Some years ago I started creating “Game Tools” pages for the games that I care an awful lot about. These were partially simply a way of collating the links and resources that I was using while playing said game in an easy-to-find format so that I could jump to it whenever I returned to a game. The problem with bouncing between games is that my aging mind can’t always remember the tools that I utilized when I last played that game. The Game Tools pages give me a point of reference so that I can hop back in and see what external tools or add-ons that I was using the last time I played. More than that however the internet has become a very fickle place, and tools and resources can often get buried in a deep stack of SEO-optimized click-farming bullshit. By documenting the resources I am using, I am also giving a hand up to anyone who happens to come along behind me.
Weirdly enough these pages seem to gain traction over time as a landing page for folks looking for information for that game. Thing is… I was doing myself a bit of a disservice because I never really included my own content in the list of things that I had been linking to. I kept thinking that there had to be an easy way to embed the content for that specific topic in a page so that folks could easily jump off to the latest posts that I have released in a given category. Enter the Query Loop block, which essentially does exactly this. You can embed it in an existing page and either sort by taxonomy elements and pull in posts that belong to specific categories or have specific tags, or you can do a free-form keyword search that queries the text of all of your blog posts and returns the latest that have those specific keywords. For me, it was pretty easy given that I have fairly structured categories and I’ve been going through and updating the individual game tool pages with a content block filtered to the most relevant category. This makes me contemplate how I have my menu structured though and maybe have higher blocks for ARPGs for example that links to content for ALL of the ARPG games that I often write about.
There are a good number of patterns that you can choose from when displaying the content block, and for the most part, I have landed upon the large left image with the content snippet. However, I think at some point I will probably create my own custom block because I would rather have the snippet and title justified on the left border and the image floating off to the right. If they have premade patterns there has to be a way to craft your own, so that is something I will dive into at a later date. For the most part the existing patterns work well enough.
The end result works well enough, but I do not love the fact that it overflows the boundaries of the content block for my blog. I might see what I can do to reign that in a bit or instead shift to one of the other patterns. For now, I am calling this good and have updated all of the fixed tool pages to follow this format. Mostly I thought I would share this for any WordPress self-hosters so you can play with it as well. I have no clue if the query loop block exists in the dotcom version of WordPress but I would be shocked if it did not.
The Dark Tower is above all else a book about obsession, and this month I have been on my own obsessive journey. After wrapping a very short read for reasons beyond the scope of my understanding I landed upon the first book of the Dark Tower series for my second read of the New Year. I started with The Gunslinger on January 2nd and wrapped the seventh book in the series on January 27th. The time between I existed in a world parallel to Roland and his Ka-Tet. This is one of those unwieldy foundationary mythos that I had been interested in for decades, but never really sought out to complete on my own. I had read some of the comics associated with this series, and read a few novels that are adjacent to this tale but never really dove headlong into the abyss that is The Dark Tower. I should warn you that from this point forward, there will be spoilers regarding each of the seven books in the series.
The Gunslinger
I have to be honest… I did not really think much of that very first book. It felt like a novel compiled together out of bits and pieces of disconnected story. That makes sense I guess given that it was originally published starting in October 1978 and continuing intermittently through November of 1981 in five separate chunks in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Like all science fiction and fantasy of the 80s and 90s… it has some problematic elements. It is weird to me how much the cultural landscape has changed, but if I had to peg the story it felt like a Sergio Leone movie… which also makes sense given that was a large chunk of the inspiration. It is a tale of very one-dimensional characters set against the backdrop of an epic quest… that felt a bit hollow. I remember questioning friends’ sanity over the years when they talked about The Dark Tower like it was this holy grail of fiction. Was this paper-thin story that I was reading really worthy of so much praise and adoration?
The Drawing of the Three
To be perfectly honest… after finishing that first book it was a bit of a coin toss if I continued forward. It was mostly out of sheer laziness and not wanting to try and figure out a new book series to read that I continued forward and in truth I am glad that I did. The Drawing of The Three is the book that begins to allow some color to creep into the otherwise sepia-toned visage of the Gunslinger’s world. This transformation is brought on by the introduction of three characters: Eddie Dean, Odetta Holmes, and Detta Walker. These characters begin to influence and expand the persona that is Roland of Gilead slowly sanding down the sharp edges and turning him into a begrudgingly likable character. The tale of this story is a bit of a meandering mess but it somehow worked. This tale is filled with broken people who strive to improve themselves.
The Waste Lands
Blaine is a pain. The third book in this sequence was the one that almost broke me. There are some aspects of the book that I greatly like and other aspects that were a bit much for me. The tale largely revolves around redemption and Roland making up for the mistake of the first book… aka when he betrayed Jake and let him fall into the abyss. In the second book, Roland goes out of his way to keep Jake from dying in the “real world” which causes a schism to form… where Roland and Jake are torn apart by the knowledge of him dying and also living being in constant conflict. The summoning of Jake as the third member of the ka-tet makes perfect sense and quite honestly… had this book entirely focused upon that quest it would be whole. Instead, the quartet continues forward into a future “Not-New-York” in the form of Lud and then ventures across an imaginary Kansas in an AI-controlled Monorail that wants to kill them where the story just sort of abruptly stops.
I cannot imagine how livid fans of this series were at the time. Six years pass until the story picks up again with Wizard and Glass. The Waste Lands feels like a bad case of editing. It seems like there was more than a book’s worth of content here and should have been kept to a tighter scope. Maybe that would have meant that there were eight books in the sequence rather than seven, but it would had a better flow to it. That is not to say that I did not enjoy the book greatly. There were moments in the book that were the best yet, and I really liked the world-building that this novel added to the story… but it was still a bit of a mess. It very much still felt like King wrote himself into a corner and then did not know how to proceed and simply just stopped the story as a result.
Wizard and Glass
This is the least favorite book in the entire sequence. I think part of the problem is that you have the conclusion of The Waste Lands just sort of crudely tacked onto this completely different flashback story. There is this night’s palaver around a campfire as Roland attempts to explain who Susan Delgado was… and that just sort of consumes the majority of the novel. The things I liked about this novel are something that I have loved about the series as a whole. I like the language of this book and the Mejis region’s particular curious dialect. I think my biggest issue is that I did not think that Young Roland, Cuthbert, or Alain were particularly likable characters. I liked Susan Delgado quite a bit and as far as I am concerned she is the primary protagonist of this tale. I also particularly liked Sheemie aka Stanley Ruiz and thought him one of the most sympathetic characters to date, but got somewhat frustrated that he kept getting entangled in the mess.
I feel like this is supposed to feel like some grand love story… but instead, it ends up feeling like a tragedy brought on by the naivety of youth and the hubris of Roland’s obsession. There are many a character to outright hate in this novel so there is at least a bit of joy in watching them all get their just deserts. I think the other issue that I had with this novel is that I could see the shape of the tale before it was truly started. Partially this is the fault of it being a flashback and partially due to bits of details from the other books… but on some level, it felt like King was just going through the paces and writing out of obligation more than love of this particular tale.
Wolves of the Calla
This is without a doubt my favorite of the novels of the entire sequence. I think this is because it is the first time that the group actually acts like the “Arthurian Knights” that they purport to be. Once again I love the language of the series and the dialect of Calla Bryn Sturgis. I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that I myself come from a backwater town in the middle of nowhere where most of the locals speak a specific way… and it just seems fitting to have these towns develop their own detailed mannerisms. I like the folk of the Calla and the simple mission of trying to stop these invaders from stealing the children and doing god knows what manner of experiments on them before returning them “roont”. This is also the last time that the Ka-Tet is whole, and as a result, it sort of serves as the payoff before the fall. The Dark Tower is a series where there are no truly happy endings, and as a result, we all knew that there would be no lasting peace.
Death, but not for you, gunslinger. Never for you.
Son of Susannah
Being perfectly blunt… this is a book that I did not like terribly much. It is a tale of things slowly falling apart. I am not sure if Mia the entity that is now possessing Susannah is supposed to be sympathetic or not. I did not find her particularly so and mostly just hated her single-minded focus. The book serves to flesh out some more of the cosmology of the world and how each particular “when” fits into the puzzle, but it was largely just a letdown after how damned good Wolves of the Calla was. I think another problem is around this point… I was just ready for it all to be over. I was six books into a series that I had been shotgunning book after book and was growing tired of living in this world’s particular headspace. This felt like something I had to endure to get to the end, which is sort of sad considering how much I loved the character of Susannah Dean across the rest of the books. The title of this book feels like a lie though, because this is less the tale of Susannah and more the tale of Mia.
The Dark Tower
Regardless of anything else… starting this book felt like an accomplishment because I would finally be finished with this series. I am not entirely certain what I think about this conclusion to the tale and from what I understand at the time it was rather controversial amongst King fans. I think the piece of this tale that I like the least is how Roland of Gilead begins to unravel. What I mean by that is that during this tale he had begun to grow as a character and take on some measure of emotional connection to his Ka-Tet and in the end… that all sort of drains away and all he is left with is the obsession that started the entire story in the first place. It’s a bit tragic I guess, that at the end of the day… the only thing that matters to Roland is his Pyrrhic quest for the tower. The Ka-Tet is truly broken and this novel sees the death of Eddie Dean and Jake Chambers and the escape of Susannah Dean leaving him only with the quest and a particular Deus Ex Machina required to allow him to accomplish his goal.
I think the frustration with this novel is that there are a lot of things that are set up as epic story arcs that just sort of fizzle out. For starters the child Mordred seemed like we were heading towards an epic battle between the aging Gunslinger and his cursed heir. Instead Mordred seems to exist just to remove one more member of the Ka-Tet as Oy takes the death that was intended for Roland. Then there is the battle with the Crimson King… which gets resolved by the “magical art boy” costing neither of them anything in the process. The piece that does not bother me in the least though is the causality loop that Roland and his quest for the tower end up being. There will always be a Gunslinger, Tower, and Man in Black that fled across the desert and I am okay with that. Given the tragic nature of this tale, it seems fitting for his quest to never be completed and for him to leave nothing but death in his wake.
Final Thoughts
Was this worth a month of my life? I am honestly not sure. I am not as connected to this tale as many of the diehard fans who joined in along the way and anxiously awaited the next chapter. I don’t think this is the work of genius that many folks seem to think it is. I think it is a flawed tale that somewhat developed a life of its own as it went. It is a colossally untidy mess. What it feels like is a pen-and-paper game where the Gamemaster did not have enough time to prep for it… so they just sort of winged it and made things up as they went. I’ve done this a few things and while there are moments of genius inspiration that come through that process… there is a lot of muddling about which seems rampant in this tale. I think the whole is definitely better than the sum of the parts, but The Dark Tower is still a bit of a mess.
Do I regret shotgunning my way through this series book after book over the course of January? Absolutely not. I am happy to finally understand the scope of this tale after having seen its evidence for decades. The piece that will stay with me though is the language of this tale. I will likely incorporate “Thankee-Sai” and “Say True, Say Thanks” into my ongoing melange of linguistical scavengry from assorted pop culture icons. In spite of my criticisms… I liked the tale quite a bit and it had moments that I will cherish from this point forward. That said, I am not exactly certain I would recommend the experience of slogging through these seven books to anyone else. Like most everything else I have consumed in my life, I will hold a timeless love for the best bits… and jettison the lesser debris.
Did I miss the point? Do you feel like my assessment of the whole was unfair? Drop me a line below. Truth is it won’t likely change my opinion of the tale but it might make you feel better at expressing yourself. After all, I am just some random dude on the internet with a blog that is entirely based on my personal opinions and doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Good Morning Friends! It is that time of year when I drag out my spreadsheets and present an increasingly difficult-to-read picture of the games that I have played since 2012. I keep scaling down the browser zoom so that I can capture a screenshot representing the spreadsheet’s totality each year. What you are looking at is a representation of the games that I have played each month and I started this nonsense in 2013… but backfilled some information that I happened to have on hand for 2012. Essentially I am a fairly rabid screenshotter when it comes to video games, in large part because I need something to break up the massive chunks of prose that appear on my blog. So I have cataloged and kept careful tabs on the games that I play during a given year and stored them away in my “Gameshots” vault which as of the time of writing this post is roughly 550,000 files and roughly 180 Gigabytes worth of storage space. This “paper trail” gives me a fairly accurate accounting of what I happened to be playing during a given month, but does nothing to tell me exactly how much I played a given game.
For years I used a service called Raptr, and I always like looking back to see what all I had played in a given year and more importantly how many hours. When I started tracking this manually I decided that trying to determine an hour count was going to be a bit onerous, so instead I made do with a simple binary count of whether or not I played a game in a given month. The black squares that you see scattered across the above screenshot represent a macro that I run that shades in any square with the number 1 in it… I then tally in the final column giving me a total count of how many months I have played at least enough of a game to take screenshots. Patterns emerge where I have a handful of “forever games” that I return to over and over, and then a wide variety of games that I have played for a few months at a time. Since starting this process I have logged 396 games that I have played at the time of writing this post, but by this evening that number may be larger.
Exploring the Games Played in 2023
We will talk about specific trends a bit later, but I tend to have years where I play a wide variety of games and then years where I entrench more into “forever games”. This was absolutely a year for forever games, but I have to admit the data tells a few lies. For example, this would give you the impression that I played a lot of Final Fantasy XIV and Fallout 76… when in truth it was more a few hours each week poking my head in to check out things and do a few daily “chores”. Guild Wars 2 however gets an honest place at the top of this list because it has been my most reliable MMORPG since I finally reached a point of acceptance for the type of game it was trying to be rather than constantly attempting to push it into the World of Warcraft mold.
The game that I spent the most time playing this year however is Path of Exile. I stole this screenshot from my Steam Year in Review that shows I had a grand total of 1246 gameplay sessions with the longest streak being 71 days in a row that I played the game. This does not shock me in the least because I have over 2100 hours on record in Steam for this game. Granted there were several attempts at playing it made from 2014 onwards, but when it finally grabbed ahold of me in 2021 and 2022… I’ve never really let go of it. My happy place this year has been playing some Path of Exile while listening to an Audiobook, and as a result, I have wiled away many hours doing this sitting on the sofa with a cat beside me and another on my legs.
The one that surprised me the most is Wayfinder because I had not even really been tracking my play of this game until the Steam Year in Review happened. This was in large part due to the fact that I was under a pretty nasty NDA regarding my playtime and was following the rules… and not taking any screenshots. I participated in several months worth of playtests before the game “launched” or at least started charging exorbitant fees to keep testing it. It is a bit of a bummer honestly because I thought this game had a lot of promise, but what I played was not worthy of spending cash on yet and needed a heck of a lot more work before it was ready for primetime.
I am also surprised that I spent more time playing Diablo IV than I did Diablo III. Though to be fair… once I dove into Path of Exile head first… Diablo III took a backseat as my ARPG of choice. For Diablo IV… I just keep poking at its corpse trying to make it be a fun game. I will admit though that Season 2 was really fun until I got to level 70. I managed to grind my way up to 90 and then lost all interest in finishing the grind to 100. I think there is hope for this game, and the team seems to be making some fairly rapid changes… but cannot seem to turn fast enough to keep the players engaged fully. The best thing that ever happened to Path of Exile was the launch of Diablo IV full stop. I’ve seen more players discover POE than players who really seemed to love D4.
As I said earlier, I tend to move in a rhythm where I have a year where I play a large variety of games… and then a year where I retreat into forever games. This was a retreating year which tells me that coming up in 2024 it will be a year where I catch up on all of the games that I missed while focusing on “comfort gaming”. I am sure at some point I will tire of Path of Exile, and one of the things that I am looking forward to spending a bit more time in is World of Warcraft. I had been hesitant to engage much with Blizzard games while Bobby Kotick was at the helm of ActiBlizz… but with him leaving the company and his official last day being yesterday… I am planning on diving into Dragonflight and giving that game a proper shot. I enjoyed the testing that I did of the game prior to the expansion launch, so I am looking forward to diving back into playing the ACTUAL Belghast character, my Human Warrior on Argent Dawn. I’ve been gone long enough that NONE of the Belghast’s on the WoW Armory are actually me anymore.
This is the point where I compare the top played games of 2023 to the top played games of 2022. Again there is some lying happening here specifically with Final Fantasy XIV and Fallout 76, so you can pretty much ignore those. I felt like I had to count them by the rules of this process but I have not spent a ton of time actually playing either of them… mostly doing “wizard chores”. Guild Wars 2 saw quite a bit more regular play with me pretty consistently spending several hours a week playing it. I got completely caught up with the expansions and started working on a second character that is now doing Secrets of the Obscure. Path of Exile absolutely saw a ton more play… Torchlight Infinite dropped to almost no play… and Destiny and Elder Scrolls Online left the list.
Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 both saw considerable play as did Last Epoch and Grim Dawn as I seem to be going through a heavy ARPG phase. Honkai Star Rail grabbed my heart for quite a bit but I have fallen off playing the game over the last several months. New World has continued to be a comfort game for me that I keep returning to, and there have been some truly shocking improvements in the game as a whole making it a really great experience. I had actually gotten back to playing some Final Fantasy XIV and had begun working a little each day to level new jobs having gotten five of them to 90. However, Affliction League in Path of Exile and our “Bel League” private league happened and completely threw me out of the rhythm of playing anything but it for a while.
Games Played Since the Start of this Project
This is the point where I attempt to tackle the totality of the list and make the massive grid of checkboxes make some semblance of sense. It is here that we can start to see some of the trends in how my gaming has changed over the years. I cut off this year at 14 months total played with a game, which makes the cut-off around EQ2 and Wildstar. Last year was the first year where Final Fantasy XIV took the lead spot away from World of Warcraft, and the thing is position on this list takes several years to shift as there are a lot of games that I played for a very long time that are still extremely entrenched in the list. For example, Rift has been a game I have not played in any form since October of 2018… but it still holds on tentatively to the sixth slot in the list. Given how much I have been enjoying Guild Wars 2 I fully expect by this time next year that Rift will have fallen to seventh and GW2 will have moved up to sixth.
Path of Exile is rapidly moving up the lower half of the list as is Fallout 76 and New World. Destiny sits high on the list but I am not playing the game at all and have not for this entire last year… so it will begin to sink down slowly. I am somewhat sad to say that I only played Elder Scrolls Online for a single month last year which means it is likely going to keep slipping down as well. It makes me happy that Everquest II holds a position on the list still since most of my time playing that game predates the start of this project. I’ve returned to it several times but I just can’t jive with its combat systems and as much as I want to love it… because I love the world and the way it was created… I just can’t go back. That is one thing I have noticed about myself is that I have a really hard time diving back into hotbar combat games. I greatly prefer the more action-oriented combat of Guild Wars 2 or New World, and I keep hoping someone will give me a new World of Warcraft or Everquest but with action combat.
This next chart shows only the games that I have played for at least six months. This really whittles down the massive list given that there really have only been so many “forever games” that end up holding my attention for the long haul. Rift had held as a bit of a rampart against the lower tier with a big drop off last year of 58 months for Rift and 30 months for its nearest competitor Guild Wars 2. However, that wall has fallen a bit with Guild Wars 2, New World, and Fallout 76 all starting to climb that slope. Considering that Path of Exile has now hit 24 months of play if it can hold my attention going into 2024 it will start to rapidly pass a number of games in the middle ground. There are a number of games on the list that are just not going to get any more progress… Dragalia Lost fore example was really strong for awhile but given that the game is now dead and closed… it will never gain more months. Similarly, Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that I have played multiple times… but is unlikely to really draw more attention. I know the story very well at this point so when the sequel comes out on PC it is very unlikely I will play through it again.
I think what is probably more telling though is the “Streak” chart. This shows the longest number of months unbroken that I have played a game. Destiny still holds the top of this chart but there are several other games that are starting to chip away at its lead now that I have effectively stopped playing it. Specifically, Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely topple it next year and take the top position with Diablo III probably also eclipsing it pending I play a similar amount next year as I did this past year. I think what is more telling though is how quickly Path of Exile has climbed the list from being only at 7 months unbroken last year at this time to 19 months. New World is holding pretty strong with 24, but it is very unlikely that I will ever hit a streak like that again with the game. Dragalia Lost like I said above is a dead game so it will sit there much like Rift… waiting for someone to push it down the list. There is no way that Guild Wars 2 does not move up in the list and will honestly probably be sitting up around Destiny by this time next year.
Another Year Down
More than anything… this was the year of books for me and they were more of my focus than necessarily the games that I happened to be playing. As far as games go… it was the year of the Righteous Fire Juggernaut as I played one as my main character in Sanctum, Crucible, and Ancestor leagues in Path of Exile… and now mourn the death of the character in Affliction. Right now I am trying to find a character that I enjoy even half as much as I did the RF Juggernaut. Currently, I am working on an RF Chieftain… but there is no way it is ever going to feel as tanky and comfy as the Juggeranut did. I am hoping maybe we see some changes that make the class viable again.
I’ve said this numerous times, but I would really like to get back into doing things as a group. I’ve been a solo-only murder hobo for far too long, and I would like to get back to doing things with other players. I am not even sure if that is a Guild Wars 2 thing or a Final Fantasy XIV thing… or even maybe a World of Warcraft thing. I am not sure I ever want to get back to playing on a hard schedule and the raiding life… but I would like to actually do things with someone other than myself going into the new year. I have a catmander tag… I just need to get over my anxiety and start using it. That wall of anxiety has been what has been holding me back from doing things with strangers for years and I am getting somewhat sick of it.
To be fair… group with other players was a goal from last year as well. I did at least finish up my Skyscale which was a goal I talked about last year so there is that. I am not sure what the next year is going to hold and as a result, I am hesitant to make too many predictions. It was a hard year for reasons that were not necessarily manifest in this blog or the games that I played. So next year I really want to work on myself a bit. I’ve still not really recovered from the massive changes we all went through at the start of the pandemic… and I feel like I need to do some drastic things in order to carve myself out a new “normal” or at least one that I am willing to accept. I’ve become a bit of a hermit and I need to change that because I have effectively given up doing a lot of things that used to bring me joy.
I hope you all have a wonderful 2024, and I am sure I will keep this tradition going for at least one more year… so I will see you next December to see what fate has in store for me. Thanks as always for reading my nonsense and if you have made it this far I love you all.
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.
