2024: My Bumper Bookish Year

Two of the many tsundokus fighting for my future attention

In 2009 I read five books all year; in 2024 I read 55! The difference being of course that back then I was working, and almost all my reading was confined to briefs on the next work project, and going over my interview write ups. It has taken me several years in fact to finally accept that I am "retired" - it's been a slow, subliminal descent into "economic inactivity" - to use the Government's thinly disguised pejorative - due to structural changes in my field of industrial market research, compounded by the pandemic, and my own ill health in 2022.

The upside of this is the newfound freedom to read whenever I want, and not just on holiday, say. Even now, I still feel a bit guilty sitting down with a book in the middle of the day, and am more comfortable reading at mealtimes or in the bath, when it counts as multi-tasking. Or in bed at night, when it counts as a form of sleep hygiene.

They're big, but not clever.

I thought I would share the list of what I read in 2024, as it would give me vicarious pleasure to think of someone else enjoying a book as much as I did. My favourite genre is the psychological thriller, and I deliberately despatched a lot of those so I could give them away afterwards and clear some much needed space. As you can see from these photos, the tsundokus are taking over the front room. The flaw in my grand plan is that for every thriller I gave away, I'd see four more I fancied in a charity shop, so it is very much a case of one step forwards and four back. One day I may get a grip, and resist the allure of the bargain book, but between charity shop browsing and online purchases of used copies, that day may not come anytime soon.

Tsundoku containers that slide neatly under a chair

Here and there I have consciously interspersed my usual fictional fare with what I perceive as a more "highbrow" or worthy tome, the 600+ page literary biography of Ted Hughes being the most obvious example of that. I did enjoy it, but it was very densely written and required a great deal of focus and commitment. I fear social media has atomised my attention span to the point where I am finding it harder to concentrate on a more challenging read. This year I will try to stretch myself again with more of these "difficult" books, perhaps with the allegedly easiest novel by Virginia Woolf, "The Years", or Hilary Mantel's memoir. I have left them in a prominent position on the coffee table to motivate me into picking them up.

Same tsundoku from another angle

I shan't give the books from last year (none of which feature in the photos) stars or ratings of any kind, not least because I can't remember what some of them were about. I don't know if this is an age thing, but due to creeping cognitive decline of some sort I forget the plot of books almost as soon as I have read the ending - it can even occur when I am only part way through, haha, if there are numerous strands to the action or it has been a while since I last picked the book up. So I have decided to mark in bold type the 15 books I distinctly remember enjoying very much and would highly recommend. There will surely have been others, but 15 is a good number to settle on.

Under sofa stash, not even in a container!

And oh look - two books called "Trespass"!

2024

Robyn Harding - The Party

James Bowen - A Street Cat Named Bob

Jonathan Coe - The House of Sleep

Lucy Atkins - The Night Visitor

Penelope Lively - How it All Began

Jean Ray - La Cité de l'Indicible Peur

Lucy Atkins - Magpie Lane

Michael Mosley - 4 Weeks to Better Sleep

Lucy Atkins - The Other Child

Rosie Walsh - The Man Who Didn't Call

Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

C L Taylor - Sleep

J P Delaney - The Girl Before

Sally Rooney - Beautiful World, Where Are You?

Terry Darlington - Narrow Dog to Indian River**

Arlene Hunt - While She Sleeps

Rose Tremain - Trespass

Tony Hawks - A Piano in the Pyrenees

Harry Bingham - Talking to the Dead

Catherine Cooper - The Château

Alex Michaelides - The Silent Patient

Nicci French - Saturday Requiem

Catherine Cooper - The Chalet

Jon Ronson - Lost at Sea

Lucy Atkins - Windmill Hill

Paul Magrs - Puss in Books

Shaun Bythell - The Diary of a Bookseller

Michael Mosley - Covid-19

Kate Atkinson - Big Sky

Monica Heisy - really good, actually

Penelope Fitzgerald - The Bookshop

Jonathan Bate - Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

Sarah Rayne - The Murderer inside the Mirror

Sally Vickers - The Librarian

Stig Abell - Death under a Little Sky

Richard Osman - The Thursday Murder Club

Louise Kennedy - Trespass

Erin Kelly - The Skeleton Key

Terry Darlington - Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier**

Hannah Jane Parkinson - The Joy of Small Things

Minette Walters - The Echo

Barbara Pym - Some Tame Gazelle

Peter Mayle - A Year in Provence (a re-read)

Jane Shilling - The Stranger in the Mirror (a re-read)

Hillary Waugh - Last Seen Wearing

Ursula Parrott - Ex-Wife

Peter Mayle - My Twenty-Five Years in Provence

Lisa Jewell - None of This is True

Nick Pettigrew - Anti-Social

Lucy Foley - The Guest List

Celia Imrie - Not Quite Nice

Cathy Kelly - Other Women

Lizzy Barber - My Name is Anna

Elizabeth Taylor - Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

Linda Green - While my Eyes were Closed

Bag for life temporary accommodation

I should say I enjoyed everything I read, and there were no "DNF"s. The last time I did that was with a biography of Coco Chanel, a fact of which I am not proud, but there was just too much detail about Russian ballet dancers. (Click on the link for a photo of yet another bookcase!)

I would have done a collage of all the books in my "Top 15", but I am not sure I could readily find them, and some I have since lent out, or left in France (where there is another bookcase, and more piles). There are three other bookcases in this house that aren't pictured here, which are largely full of unread titles . ;)

Have you any good books to recommend from your recent reading? 

Not that I should be encouraged to acquire any more, obviously, but there's always the library...

Another bag for life full

**The author, Terry Darlington, was my old boss at Research Associates, and the reason I relocated to The Midlands nearly 40 years ago. The Wigan Pier book is especially autobiographical, and there are even references to a couple of projects I worked on, and a vague reference to "female staff".

Widget weirdness, a blogspot of bother, and stemming the lost follower lemmings

Source: Etsy

Five years ago this week(!), I had 63 followers. I felt moved to write a post back then about the frisson of pleasure that the little mosaic of avatars gives me whenever a new colourful square pops up, signalling the arrival of a new reader. Someone who is keen to catch every post and not just dip in occasionally. And who hasn't just landed on Bonkers by mistake, as I have long assumed so many visitors do. As I remark in that post:

'You would be amazed how many people find Bonkers about Perfume by looking for avocados.'

In the same post, I also fret about the possible reasons why a single follower recently left:

'Perhaps they were bemused by my post about Californian road surfaces. Or the sheer number of posts about California last month. Even readers based in California would probably agree that the attention accorded to their state was disproportionate.'

So that was then - I lost one follower and it troubled me... Fast forward to January 2016, when I started out with 166 followers, from memory. In the space of a week or so, I lost 23 followers in two huge tranches - 13, and then a further 10. In the whole of 2015 I think I was down one follower, and hadn't particularly worried about that. But 23 in a matter of days is starting to look a lot like lemmings.

Source: Jacquie Boyd via Debutart

And as a woman of a certain age, I am prone to anxiety at the best of times - it is all part and paranoid parcel of the hormonal soup which comes with this mid-life territory. If someone doesn't reply to an email for a longish period of time, I am more likely to assume the person has taken violently against me rather than that they are away, or merely busy. And so my first reaction to this mass exodus of followers was that there were rumours circulating about me somewhere in cyberspace, urging perfumistas to unfollow Bonkers at their earliest convenience. I actually found myself googling various likely permutations of search terms, such as:

'I don't like Vanessa's style of writing / Vanessa / what Vanessa said'

'Stopped reading Bonkers about Perfume'

'Unfollow Vanessa's blog'

'Bonkers about Perfume not about perfume anymore'

Source: YouTube

And more, much more, in that cringeworthy self-critical vein! You see, the fact that I ran two consecutive posts on makeup and skincare around the time this drop off in followers occurred - even though I assured readers that I would be returning to the subject of fragrance imminently - struck me as possibly significant. Maybe people suddenly got fed up with these off-topic posts. Maybe all the followers in question were men, who couldn't give a toss about lipsticks and serum, though I had no way of knowing.

So my working theory at this point was that the skincare posts - in particular my list of vacuous personal discoveries such as tying one's hair back before washing one's face and how to apply eyeshadow(!) - might have been the tipping point that turned people away in droves. And then I suddenly had the idea to google a different line of inquiry, specifically about 'losing followers suddenly on Blogger'.

And to my surprise and relief up popped a recent blog post by a chap called Chuck Croll (the 'nitecruzr' below) on this very subject, which explains what may be going on, namely that Google is eliminating followers who use Open ID accounts as opposed to Blogger / Google accounts.

Here is a helpful extract explaining the problem:

'People Following without Google accounts did not get newsfeed subscriptions.

Followers using OpenID only got their photo icon in the Followers facepile. How would OpenID Followers get a Reading List subscription? Reading List subscriptions require Blogger / Google accounts.

If you look in your Reading List and find this blog listed, you are Following this blog using a Blogger account - since the Reading List subscription is one benefit of Following. If you don't find this blog listed, you may subscribe, using Reading List - or Follow, using "Follow Me". Just use a Blogger / Google account, when you Follow.'

Source: blogging.nitecruzr.net

Chuck goes on to say that readers can also follow using Google +, but I don't think I am currently geared up for that, and need to figure out what I have to do in order to be able to post the appropriate gadget in the sidebar.

Now I can't be totally sure that this is the reason for losing such a flurry of followers this month, but given the timing of the post about the phenomenon - and the fact that even my paranoia can be offset with arguments about the 'balance of probability' - I reckon this is what is at work.

So assuming the 23 lost followers (at the time of writing that is - they may not be the last to go!), were booted off Bonkers by Google rather than deserting of their own accord, I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to them all - even though they are almost certainly not reading, or only if they are supremely determined! I hope you can figure out an alternative method / widget that works for you if you would like to receive notifications of future posts. There's Bloglovin and Follow by Email of course - I hope those are additional options, and not also dependent on a Google account.

Yep, as I said in my 2011 post, I remain 'a fair weather computer operator' and am not a little nonplussed by this widget weirdness, and readers apparently running for the hills...

And if the mass exit was in fact because of something I said - or the topics featured - I am sorry about that too, though I shall probably never know...!