My Year In Books

Continuing with the topic started by my wife yesterday, I decided to make my blog tonight about books.  For 2024, so far I have completed 20 books for the year.  Not quite as good as last year when I hit 26 books but respectable nonetheless (I had a very busy summer so my reading pace fell behind).

Of the 20, six of them were non-fiction.  For me, these always tend to take a bit longer for me to read.  Filled with lots of information and no plotline to carry me forward.  With the non-fiction books, my top three were:

    1.  MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales and Gavin Edwards.  I’m a big Marvel fan and I enjoyed reading about some of the inside moves that brought Marvel to where it is today.

2.          2.  Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher.  Well-told, entertaining stories about the players in Silicon Valley.

3.          3.  Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed Upended TV by Peter Biskind.  Stories about the rise and fall of Peak TV by an incredible writer.

Before you ask me, the answer is no, I don’t only read non-fiction books with colons in their titles.  These just did.

Moving on to the fiction books, this gets a bit trickier.  I really enjoy thrillers with a special leaning toward legal thrillers (I’m a lawyer if you haven’t guessed).  Here are my top three in that category:

    1.   The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz.  A story about multiple generations of a Jewish family in New York with much of the action taking place on the campus of Cornell University, a place that is near and dear to my heart.  Really well written and surprisingly (for me), not a thriller.

2.           2.  Dark Matter by Blake Crouch.  This one is a high concept thriller with some tech and metaphysical hoo-hah thrown in.  Fortunately, it didn’t let the technical stuff bog down the story.  Really interesting concept and was faithfully adopted by AppleTV into a series for those of you who prefer to watch vs read.  Interestingly, Apple renewed the show for a second season so I’m very curious where they will take us next (the first season covered the plot of the book).

3.            3.  American Assassin by Vince Flynn.  This is not a new book and was adapted into a film nearly 8 years ago.  It was very entertaining and well-written.  It is the first in a series so I will likely dabble in subsequent books in the series to see if the quality is sustained throughout.  Interestingly, this one is very much an international thriller which is not a type that I typically go for.

Looking over my list, my takeaways are that I’m pretty much game to read anything that is well written.  I also see that a number of books that got glowing reviews on Amazon and other book sites rarely live up to such effusive praise.  I hate it when a book fails to deliver a satisfying ending after you’ve invested so much time in it.

If you’ve read a good book (and especially a thriller), I’d love to hear about it.  Thanks for reading.

Frosty