My Year in Books
I've stopped trying to impress people
Happy (almost) new year! As is tradition, I’ve been looking back over my 2024 as we head to go into 2025. I didn’t do as much writing as I had hoped, but I sure did read a lot!
My reading journey really began once I left the convent. I certainly read a lot of spirituality and theology while I was in formation for religious life, but I can count the amount of fiction I read in the 3.5 years I was there on one hand. I just didn’t have time for it, and when it came down to it, I was living in a Catholic bookstore so my TBR was pretty much exclusively the books I saw on the shelves day after day.
When I left the convent, I moved in with a friend of mind who is a voracious reader and who had hundreds of books on the shelf. I started
I am a competitor at my core. When it comes to books I don’t normally compare myself to other people, but I want to constantly outdo myself. For a while, this meant reading books that were outside of my preferred genre but which I believed would be of value to a Catholic audience, so I would read and review them.
This year I stopped trying to impress people.
My list of books this year is pretty much made up of memoirs and thrillers, which are my favorite genres of books. I stopped caring if I read all the books in the NYT top ten and when I went to vote in the GoodReads Choice Awards this year, I had barely read any books outside of those genres. In the past, I would have read most of the books that were nominated.
I also read significantly less books this year compared to last year. In 2023 I read a startling 280 books, mainly because of projects I was working on. This year I read 134, which is back to average for me. I also focused on watching more movies this year, something that I’ve greatly enjoyed.
That said, I also gave fewer books 5 stars in my Goodreads account (feel free to add me). I haven’t been trying to read great literature this year, so I gave most of the books I read 3-4 stars. The 5 star books had to really stand out and couldn’t be the run-of-the-mill thrillers that I regularly read.
Here are all of the books that I gave 5 stars in 2024.