2024: The Year In Books

As 2024 comes to a close, my fourth full year of remote working, I managed to once again surpass my previous records by completing a whopping 61 books, two books more than my previous high set last year and my fourth consecutive year completing the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge.  I completed the challenge in mid-November and surpassed last year’s total in mid-December.  I read 22,622 pages, by far my highest total of all time and just the second time I’ve managed to surpass 20.000 pages.

Of those books, only five were non-fiction and, of the remaining 56 novels, only five 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 two hard covers, two paperbacks, 53 e-books and no audiobooks.  I continued to take advantage of my library card, which helped me procure 46 of the books I consumed throughout the year.

Over 69% of the books I read this year were by authors I had read before. The 19 authors that I read for the first this year were:

Jessica Knoll Isabella Maldonado Kathleen McGurl Lisa Taddeo
Lisa Jewell Millie Bobby Brown J.M. Dillard Lee Goldberg
Avery Cunningham Margot Douaihy R.F. Kuang Jessica Simpson
Jeffrey Lang Dayton Ward Holly Wilson Karin Smirnoff
Walter Beede Michael Connelly Rob Harvilla

Karin Slaughter, Jeffery Deaver, Laura Lippman, Elin Hilderbrand, Jessica Knoll, Michael Connelly, Minka Kent, Lee Goldberg, Rebecca Forster, Stephen King, and Sarah Pekkanen were the authors that I read multiple titles from during 2024.

17 of the books I read were released this year, while only three of them were released last century, with the oldest first published in 1997.

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Book 23 (of 52) – The Girl In The Eagle’s Talons

The Girl In The Eagle’s Talon – Karin Smirnoff

This November will be 20 years since Stieg Larsson, the original author of the Millennium trilogy and creator of the Lisbeth Salander character, passed away at the age of 50.  Karin Smirnoff is now the second writer to follow Larsson, hired to start a new trilogy to continue the adventures of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist.  The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons is the first effort under that arrangement.

A wedding and a long-lost relative bring both Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander to the north of Sweeden, where they once again find their paths intersecting.  They work together to track down Mikael’s kidnapped grandson and Lisbeth’s niece’s kidnaped mother, both taken as part of a plot to strongarm a local assemblyman.

It’s been over a decade since I read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Larsson’s last take on the characters, and five years since the last book overall, so the previous authors’ feel for the characters were not exactly at the top of my mind.  That said, Smirnoff’s portrayal of Salander felt particularly off.  Almost like all of the hard edges had been sanded off to make her a more relatable character.  It certainly feels like these books are now being produced simply to cash in on the world Larsson created rather than because there was a story that needed telling.