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 3 (of 52) – Three Women

Three Women – Lisa Taddeo

Maggie, an underage high school student in North Dakota, allegedly has an inappropriate relationship with her married teacher.  Lina, an unhappy housewife in Indiana, is turning to an old high school flame to do the things her husband will not.  Sloane, a gorgeous restaurant owner in the Northeast, brings others into her bed to please her husband.  In Three Women, Lisa Taddeo dug into the lives of these three women, interviewing them and the people around them in order to get the story of their sex lives and how it impacts their day-to-day existence.

I first found out about this book earlier this year when I learned it had been adapted into a series that would be airing on STARZ.  The concept worked better for me than the actual execution.  The writing took on the form of prose, while being a non-fiction tale of three real-life women.  We’ll see how much, if at all, the series adheres to the book, assuming I ever see it.