I had this year. What books are you yourself looking forward to? Drop me a line below.