Tag / Matt Haig

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Book 12 (of 52) – The Book Of Lost Hours

The Book of Lost Hours – Hayley Gelfuso

As the Nazis rise to power in Germany leading up to World War II, a young girl is stranded in the time space, a vast library where the memories of the dead are bound into books.  As she grows older, she finds soldiers from different countries entering the time space to destroy certain memories, changing the collective reality along the way.  When she starts to interfere, she becomes a target, eventually getting pulled out and forced to work for the CIA in order to protect the man she loves and their secret child.

The Book of Lost Hours, the debut novel from Hayley Gelfuso, was a nominee for Favorite Science Fiction in the 2025 Goodreads Choice Awards and was a Good Morning America book club pick.  This was a fine debut from Gelfuso, who covers some of the same ground as Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library while tackling the role that government, both ours and others, plays in shaping what we eventually come to think of as history.  I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for whatever she comes up with next.

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Prolific Authors – Two Books

It is time once again to take a look at the authors I have read the most, dating back to high school.  This year, I’m once again on pace to set a new record for books read in a year, so I thought it would be nice to take a deeper dive into those books I’ve read through August of this year. Since our last check-in, I’ve read an additional 114 books, so there should be some movement over the past two years.  Without further ado, it’s time to take another look and see if my “favorite” authors have changed much over the years.  We begin today with the 40 authors I’ve read two times, one fewer than two years ago.

Laura Caldwell

I have no idea how I came across the work of this local author, but I must have enjoyed it enough to go back for seconds.  Unfortunately, she passed away in 2020, leaving behind a back catalog of fourteen novels and two non-fiction books.

Michael Chabon

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the most recent of the two works of his I’ve read.  I have another, Wonder Boys, waiting in the to read pile, so he rise up some day.

Matthew V. Clemens

The co-author, with Max Allan Collins, of the final two chapters of the Reeder and Rogers trilogy.

Ready Player Two – Ernest Cline

Ernest Cline

The man responsible for both Ready Player One and Ready Player Two.

Bill Clinton

The former president has co-written two novels with James Patterson.

Michael Connelly

The creator of Harry Bosch makes his first appearance thanks to his Renée Ballard spin-off series.

Laura Dave

I read my second novel from her, The Night We Lost Him, earlier this year.

Felicia Day

The first author here that I’ve happened to meet in person.

Cameron Dokey

She makes the list based on two entries in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.

Warren Ellis

The comic writer, currently in exile after being called out for abusing women, makes the list thanks to two prose novels.

David Fisher Continue reading →

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Book 55 (of 52) – The Life Impossible

The Life Impossible – Matt Haig

When Grace Winters, a retired math teacher from England, inherits a house on Ibiza from an old colleague she hadn’t seen in decades, she embarks on a new adventure.  Following a letter left for her by her old friend, her worldview, and life, are changed forever, helping to ease her guilt over the life she has lived and the so-called mistakes she made along the way.

The Life Impossible, Matt Haig’s follow-up to his 2020 smash The Midnight Library, follows a similar theme.  Instead of looking at the regrets of the roads not taken, this time he tackles letting the guilt of the things we did do shut down our ability to enjoy life.  I’ve never taken a look at his backlog of works, so I may have to that one of these days.

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2021: The Year In Books

As we wrap up 2021, my first full year remote working, I managed to read a whopping 54 books, an increase of 31 books over last year and my first year completing the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge.  I surpassed last year’s total in mid-June, passed my best years, 2015 and 2016, in late August, and completed book 52 with two weeks left in the year.  I read (or listened) to 18,670 pages, by far my highest total of all time and only the second time I’ve passed 10,000.

Of those books, 16 were non-fiction and, of the 36 novels, 10 were tied to a TV show, either as the source material or as a tie-in.  None of the books came out of my dwindling “to-read” drawer, with 43 e-books and 4 audiobooks.  For the first time since I was a kid, I got myself a library card, which helped me procure 14 of the books.

Just less than half of the books I read this year were by authors I have read before. The 31 authors that I read for the first this year were:

  • Tegan Quin
  • Sara Quin
  • Lucy Foley
  • Jenna Fischer
  • Matt Haig
  • Eric Nusbaum
  • Jon Taffer
  • Charlotte Douglas
  • Susan Kearney
  • Fredrik Backman
  • Jeff Pearlman
  • Minka Kent
  • Alan Cumming
  • Megan Goldin
  • Molly Bloom
  • Barack Obama
  • Ali Wong
  • Timothy Ferriss
  • Issa Rae
  • Walter Tevis
  • Tess Gerritson
  • Gary Braver
  • Andy Weir
  • Matthew Walker
  • James Clear
  • Grady Hendrix
  • Simon Sinek
  • Jason Fung
  • Julia Spiro
  • Jon Pessah
  • Ruth Ware

Erle Stanley Gardner, Mary Kubica, Jeffery Deaver, Andy Weir and Karin Slaughter were the only authors that I read multiple titles from during 2021.

6 of the books I read were released this year, while 5 of them were released last century, with the oldest first published in 1933.

Finally, the breakdown by month, which was fairly consistent across the entire year.

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Book 7 (of 52) – The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library – Matt Haig

What if, in the moment between life and death, you were given the chance to travel the roads not taken, examining the regrets of your life and seeing where those divergent paths took you?  In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed gets this opportunity after attempting suicide, despondent over the waste she views her life to be.  She tries on many other lives, revisiting the big decisions she’s made in life: stopping swimming competitively, leaving her band on the brink of stardom, abandoning her childhood dream of becoming a scientist.  At the end, she realizes that the only life that gives her contentment is the one she tried to end, and she returns, realizing that she has made a difference in other people’s lives and that she will continue to do so.

I had never heard of Matt Haig or his work prior to last December, when The Midnight Library won the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Fiction novel of 2020.  The premise sounded interesting and, thanks to a credit from Amazon, I was able to get it relatively cheaply.  While the story didn’t go quite as I expected and you could see the end coming from a mile away, this was an interesting take on a fairly regular topic.  We’ve all looked back at the big decisions in our life and wondered “what if?”.  But what if it was the smaller decisions that had the greater impact on our happiness?  That’s the interesting question that Nora gets to after trying out the obvious lives and finding that they didn’t give her what she was looking for.