Reading in 2024

Reading in 2024 didn’t go so well. I was reading slowly from the get-go but miraculously managed to stay close to my reading goals through the first half of the year. Then things fell apart and I just . . . stopped. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t finish any books. And it wasn’t just my reading that was affected. I also couldn’t write or compose music either. It was sad.

But there’s no fixing it now. The only thing to do is to celebrate the positives, and then make some new reading goals for 2025.

The biggest positive is that I finally finished the SLJ’s Top 100 Children’s Books list. Hooray!

I finished a total of 31 books. It’s not nearly as much as I’d hoped to do. But I remind myself that a lot of people don’t read at all, and that I also read many news stories, magazines, etc. over the course of the year. I wasn’t slacking.

As has been the case for most years, I was pleasantly surprised by some books and unexpectedly disappointed by others. There were four books that struck me as truly remarkable and to which I gave A+ grades: Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond, and The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. The first two were from the SLJ list and the second two from the BBC list. Other pleasant surprises included Scythe by Neal Shusterman and the sequels (the series should have been awful given the premise, but somehow wasn’t), The Twits by Roald Dahl (I don’t always like Dahl’s books, so I never know what I’m in for), and Our Hideous Progeny by C.E. McGill (I hadn’t planned to read so much horror for the year, and I didn’t expect to enjoy any of it in the way I did this one).

It was the Nancy Drew stories that disappointed me the most. The few that I’ve had in my library since childhood are good, and I figured that most others would be of a similar quality. Not so. Among the three “new” ones I read in 2024 I found serious problems, including nonsensical and unrealistic plots, bigotry, and even, in one awful scene, romanticization of the slavery era. Nancy herself disappointed me with her entitled behavior and sometimes unjustified nosiness. I was able to enjoy The Mystery of the Brass-Bound Trunk, but by the time I was done with The Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion and The Secret in the Old Attic, I was pretty well disgusted. I’ve decided to give those three away. I will read the two other Nancy Drew books that I recently acquired, but unless they wow me, I will not be collecting any more books from the series.

Goals for 2025

• Read more poetry. Really, how hard would it be to read one poem per day? There’s no excuse for me not to.
• Read at least 16 books from the BBC’s Top 100 Children’s Books list. I’ve read 52 so far. Reading 16 per year would see me finished with the list in three years. Faster would be better, but I don’t want to burn myself out on kiddie lit. Sixteen seems like an achievable, not-burning-outing sort of goal.
• Read more books and give more of them away. I want to at least read more books this year than I did last, so my goal for 2025 is 32 books. I also want to give away more books. I’ve acquired too many since the GLP (Great Library Purge), and it’s time to reduce the size of my library again. That means reading as many of my unread books as possible, and also revisiting certain long-owned books and considering whether or not they still deserve homes on my bookshelf.

And that’s it.

Wishing everyone a great year of reading in 2025!